Was watching CNN the other night and Paula Zahn was doing a report on the riots in the Arab world. At the end of the program, she editorialized, “at CNN, we feel it is our job to report the news, not to throw fuel on the fire. That’s why we have decided not to show the offending cartoons.”
What it said to me was that “we’re willing to give up some freedom of the press for the comfort of knowing that CNN headquarters won’t be torched by a mob.” Worse than that, though, is that terrorism has now extended to journalism (which I kind of new, but is not obvious) and that the “truth” is going to be advanced by those who are most willing to use violence to drive their message.
A friend of mine had perhaps the most keen insight into the rioting. He observed that rioting is the litmus test for a “perversion of Islam.” Now, if someone says that, for example, suicide bombers are a “perversion of Islam” but we don’t see any rioting in the streets of the Arab world, we can be comfortable in knowing that it’s actually not a perversion of Islam. The cartoons are a perversion, so there’s rioting. Now, we’ve got it.
On a side note, sort of….a colleague of mine asked after the Hamas electoral victory, “oh man, what is happening in the
All I said was, “nothing’s really different, except for you understand now what I understood 15 years ago about the objective of the bulk of the Palestinian populace.”
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