Newsweek Lied, People Died

To any American awake enough to realize that the mainline media has been left-biased for years, the Dan Rather story with the fake memos last fall was no surprise, other than for the level of incompetence. Dan and CBS thought that a one hour prime-time special that was completely one-sided anti-Bush would be a great way to help their buddy John Kerry. Mainstream US media works to get Democrat elected … no news there, except of course that the memos were faked. Golly, what a shame.

It seems however that Newsweek as stepped over a new line. Their May 9^th issue carried a story that US forces were defiling the Muslim holy book, the Quran, by flushing it in a toilet. This story spread across the Arab world, including Afghanistan and has apparently been a major factor in the latest round of violence, which have included at least 15 deaths. We know the press is anti-Republican, and the far left tends to be anti-American. What we are seeing now is the mainstream press moving more to the anti-American side.

The whole Abu-Grab story is an exercise in attempting to create as much of a problem for the US in Iraq, or other Arab countries as possible. When the NYT had it on their FRONT PAGE over 40 times last year, one could at least hope it was just another thinly veiled attempt to defeat Bush. This years “celebration” of the “anniversary” (of the story breaking, not the event) lets us know that it runs deeper than that.

Anyone with a couple firing neural circuits knows that the whole prison abuse story is going to help inflame Arabs. The media and the left has CONSTANTLY pointed out that one of the key reasons that the war in Iraq is a bad idea is because “it makes terrorists faster than we can kill them”. They must be a bit concerned as to the truth of that assertion, since their treatment of Abu-Grab and now the Quran desecration fable one year later show that they feel that there may need to be an “assist” in the minting of new terrorists. Newsweek is deliberately printing a story that has every potential of getting people including US soldiers killed … if it was true, that would be bad enough. When it isn’t true, it is unconscionable.

The mainline media is of course going to back off this as fast as they can, it is already off the CNN headlines, replaced by “Looks Like a Bad Hurricane Season”, but it is still available at http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/15/newsweek.quran/index.html.

I wonder how quickly it would be buried if Rush Limbaugh or Fox news made an “error” of similar import? "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's May 23 issue. Touching.

Newsweek lied, people died. BUT, they said they were “sorry” … but why did they need to do this story in the first place? It turns out they used some of the same logic as CBS used to “verify” the memo story. They asked officials, and they “didn’t deny it”. There may be a couple of flaws in that logic. Dan Rather was duly accused of being the Queen of All Space Unicorns on the Internet last fall, and is yet to deny this serious charge. If the logic of “failure to deny means it is true” works, the Space Unicorns can rest, their Queen as been found!

We have an American press that is trying to give Al-Jezeera a run for it’s money on being anti-American and inciting Arabs against America and Americans. Fox news is considered biased because their position on the War is to attempt to provide a “pro-American view”. Isn’t it just as biased (and a bit harder to understand) to go out of your way to provide and ANTI-American view?

It would be nice if something could be done here. Freedom of speech doesn’t include the freedom to yell “fire”! in a crowded theatre (when there is no fire). I’d argue that Newsweek as crossed that line. Had the story been true, it would have just showed a short-sighted interest in not caring about what was likely to happen, including loss of life. Since it is turning out to NOT be true, Newsweek lied about a story that cost lives. We could do with one less left-wing pamphlet.