Newsweek, a publication I’ve largely ignored for years, has published a false story about US forces at Gitmo “desecrating the Koran”. As expected, it has blown up. And understandably so, such inaccuracy is dangerous. Doubly so with respect to US endevours abroad. I’m sure the guys at Powerline are going nuts.
As tempting as it is to blame Newsweek for the riots in the Middle East that followed from their initial report, it’s not the magazine’s fault. At least not directly.
The riots were started, fueled, and participated in by people whose worldview is such that destruction of a copy of a book is punishable by death. This faction of the Arab population, and I’d wager by no means the majority, already hates the United States. Islamists will take any opportunity granted them to further characterize the US as the Great Satan, they will murder in the name of defeating us for the most tenuous of reasons and under the most thinly veild excuses. It is not as if a group of peace-loving America loyalists suddenly ran out and started burning flags. The folks faning the riots hated us before and will continue to do so. The danger that the Newsweek falsehood poses is summed in this comment from Austin Bay’s site:
I’m on my way back to Kabul, as I typically do every summer, but my family is completely opposed to my travel and work this year in Afghanistan even though I’ve safely transited there, in and out of State and UN/NGO service for nearly 20 years. The word I receive from Kabuli friends is that Isikoff has singlehandedly turned US triumph in the country to a total disaster. It was thought an anomaly last summer that some wonderful–and tragically forgotten–American DynCorps workers (mostly ex-military and my good friends) were killed in an environment that was pro-American to the core. That could be seen as a terrible tragedy, an unreasonable sad event impinging on an overall positive atmosphere–a last ditch effort by desperate Al Qa’eda remnants from outside Afghanistan to vent anger at the overwhelming success of the Americans. Now thanks to one Bush-hating reporter (google Isikoff if you doubt his intentions,) the recidivist Taliban-Pathans of southeast Afghanistan once again have an issue to de-legitimize the Karzai-US alliance.
That, in short, is what Newsweek is guilty of: giving an excuse to our enemies. Did they cause the riots? No, Islamists in the Middle East caused the riots. But they did provide a pretense under which our enemies can wreak havoc. There’s really no excuse for such shoddy reporting, none. And I think Newsweek should suffer dire consequences, not from the government, but on its bottom line. Punish with your pocket book, and just stop reading the damn thing. I quit years ago when the cover story was “Teens: What do they want?”, pegging that as an indication of impending laziness. Unfortunately, I seem to have been right and now Newsweek has provided an easy excuse for Islamists continuing their campaign of wanton violence.
