David Brooks sums it up well. Murder charges? Let me call BS on that. I read Isikoff's (and his cohort Mark Hosenball) column regularly. They are solid, interesting journalists who are quite neutral.
Posted on Fri, May. 20, 2005
Let's keep our focus on the real enemy
DAVID BROOKS
Maybe it won't be so bad being cut off from the blogosphere. I look around the Web these days and find that Newsweek's retracted atrocity story has sent everybody into cloud-cuckoo-land. Every faction up and down the political spectrum has used the magazine's blunder as a chance to open fire on its favorite targets, turning this into a fevered hunting season for the straw men.
Many of my friends on the right have decided that the Newsweek episode exposes the rotten core of the liberal media. Austin Bay's influential blog raises the possibility that this might be the mainstream media's Abu Ghraib. Dennis Prager, who is intelligent 99 percent of the time, writes, "Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths of innocents and for damaging America." Countless conservatives say the Newsweek folks were quick to believe the atrocity tales because they share the left-wing, post-Vietnam mentality that always assumes the worst of the U.S. military.
Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness. I used to write for Newsweek. I know Mike Isikoff and the editors. And I know about liberals in the media. The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.
Meanwhile, the left side of the blogosphere has erupted with fury over the possibility that American interrogators might not have flushed a Quran down the toilet. The Nation and leftish Web sites are in a frenzy to prove that the story is probably true even if Newsweek is retracting it.
This, too, is unhinged. Would it be illegal for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven? Could there be a few more liberals willing to admit that prisoners routinely lie about their treatment? (Do we expect them to say their time in captivity wasn't so bad?)
Then I click my mouse over to the transcripts of administration statements and I can't believe what I'm seeing. We're in the middle of an ideological war against people who want to destroy us, and what have the most powerful people on Earth become? Whining media bashers. They're attacking Newsweek while bending over backward to show sensitivity to the Afghans who just went on a murderous rampage.
Talk about the bigotry of low expectations.
Maybe we should all focus on what's important. Newsweek's item was seized and exploited by America's enemies in a way that was characteristically cynical, delusional and fascistic.
The people who seized upon this item, like the radical clerics in Afghanistan, are cynical in the way they manipulate episodes like this to whip up hatred and so magnify their own standing.
At the same time, they believe everything that could be alleged about the U.S., and more. They've spent so many years inhabiting a delusional mental landscape filled with conspiracy theories and paranoia that you could drill deep into their minds without ever hitting reality.
Finally, they are strategically ruthless. Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker, who has spent years reporting on extremists, says they use manufactured spasms of hatred to desensitize their followers. After followers spend a few years living through rabid riots and vicious sermons, killing an American or a Jew or even a fellow Muslim seems no more consequential than killing a mosquito. That's how suicide bombers are made.
The rioters are the real enemy, not Newsweek and not the American soldiers serving as prison guards. Just to restore some proper perspective, let me quote a snippet from the sermon delivered by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris, which ran last weekend on the Palestinian Authority's official TV station:
"The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world — except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquillity under our rule because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews — even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."
These are the extremists, the real enemy. Let's keep our eye on the ball.
Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.
