For Trump, Paris, Orlando, And Others Are Terror Attacks, But Uri And Pathankot Are Not

The United States seems to have different yardsticks for the terror attacks taking place in different countries. While India, for years, has been a victim of terror attacks instigated by Pakistani security agencies, many of the attacks that have taken place here are not considered terror attacks by the US.

The Trump White House released a list of 78 terror attacks across the world that the US President believes was under-reported by the "very dishonest press," amid a furious row with the judiciary and the liberal media over terrorism and immigration issues.

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The White House list includes attacks such as the ones in Paris, Orlando, and San Bernardino, all of which by any account received substantial media coverage. But it does not cite a single attack on India, including the assaults on Uri and Pathankot. It was not clear if Trump believes the attacks were well-covered by the media or if he did not believe they were terrorist attacks.

Also Read: Uri Attackers Came From PoK, India Tells Pak

The White House list, with a timeline covering September, 2014 to December, 2016, cites four attacks in Bangladesh, including the one on Artisan Bakery in Dhaka that killed 22 people , two other attacks with a single casualty, and one attack in Pakistan in April 2015 in which one US citizen was wounded in knife assault.

It also lists incidents such as the one in Merced, California, in which four people were wounded in a knife attack on a college campus by an attacker described as a "US person."

The White House release of the list followed another contentious week in the US culminating in President Trump attacking the media and the judiciary for its purportedly lax attitude towards terrorism.

"In many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it," he told military personnel at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa on Sunday in a continuation of his attack on the media. "They have their reasons, and you understand that."

BCCL

Pressed on what exactly the President meant, his aides said Trump believed the media underreported the attacks relative to their frequency. "He felt as though members of the media don't always cover some of those events to the extent that other events might get covered; that a protest will get blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn't necessarily get the same coverage," White House spokesman Sean Spicer said.

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Another official later told the media that the "real point here is that these terrorists attacks are so pervasive at this point that they do not spark the wall-to-wall coverage they once did." She explained that "if you look back just a few years ago, any one of these attacks would have been ubiquitous in every news outlet, and now they're happening so often ¡ª at a rate of more than once every two weeks, according to the list we sent around ¡ª that networks are not devoting to each of them the same level of coverage they once did."

The spat over the terrorism issue came hours ahead of an appeals court hearing in San Francisco late on Monday where the Trump administration is challenging the ruling of a state court suspending the Presidential order banning nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.

More than 100 tech companies and several public intellectuals and individuals have filed amicus curiae briefs opposing the Trump administration's move, even as Trump, in an unprecedented act, has attacked the judge for permitting soft borders and said he could be held responsible if there is any terrorist attack.

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The US media, in turn, has ridiculed the Trump administration for cooking up fictional accounts of terrorist attacks, citing the case of Presidential aide KellyAnne Conway who spoke about a terrorist massacre at Bowling Green that never occurred. She later clarified that she misspoke, but it turned out that she had referred to the fictional massacre at least once before.

Conway was roasted on social media ("I can think of only one terror attack that the media has single-handedly & unanimously ignored & that's the tragic massacre at Bowling Green," read one tweet) even as President Trump used the same medium to warn that the "threat from radical Islamic terrorism is very real, just look at what is happening in Europe and the Middle-East. Courts must act fast!"

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Trump also continued to challenge reports and commentaries about his soft approach to Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin, tweeting, "I don't know Putin, have no deals in Russia, and the haters are going crazy - yet Obama can make a deal with Iran, #1 in terror, no problem!" That led the press to unearth past interviews where he speaks of knowing Putin.

The US President shocked the Washington establishment and foreign policy traditionalists over the weekend after defending Putin in a TV interview (in which the anchor described Putin as a killer), saying, "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent? "