Mideast missile mishap goes relatively unnoticed

One News Now (Link) - Chad Groening (August 20, 2009)

An Israeli author and Middle East expert cannot understand why the American news media completely ignored a recent failed missile test in the Middle East that should have made huge headlines in the United States.

Recently Israel's Haaretz news published a report from Japan's Kyodo News that 20 Syrian civilians were killed and more than 60 more were injured after a Scud missile test fired jointly by Syria, North Korea, and Iran in late May strayed off course. The launch was an attempt to test a new short-range ballistic Scud missile jointly developed by the three countries.

But a technical malfunction caused one of the two missiles test fired to land in a market located in a town on the Syria-Turkey border, inflicting more than 80 casualties.

Avi Lipkin is an Israeli scholar and author who has traveled extensively in the U.S. warning Americans about the threat of Islam. He wonders why the story has been virtually unreported in Western media.

"You're given all this stuff [in the media] about Michael Jackson and other scandalous news which has absolutely no value for the human race," he laments. "And of course when you have missiles exploding in the wrong places, this is an octopus with a number of tentacles -- but the head, of course, is in Iran."

Lipkin says under the Obama administration, the phrase "war on terror" has been replaced by "war against al Qaeda" -- and since it was not al Qaeda that fired the missile, it evidently was not deemed newsworthy.