Newsweek's consequences
UNITED NATIONS — “Whoops we did it again”, to paraphrase pop singer Brittany Spears.
The religious and emotional firestorm raging in Afghanistan and parts of the Middle East, stem from the incendiary allegations made by Newsweek magazine that U.S. military interrogators at the Guantanamo base were tearing up the Koran and flushing it down the toilet became America’s latest media gaffe. This sordid story—under the rubric of investigative journalism—was plainly WRONG. Yes, Newsweek grudgingly admitted it, but after the damage had been done.
Seventeen people are dead. Anti-Americanism is fueled. Seeds of hate have been planted. And it’s not over yet.
The basic story was that an anonymous “senior U.S. government official” claimed that American guards at the Guantanamo base had flushed the Koran down a toilet to intimidate terrorist suspects. Besides the tawdry nature of the claim, any reporter should presumably be aware that printing such an allegation would not play well with the hair-trigger religious emotions in the Middle East—never mind that America is at war there.
Ah, but not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, we see the journalistic Fourth Estate crusading for fame and ratings. It’s not the first time. Over the past year Dan Rather’s CBS debacle over running a fake story on President Bush, the New York Times charges on the eve of the Presidential election that hundreds of tons of Iraqi high explosives went missing under the noses of the US Military, and other such fabrications sullied media reputations. These stories were proven false, but in an American context. The damage from the Koran desecration allegations goes far deeper.
The Newsweek “Periscope” report was dead wrong and the consequences were deadly. After some hemming, and hawing the magazine retracted the story after the damage had been done. Among Americans, case closed, lessons learned, and another strike for the major media. Among Arabs, Afghans and Pakistanis, the religious disrespect, the hurt, and the pain will endure for quite a while.
Secretary of State Condi Rice stated categorically, “It’s appalling that this story got out there. I think it’s done a lot of harm.”
The damage caused by such “reporting” becomes near irreparable—this is not simply a case of liberals in the media taking a backhanded cheap shot at the Bush Administration, but of a wider and smirky left-wing hauteur of the hell with the consequences, never mind the truth.
On the Arab Street Newsweek’s retraction of the article is seen as an American magazine caving into political pressures from the White House. That’s their misperception.
Many of the Afghans and Pakistanis who will instinctively believe this Newsweek story also fall into the school of thought that America is at war with Islam the religion, not radical jihadi terrorists who happen to be Muslim. This is the proof! Even many UN diplomats were all too eager to believe these allegations.
Americans are basically reasonable people. They are equally respectful, for the most part, to other faiths including Islam. That’s why people in the USA were equally shocked and disgusted by Newsweek’s unproven allegations.
But let’s also question the religious uniqueness of Islam here. While the Afghans are overwhelmingly Muslim, did their religious tolerance forbid the formal and premeditated blasting of historic Buddhist monoliths of Baiman in 2001? The Taliban regime could have cared less about this vile desecration to the Buddhist beliefs or the global outcry which accompanied it. Do Sunni Muslim terrorists care when they bomb Catholic Churches in Baghdad, or for that matter Shiite mosques elsewhere in Iraq? Is the Saudi Arabian government censured for systematically burning Christian Bibles?
Still the issue here is Newsweek. Lacking the truth, the consequences of this scurrilous story caused so much hurt to Muslims, so much damage to American interests, and so much added danger to U.S. troops overseas.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.  |
