Diana West is on the case in her latest Washington Times piece.
So, Newsweek had "little idea how explosive" its Koran-down-the-toilet story would be, writes Paul Marshall in National Review Online (NRO).OK, I buy that — although Newsweek is hardly exceptional in its failure to understand Islam 101. Still, the anonymously sourced, now-retracted story — evidence of "media mistrust of the military," writes the Wall Street Journal — didn't become "explosive" until after Imran Khan, a Pakistani anti-U.S. opposition leader (and divorced son-in-law of the late financier Sir Jimmy Goldsmith) held a press conference to light the fuse.
And then what happened? White House spokesman Scott McLellan put it this way: "The report had real consequences. People have lost their lives. Our image abroad has been damaged." Regarding the spate of killing and mayhem across the Muslim world, the New York Post's John Podhoretz wrote that people "are dead for no reason other than some 'good and credible' source had an axe to grind with one of his bosses 15,000 miles away in the United States."
The "report" did this? Our "image" has been damaged — only now? For no "other" reason? Something's missing. That is, Koran-gate offers more than just another example of Washington politicking or good, old-fashioned media bias. Neither drove rioters to murder last week on the Arab-Muslim "street" any more than they drove Mohammed Atta to mass murder a few years ago in the friendly skies. It was jihad then, and jihad now, the rigid ideology that infuses medieval blood-lust with an unlikely longevity in a post-Enlightenment, technological age. Which is why the Newsweek story is not about us. Rather, it underscores something about them that is much more significant.
Us and them: The words are "divisive"; the concept politically incorrect. But what Michael Isikoff and Newsweek have done with their admittedly flimsy instance of reporting is focus our eyes on the chasm that lies between the Muslim world in which a book — one book — is sacred and life is cheap, and the Western world where speech is free and life is precious.
Read it all.
Posted at May 22, 2005 8:29 AM