Newsweek and the Bell that Cannot Be Unrung

[theist]

Like a guy we caught trying to take a dump behind the building one morning.

 

The US has got to stop apologizing all over the place to these freaks. They film themselves chopping off peoples heads with dull knives and then broadcast it world wide and no uproar. They car bomb innocent men women and children by the hundreds and no Muslim demonstrations against the atrocity.

 

Time to stop kissin' up to these wankers.

[krsna]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4558831.stm

[theist]

I don't consider people planting bombs and suicide bombing people in market places or on buses as having any connection with even the most rudimentary of religious processes. They are demons and fanatics.

 

They could have a nice process of praying 5 times a day etc. and make good progress back to God but their conversion by the sword/bomb nonsense reveals their true mentality.

 

It is like a sannyasi who rapes little children. Is he a sannyasi? Of course not he is a flippin' demon and the fact that he carries a danda just makes him more of a demon.

[krsna]

Shrila Bhaktivinode Thakur writes:

"Differences that arise from places, times, languages, behaviors, foods, dresses, and natures of various communities are incorporated within peoples spiritual practices and gradually make one community so completely different from another community that even the consideration that everyone is a human being may cease to exist.

Due to these differences there is disagreement, cessation of social intercourse, and fighting, even up to the point of killing one another.

 

When this ass-like mentality becomes prominent within the kanistha-adhikaris, they certainly indulge in these things. But if they develop a swanlike mentality, then they do not take part in quarrels; rather, they endeavor to attain a higher level."

 

(Sri Krishna Samita)

 

[theist]

Yes I am such an ass. But I prefer it to being a weak kneed kiss ass.

 

Carry a bomb into a resteraunt and slaughter twenty people then you should lose your head post haste I don't care what kind of "holy" costume you put on in the morning.

[Guest guest]

"The poison we chew in others, will surely come to us."

 

They have already lost their head, whatsmore their heart.

Don't lose yours.

[theist]

Nah no way. Peaceful yes. There are ksatriyas in vedic culture for a reason. Now I am not claiming to be a ksatriya But I agree with those that are and take action when it's called for.

 

It's been called for time and time again.

[Guest guest]

'Personally, I could care less what Mad Mo and folks like you believe.'

hence your barbarian response to everyone who does not share your belief, which may be lightyears ahead; but in which direction????

VdK.

[Guest guest]

Today, Catholics eat Jesus'flesh and drink His blood. How's that for a religious practice? where in the quan do you find such recommendations?

VdK.

[Guest guest]

To us old Fleet Street hands, Michael Isikoff will always be the guy who lost the Monica scoop. He had the Lewinsky story first, but his bosses at Newsweek killed it at the last minute. They wanted more sources, more corroboration: It’s all very well having Presidential DNA on the intern’s cocktail dress, but we really need a second stain on a second dress before it would be responsible to run this thing. If you can’t get a second dress, the Columbia Journalism School Book of Media Ethics says it’s okay to make do with a cashmere sweater, as long as it’s in an approved pastel shade (the sweater, not the stain). The point is, on a big scoop like this, we need to get everything nailed down airtight, even if that means we don’t break it until, oh, somewhere round the middle of Al Gore’s second term.

 

So Isikoff lost his story, and Drudge broke it instead and made his name. Flash forward seven years to the spring of 2005: Isikoff is still at work at Newsweek, possibly still working on trying to nail down his Monica scoop. Suddenly, “a knowledgeable US government source” tips him off on a hot story: at Guantanamo Bay, interrogators got prisoners to talk by flushing a copy of the Koran down the toilet. Like all stories, this scoop immediately went through the full, exhaustive, ultra-rigorous Newsweek editing process. Thus, the spelling of “Koran” was changed to the more culturally sensitive “Qur’an”. A Senior Editor then took a further look at the controversial story and said, “Hmm. I dunno. Shouldn’t it be ‘Qu’ran’? Or maybe ‘Q’u’r-an’? I’d be happier if we could get a couple of extra apostrophes in there…”

 

And then they ran the story. And, as we now know, it sparked riots in Pakistan and elsewhere that reportedly left 15 people dead. And, unlike the fact-checked-to-death Monica story, the Qu’ran-down-the-to’ilet story turned out to be – what’s the word? – untrue.

 

As should have been obvious even to Isikoff and his colleagues. Is it possible to flush a Koran down the toilet? It takes a bit of effort to get even an average issue of Newsweek down and round the bend. I tried flushing Michael Isikoff’s Covering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story down there and wound up getting water all over my wingtips and squelching off in my socks to call a plumber. And Isikoff’s book is only 416 pages. My copy of the Q’u’r’an is 950 pages, though if you reduce the apostrophes you can get it down under 800. The suras-down-the-septic story was an obvious crock. All it had going for it was that Newsweek wanted it to be true.

 

“It’s important to remember,” Isikoff told The Washington Post, “there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards here.” And that’s true. The fake Koran-flushing lives up entirely to the CBS bogus National Guard memos: an honest mistake that, like all the mainstream media’s honest mistakes, is always a mistake that will, if true, damage the Bush Administration. By contrast, when the Swiftvets come along, whoa, hold your horses, let’s get the slo-mo fact-checkers in for three or four months, at least until, say, mid-November. The only difference this time around is that there seems to be some damage to America’s reputation in parts of the Muslim world otherwise relatively well-disposed to the Great Satan – Afghanistan notably – plus a body count that makes Michael Isikoff considerably more lethal than, say, Lynndie England.

 

The rules for this sort of thing are well known. Last year, an old leftie Scots pal of mine, Alistair Beaton, wrote an anti-war “satire” which included Bush and Blair singing “We’re Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus”. Ha-ha. Alistair’s play opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England and did boffo biz. In his merciless evisceration of Bush-Blair and the radical Christian threat to world peace, Alistair was operating in the tradition of bold, courageous, transgressive artists without which a free society cannot survive. And fortunately, crazy as they are, these Christian fundamentalist types don’t tend to be waiting for you at the stage door. Whereas, if you write “We’re Sending You A Schoolgirl Bomb From Allah”, you attract a somewhat livelier crowd, and it’s hard to pick up showbiz awards for your bold, transgressive, courage, etc, when you’re six foot under. Ask Theo van Gogh. As a rule, if you’re going to be “provocative”, it’s best to do it with people who can’t be provoked.

 

Journalists understand this, too. When Christians get hot and bothered about a horny Jesus (The Last Temptation Of Christ), a gay Jesus (Terrence McNally’s Broadway play Corpus Christi) or a Jesus floating in the artist’s urine (“Piss Christ”), columnists take to the barricades to champion the cause of free speech. When Muslim groups shut down a play in Cleveland because its revolting apologia for a Palestinian suicide bomber is insufficiently pro-Muslim, the silence of the media lambs is deafening.

 

But somehow, when it’s the merest hint of a rumour of a canard about Bush stooges flushing the Koran down the toilet, Newsweek doesn’t bother thinking through the consequences. That’s the real problem here: not the reflex leftism but the pathetic hicky parochialism of a US media unable to see things except through the tunnel vision of domestic partisan advantage. Who’s really the “culturally insensitive” ones here?

 

Mark Steyn

National Review, May 26th 2005