Some journalists really enjoy writing in first-person voice. I am not one of them.

Yes, I know that the previous sentence began with the word “I.” We are almost seven-years into the life of GetReligion and, obviously, I have had to get a lot more comfortable with first-person work.

Blogging does not have to be first-person, all-commentary based work, but much of it is. When I say that I have never been all that comfortable with first-person writing, I am mainly talking about first-person news coverage, as opposed to what we do here at GetReligion, which is first-person news criticism.

In other words, I find it much easier to quote other people than to quote myself, especially when it comes time to trust my own memories of news events. It was especially hard, this past week, to try to quote the 20-year-old version of myself, flashing back to events that I witnessed as an undergraduate reporter at The Lariat at Baylor University.

The subject this week: The mind-blowing role that the NoZe Brotherhood has played, and continues to play, in the U.S. Senate race in Kentucky.

There is no need to go into all of the crazy details again. You can, after all, read one or both of the GetReligion posts that I have written on the topic, so far.

I finally decided to try to turn out a Scripps Howard News Service piece on the topic, which required the use of first-person voice. That was the subject of this week’s GetReligion “Crossroads” podcast. Click here to listen to that on your computer or download it to play on a mobile device.

The hard part was when my mind started playing tricks on me. You see, I was not a NoZe Brother, but I have known a few. I also attended quite a few events involving national-level news makers that were crashed by the NoZe crew. I mean, there are some very famous Ornery members of the NoZe Brothers. The Wikipedia page for this secret society of misfits names quite a few. Check it out.

My personal favorites are:

* Bill Cosby — “Bro. J-E-L-L-NoZe.”

* Billy Graham — “Bro. Cracker NoZe Graham.”

* Bob Hope — “Bro. SkiNoZe Hope.”

* Dan Rather — “Bro. CBS Evening NoZe.”

The one that threw me off was “Bro. Water NoZe Jaworski,” the title given to the final special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal.

Jaworski was a prominent Baylor alum. One of the funniest NoZe events that I witnessed was the Homecoming parade in which Jaworski was Grand Marshall, only days after the Saturday Night legal massacre that led to his appointment. With national television crews on hand to capture remarks from Jaworski, a NoZe Brother (complete with the classic fake nose, glasses, big wig and trench coat that implied indecent exposure could happen at any moment) walked silently in front of the new Beltway big gun’s limousine carrying a sign that said, “Clap if you think he is guilty.”

“He,” of course, was President Richard Nixon.

Baylor was already far into its transition from being a largely middle-class campus from old-fashioned Southern Democrat homes into a richer campus packed with suburban Republicans. Obviously, most of the parents and alumni felt that they needed to clap for Jaworski, but how could they do that without being filmed clapping to impeach Nixon?

It was a classic NoZe moment. Jaworski gamely played along, as he later became on honorary NoZe. Was he already a NoZe from his college days? Nobody NoZe or, at least, no one has spoken out.

In my memory, I was pretty sure that the NoZe had pinned the “Water Noze” title on Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, who lectured on campus (In the Q&A time I asked him to rank his favorite “Deep Throat” theories, since he could not ID the source on his own, of course) as part of the hubbub before and after the release of “All the President’s Men” (the book, at that stage). However, in my column research I found that there are multiple references online that pinned that title on Jaworski. Thus, I can only assume that some similar title went to Woodward, when the brothers “honored” him that night in Waco Hall.

What was that title? Is there anyone out there in post-Baylor land who remembers? Help this aging scribe out, please.

By the time I wrote the final version of the Scripps Howard piece to post on my own home page, I had decided to go with this more careful wording for the key sentence:

I was present when Woodward was made an honorary member — Brother Water NoZe, or a variation on that theme — when the NoZe crashed his lecture, presenting him with his own plunger, while seated on a rolling commode.

Sigh. Enjoy the podcast, I guess. I really don’t feel comfortable with my own first-person writing, when it comes time to try to write about news events.

A lot more details have come to light as the international probe into a terror threat emanating from Yemen has widened. But some details should have been much clearer from the start.

One of the early oddities with this story was that the Chicago synagogues to which the bombs were addressed were repeatedly referred to as “places of Jewish Worship.”

I know that President Obama, in his press conference, called them places of Jewish worship. But reporters often — maybe not often enough — translate bureaucratese into more precise words that can be more easily understood by readers.

These weren’t Jewish community centers, so it’s pretty safe to just identify them as synagogues. Thats the Jewish version of a church.

