Sunday, May 15, 2005

The "Quran desecration" crisis has made the news all over the last several days but it seems over now as the original source says now that the reports of the descretion were incorrect.
Michelle Malkin links to an article on the Times (UK) online that covered parts of the issue:

AT LEAST nine people were killed yesterday as a wave of anti-American demonstrations swept the Islamic world from the Gaza Strip to the Java Sea, sparked by a single paragraph in a magazine alleging that US military interrogators had desecrated the Koran.....

The unrest began this week after Newsweek published an allegation that American military interrogators had desecrated the Islamic holy book in an effort to rattle detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The report said that they had placed the Koran on the lavatory inside inmates’ cells and had “in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet” .

I thinks this irresponsible and reckless behavior at the end of the media must not pass unquestioned (some reasonable punishment won't be a bad idea though) because people were killed in some countries just because some reporter thought it was cool to write about a subject considered irritating by millions of people. I'm not trying to justify the riots here; on the contrary, I'm against them but (and correct me if I'm wrong) one must not put matches near gasoline.

I haven't payed any attention to this story from the beginning plus, it's technically impossible to flush a 700 page medium sized-if not large-book down a toilet!!

What is interesting is that Iraq witnessed no demonstration at all, not even a single statement of denoencemnet from anyone although Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya kept running updates on this subject almost every news-hour and have always talked about the descretion incident as if it were confirmed news.

If this is to indicate anything I think it indicvates that Iraqis are more concerned about their own lives than they're about the "issues" of the Islamic world's dignity and more important (and here I see our community approaching a turning point) is that people are giving the media less credit than they used to do.

Update: FOX video clip covering the Newsweek's screw up and "apology" here and a longer one here.

No comments: