‘Tis the season for media list-mania, and (true confession) I always am mildly surprised upon viewing Top 10 story lists to find that I’ve forgotten some humdingers. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011?
In fact, given a tally of my own columns, jihad is the top story of 2011, just as it has been since at least 2001. Not that the media see it that way, of course; they see the spread of Islam’s law and call it “diversity” in the West or “Arab Spring” in the Middle East. They are blind to its implications, they apologize for its depredations and, in general, they commit professional malfeasance by misrepresenting the facts. Then again, at least they cover it.
The same isn’t true for the following story, which I submit is the great unsolved mystery of 2011. What really happened in the forest at Smolensk, Russia, when a Polish aircraft carrying Poland’s national leadership crashed in April 2010, killing all 96 people on board, including Poland’s president and first