Even odder, though, was the initial story from The New York Times. It was an earlier version of this story that was titled “Terror Alert Touched Off by Suspicious Air Shipments.” The earlier version, which you can still find on online message boards, went straight from talking about the “widening investigation into suspicious packages” to this:

Federal officials warned synagogues in the Chicago metropolitan area to be on alert, said Linda Haase, associate vice president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.

“We were notified about this earlier this morning,” Ms. Haase said in an interview. “We are taking appropriate precautions and we’re advising local synagogues to do the same.”

By the afternoon, Jewish institutions throughout the nation were being told by the Anti-Defamation League to step up their security. “Law enforcement asked us to reach out to the Jewish community to be on alert, to be vigilant, in particular for packages,” Steven Sheinberg, the director of community security at the League said in an interview. “We have heard of no specific threat, but these things are unfolding and progressing.”

Knowing what we know now, it’s no surprise at all that this NYT story added such context. But in this version of the story it was quite the non sequitor. Until the above paragraphs, there had been no mention of Jews, synagogues or places of Jewish worship.

In other words, this story said Jews were on alert but didn’t say why. And why, after all, is often the most important question a story should answer.

Have we really gotten to the point that any terror threat from the Middle East is presumed to target American Jews? Or was this just an editing flub in the rush to get this story online as quickly as possible?

It may have been the latter. When I sent this story to the GetReligion team, Bobby — Go Rangers! — replied with an NYT news alert that mentioned “places of Jewish worship.”

The funny thing was that the link included in the news alert redirected to the NYTimes.com home page. Where the earlier version of the story I just discussed was prominently featured.

My husband laughs at political reporters who act like election night is the hardest night of the year because of the tight deadlines. As a designer and copy editor on the sports desk, election night is nothing compared to Green Bay Packer game days. That said, the Wisconsin races will be interesting, since more television ads aired between Russ Feingold and Ron Johnson in September than in any Senate or House race in the country.

As individual Senate and House races remain up for grabs, reporters look for broad trends to take the country’s pulse. Key coalitions that voted for President Obama may vote Republican, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll.

Much of the election attention seems focused on women, especially with the number of high-profile races featuring female candidates. The Times reports that if women choose Republicans in House elections, it will be the first time since exit polls looked at the breakdown between sexes in 1982. This could be an important historical switch and worthy of coverage, but the poll’s accompanying story then focused primarily on women with only a brief mention of the Catholic swing. Click into this graph, though. Yes, that’s a potential 34-point swing for Catholic voters from Democratic to Republican in two years.

Remember that tmatt wrote about the expected Catholic vote in 2008, offering four different kinds of Catholics to consider: ex-catholics, cultural catholics, Sunday-morning american catholics, and the “sweats the details” Roman Catholic. So this group is hard to categorize, especially when you add region, age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

But this poll suggests 62 percent of Catholics say they will vote Republican in the upcoming midterm elections while 38 percent said they were voting Democratic, leaving a significant 24-point gap. Here’s Joseph Bottum’s prediction in the conservative Weekly Standard.

Catholic voters this year will likely break the way the rest of the nation breaks: Hispanic Catholics in one direction, white ethnic Catholics in another; Southern Catholics trending one way, Northern Catholics a slightly different way. Just drop the word Catholic, and you’ll have a reasonable idea where their votes will go. And in the remaining days of the campaign, the Catholic church itself will surely be attacked for even the least gesture of interest in the issues of the campaign, though none of that will actually matter politically.

But the vocabulary of Catholicism, that way of bringing religiously grounded moral claims into the public square, and doing so nonreligiously: It’s simply here in American electoral politics. Here in 2010, and for a good long while to come.

There will be no lack of election coverage, but between the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, the tea party movement, and the shift in women’s voting patterns, political reporters could easily overlook some interesting religion angles. Hopefully we’ll see some reporters pay attention to these numbers.

That’s my precious little cheeseburger pictured here. I also have the cutest little baby bat you’ve ever seen. We are enjoying Halloween and have been practicing our “Trick or Treat//Does that have nuts in it?//Thank you!” lines for weeks. But I have been having some scheduling issues with another holiday that falls on Oct. 31: Reformation Day.

I’m Lutheran, so this is a big day for us. We like to throw parties to celebrate and sing songs about salvation by God’s grace. It’s what we do. Reformation Day parties and Halloween parties are a hard combination for parents of little children, though, and we’ve had to do some fancy work with the scheduling. I figured it was just a Lutheran problem until I saw a few stories that indicated the scheduling conflict was more widespread.

