Sunday, May 15, 2005
Newsweek and the Mob Mentality
There are two basic lessons to be learned from the recent episode of a now-withdrawn Newsweek story and the fatal riots it has sparked in Afghanistan and elsewhere:
#1: Newsweek is a shitty magazine. Clearly they rushed this to publication. At this point, I can't help but remember their shamelessly exploitative (and yet content-free) cover interview with Timothy McVeigh, or another cover feature: "In Defense of Teenage Girls." The latter was the most asinine thing I have read in a magazine this decade, for reasons I can't even begin to go into. Oh yes, and let us recall Newsweek's 1983 flirtation with publishing the fraudulent Hitler diaries - it pulled back but then declared that it "almost [didn't] matter" whether they were true or not. These little reminders of crappiness seem to come once or more per decade. It was fixing to be about time.
#2: However, it almost didn't matter (hah!) what the source of these reports were. If Al Jazeera had aired them with an even thinner factual base, there still would have been riots and bloody mayhem. To a considerable degree, we are collectively hostage to the rumors that are spread against us, and all the folks who try to reduce Islamist rage to a political agenda - a list of bullet-pointed items that, if solved, will end all this - miss this. Islamists work to ensure that Muslim populations are kept at a continual boil - they thrive by inspiring a lynch mob mentality. That puts an onus on us to, yes, avoid flushing the Koran down the toilet. But a quick survey of the bizarre things that are said about us by Islamists should remind us of the extent to which the sources of rage lie out of reach. Newsweek or not, Koran-flushing or not, we are going to be depicted as enemies of Islam. The extent of this can be reduced somewhat, but not eliminated.
#1: Newsweek is a shitty magazine. Clearly they rushed this to publication. At this point, I can't help but remember their shamelessly exploitative (and yet content-free) cover interview with Timothy McVeigh, or another cover feature: "In Defense of Teenage Girls." The latter was the most asinine thing I have read in a magazine this decade, for reasons I can't even begin to go into. Oh yes, and let us recall Newsweek's 1983 flirtation with publishing the fraudulent Hitler diaries - it pulled back but then declared that it "almost [didn't] matter" whether they were true or not. These little reminders of crappiness seem to come once or more per decade. It was fixing to be about time.
#2: However, it almost didn't matter (hah!) what the source of these reports were. If Al Jazeera had aired them with an even thinner factual base, there still would have been riots and bloody mayhem. To a considerable degree, we are collectively hostage to the rumors that are spread against us, and all the folks who try to reduce Islamist rage to a political agenda - a list of bullet-pointed items that, if solved, will end all this - miss this. Islamists work to ensure that Muslim populations are kept at a continual boil - they thrive by inspiring a lynch mob mentality. That puts an onus on us to, yes, avoid flushing the Koran down the toilet. But a quick survey of the bizarre things that are said about us by Islamists should remind us of the extent to which the sources of rage lie out of reach. Newsweek or not, Koran-flushing or not, we are going to be depicted as enemies of Islam. The extent of this can be reduced somewhat, but not eliminated.
