I have some suggestions for the New York Times.  When you provide stories like this:

Federal agents on Wednesday fatally shot a man they described as the leader of a violent Sunni Muslim separatist group in Detroit.

The 53-year-old man, Luqman Ameen Abdullah, was killed in one of three raids conducted in and around the city, in which six followers of his were taken into custody.

…there are things that you need to mention.

• If the group that this guy was affiliated with is “a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam, which seeks to establish a separate Sharia-law governed state within the United States,” we need to know that. A story about domestic terrorists is a different story than one about foreign terrorists. It just is.
• Likewise, if Luqman Ameen Abdullah – the leader who got shot – was born with the name “Christopher Thomas,” we need to know that.
• And finally: if the guy is saying things like “Obama is a Kafir. McCain, all the rest of them Kuffars, are Kuffars,” we need to know that.  Especially that first sentence.

Let’s be blunt: the FBI shut down a proto-cell* of radical fringe Black Muslim domestic terrorists – which is something that’s going to please everybody, with the possible exception of CAIR.  And as can be seen from the links, most news organizations are capable of reporting on this in a forthright fashion… but the New York Times takes until the second-to-last paragraph to even hint at it.  Which is problematical; after all, the idea here is for a newspaper to report on what happened.  Not to make its readers have to go out and find out what really happened…

Moe Lane

*They were still at the ‘criminal activities to fund illegal firearms purchasing’ stage.  I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t read of this particular organizational arc before.

PS: Glenn Reynolds wonders why we’re seeing more domestic counter-terrorism operations these days.  At a guess, I think that we got some very good intelligence a few years ago and started up a variety of investigations.  We are now rolling them up because the targets are starting to look like they’re ready to switch from rhetoric to action, now that Big, Scary Bush isn’t in the Oval Office any more…

Crossposted to Moe Lane.