Bruce Nolan at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports on a parish that’s moving Halloween from Oct. 31 to Nov. 1. Livingston Parish says that people who trick-or-treat outside of the hours 6-8 on that day will be fined. The story explains that the parish has dealt with the issuer repeatedly over the years and that this was the law that developed, but not without dissent:

All this has attracted the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union, which Friday dispatched a letter to parish officials telling them they were violating neighbors’ constitutional rights to walk their streets and ask for candy any day they pleased, as well as the religious freedom of anyone wanting to celebrate Halloween as a religious feast — although trick-or-treating is not part of Wiccans’ observance of the day.

Mark Oppenheimer and Kim Severson at The New York Times expanded the theme by looking at other scheduling issues. Some areas might have moved trick-or-treating to Saturday night except that folks didn’t want to mess with college football watching plans. Other areas simply have a desire to avoid trick-or-treating on nights before school is in session. Here is my favorite chunk of the story, which deals with a county in Georgia’s decision to move the festivities to Saturday:

The Savannah mayor, Otis S. Johnson, who was at a Monday news conference where officials suggested the switch, said that as a lifelong resident of the city, he could not remember another time anybody complained about Halloween on a Sunday. But he said he supported the decision.

“Sunday is the Christian Sabbath,” Mr. Johnson said. “But also since celebrating Halloween normally takes place at night, and the Jewish Sabbath ends at sundown, we would not be disrespecting their Sabbath either. And Muslims celebrate their prayer on Friday. So if there were religious concerns, we have covered all of them!”

Mr. Johnson’s reasoning was not good enough for a Savannah Morning News columnist, Tom Barton, who wrote on Wednesday that Mr. Johnson had violated the Linus Rule, after the Peanuts character who once said, “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin.”

“The county’s top elected officials ignored this sage advice Monday,” Mr. Barton wrote. He added: “Saturday night is the absolute worst night for extracurricular candy-bar grubbing. As everyone who has gone beyond Sesame Street knows, Saturday is reserved as the night when Savannah’s adults go out and do stupid things (think partying, clubbing, driving drunk and fighting over girlfriends and baby daddies at 24-hour IHOPs).”

There’s much more meaty discussion of religion, too, such as how seventh-day Christians (who observe a Saturday sabbath) are affected by changing to Saturdays and how Roman Catholics are affected by a move forward into All Saints Eve.

There was one Halloween story that was a bit confusing to me. From the Associated Press, It’s about how a small Native American community called Jemez Pueblo has banned trick-or-treating due mostly to safety concerns but also because it’s “a holiday that’s not part of pueblo culture.” I was hoping to find out more about exactly how this holiday conflicts with the tribe’s culture. We’re told that they “deeply embrace” their traditions, including their unique language and adobe beehive-shaped outdoor ovens. Trick-or-treating only came to the group a few decades ago:

[Jemez Pueblo Gov. Joshua] Madalena said the ban is supported by the Tribal Council and pueblo religious leaders.

“Their words of wisdom is what we need to continue to promote our traditional ways and values to our children, to educate them on our ways and customs, our dances and our songs,” Madalena said. …

The leaders instead want to stress All Souls Day Nov. 2, which pays respect to loved ones who have died.

“We pay tribute to our ancestors, we pay tribute to our family members that have passed on to the other world, and we ask blessings from them,” Madalena said.

So the traditional culture includes a celebration of All Souls Day? What exactly is this traditional culture that rejects Halloween but embraces All Souls Day? The actual religious views of the tribe aren’t mentioned. The reader who submitted this story thought it would be an excellent hook for discussing syncretism. He also said, “it seems some aspects of Christian culture have been traditionalized while others have been rejected. To me, at least, that’s a fascinating starting point for a piece on how religions are constantly reshaped by outside forces.” Halloween is pretty foreign to my religious culture, although the less demon-crazed it’s become, the more acceptable. But still, this does call out for a bit more information and more substantive treatment.

I was on the Washington, D.C., Metro today (my normal commute is by rail from Baltimore) and, as you would imagine, things were a bit tense. Maybe I am wrong, but I think there was more security out than normal.

The story of the week in mass-transit land is, of course, the arrest of Farooque Ahmed, the suburban father who authorities say was set up to conspire with fake al-Qaeda operatives to bomb the Arlington Cemetery, Pentagon City, Crystal City and Court House Metro stations.

Readers of the Washington Post coverage were, I am sure, stunned to know that he is a “naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan.”

It is still early in this story, relatively speaking. However, I was struck by the fact that, in this early Post report, a large team of reporters had already pulled enough facts together to find a middle ground between (1) virtual silence and (2) saying that the accused man may or may not have ties to a terrorist network, and leaving it at that.

Let’s start at that language that news consumers are so used to reading whether an urban nightmare is traced back to suburban roots.

Neighbors described Ahmed as pleasant but private.

The story then serves up yet another sentence that will be familiar to readers in the post-9/11 era.

Shaya Fitzgerald, 39, a physician’s assistant who lives across the street from Ahmed’s brick townhouse, said he has a young son and a wife who dress conservatively.

However, I was — as a journalist who cares about details that flesh out references to religion — pleased that the Post team didn’t play that “dress conservatively” card and then turn away. Instead, this early report offered some complex and interesting details. Follow closely:

She “wore a full hijab, the whole thing. She seemed relatively young,” Fitzgerald said. “My only impression of him was that he was not that sociable.”

Ahmed moved to Virginia from Staten Island, N.Y. His wife, Sahar Mirza-Ahmed, is from Birmingham, England, and is an active member of “Hip Muslim Moms,” a Northern Virginia playdate group for women with children younger than 5.

“I don’t know what to do. This is too close to home. You don’t know anybody,” said Esraa Bani, an organizer of the mothers group. She said she wants people to understand what her group is really about: “We are hip, as in a lot of us are born and raised here. We’re very savvy moms, working moms, tolerant moms. If we saw any signs of this, it’s just not at all part of our demographic.”

Phone messages left for Mirza-Ahmed were not returned.

Let me stress again that this is an early report. However, additional passages in the report indicate that the reporters are attempting to treat this family’s Islamic faith as an actual part of its life in a given region — the suburbs of Northern Virginia. Instead of simply using flat, vague labels, there is evidence of quick attempts to gather symbolic facts about their lives.

The Muslim family is in the suburbs and, on one level, of the suburbs. Maybe.

More details are sure to come, I am sure. But I was impressed that religion was clearly mentioned, rather than being safely ignored, and that the journalists covering this major story then attempted to deal with religion in human terms. That’s impressive, and fitting. I expect that more symbolic details are forthcoming.

Here in the nutty, right-wing, Bible Belt state of Oklahoma, we go to the polls Tuesday to cast our ballots and, hopefully, stop the incessant radio and TV commercials from those who are sneaking in our borders and accosting our way of life. I am talking, of course, about the politicians. Seriously, folks, I am willing to give my vote to the first candidate to shut up for a full five minutes.

I jest. I jest.

Most of the commercials I hear seem to relate to our Republican gubernatorial candidate who is going to stand up to Washington (by moving from Congress to the governor’s office in Oklahoma City) and the massive education spending measure that would pay for itself by cutting $2 billion in tax breaks for special interests (you don’t think there’s any teacher union involvement in that wholly believable campaign, do you?).

But I digress. This is GetReligion, so let me get to today’s topic: Sharia religious law. And today’s other topic: Bad journalism. And to play a starring role in both topics: the Los Angeles Times.

Besides voting on State Question 744 — the education spending measure referenced earlier — Oklahomans will decide 10 other state questions Tuesday. One of them, State Question 755, would ban Sharia law in the state. Here’s how The Oklahoman, one of the nation’s more conservative newspapers, described the measure in an editorial urging voters to reject it:

This is another feel-good measure that has no practical effect and needn’t be added to the Oklahoma Constitution. The question would prohibit the use of international or Sharia law when cases are decided in Oklahoma courts. As it is, judges exclusively use state and federal law to guide their judicial decision-making. Passing the question might make some politicians happy and make some Oklahomans feel better. That’s all it would do. Voters should reject it as unnecessary.

The L.A. Times, too, considers the measure downright unnecessary. Unfortunately, that newspaper chose to make its position clear not in an editorial but in a news story. Here’s the lede on the Times’ story:

As the country grapples with its worst economic downturn in decades and persistent unemployment, voters in Oklahoma next week will take up another issue — whether they should pass a constitutional amendment outlawing Sharia, or Islamic law.

Supporters of the initiative acknowledge that they do not know of a single case of Sharia being used in Oklahoma, which has only 15,000 Muslims.

The rest of the story follows much the same pattern of making clear exactly how crazy the ballot measure is, according to the Times.

Supporters “can point to only a handful of cases that merely allude to the centuries-old, complex tangle of Muslim religious law.” Backers “have cited only three cases that they contend show the threat of Sharia law.” Blanket statements are attributed to “some conservative activists.”

Another weakness of the story is that it fails to highlight the bigger picture of Oklahoma politics. The Sharia ballot question is not placed into the context of a larger conservative movement in the state. Typically, we GetReligionistas complain when reporters focus too much on the politics and not enough on the religion. In this case, the politics seem to be crucial to understanding what’s occurring. For example, consider this story from The Oklahoman:

Oklahoma voters will decide several ballot issues next week that critics say pander to extreme conservatives and would move the state further to the right.

State questions on Tuesday’s ballot would make English the state’s official language, prohibit Oklahoma courts from considering international or Islamic law when deciding cases, and allow residents to opt out of the new federal health care reform law.

The three questions are the product of a Republican-controlled Legislature, which circumvented Gov. Brad Henry — a Democrat — to take them to the ballot. Critics say Republicans are trying to beef up voter turnout among certain conservative groups by appealing to biases on immigration, Islam and the reach of Washington in a state where President Barack Obama failed to win a single county in 2008.

For a much better national treatment of Oklahoma’s Sharia measure, take a look at CNN’s informative report by national security producer Laurie Ure:

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (CNN) — Oklahoma voters are considering an unusual question that will appear on their ballots this Tuesday: whether Islamic law can be used in considering cases in state court.

The question is the doing of State Rep. Rex Duncan. The Republican is the main author of State Question 755, also known as the “Save our State” constitutional amendment, one of 11 questions on the state ballot.

The question might seem a befuddling one for a ballot in the heartland, but it stems from a New Jersey legal case in which a Muslim woman went to a family court asking for a restraining order against her spouse claiming he had raped her repeatedly. The judge ruled against her, saying that her husband was abiding by his Muslim beliefs regarding spousal duties. The decision was later overruled by an appellate court, but the case sparked a firestorm.

Keep reading the CNN report, and you get nuance, you get Newt Gingrich proposing a federal law along the same lines, you get actual ballot wording, you get details on the claims made in media ads, and you even get this kind of real reporting with input from a real person:

Quraishi insists that Islam does not allow for men to mistreat women, and that the New Jersey case involved a “crazy, loony man, unfortunately a Muslim.”

“That is not Islam,” he said.

“Oklahoma, you know, is a very Republican state,” Quraishi said. He accused some lawmakers with attempting to instill fear in the heads of constituents in order to drum up votes. “But Oklahomans are not like that. I know most of the Oklahomans. They’re very nice people.”

CNN’s report practices good old-fashioned journalism. Just for kicks, the Los Angeles Times might try it sometime. Even when writing about a nutty, right-wing, Bible Belt state such as Oklahoma.

News broke this week that Farooque Ahmed had been arrested in connection with an alleged plot to bomb Metro stations here in Washington, D.C. The first draft of the story I read didn’t mention anything about religion but the mentioned ties to al-Qaeda and Pakistan suggested it might become a part of the story. When the breaking news story was updated by the Washington Post, we got:

Muslim leaders in Northern Virginia said that, as of late Wednesday, no one had reported knowing or having interacted with Ahmed at local mosques. His arrest, however, touched off a conversation about whether Ahmed might have initiated a plot or whether law enforcement officials had floated the idea to him, as has been suggested in other FBI sting operations.

“It’s a conversation that’s definitely going on in the community,” said Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, spokesman for Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church. “At the same time, though, if you’re dumb enough and sick enough to think you’re working for al-Qaeda, then maybe your behind should be put in jail. If what the authorities accuse him of turns out to be true, I have very little sympathy for someone who plans something like that.”

Now, I’m not sure that the spokesman for the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque is the best guy to go to. As I wrote a few months ago:

It’s a very popular mosque in the area but it’s also known for having once had an imam by the name of Anwar al-Awlaki. Yes, that Anwar al-Awlaki. Two of the 9/11 hijackers attended services there and a German planner of the 9/11 attacks had the number for the mosque in his apartment. Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan also attended there years ago. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was convicted of conspiracy to assassinate President George W. Bush and of providing support to Al Qaeda, worshiped and taught Islamic studies there. A former member of the mosque’s executive committee was convicted of obstruction of justice for refusing to testify about Hamas. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that mosque leaders have been political (he quotes from one 1998 sermon: “Allah will give us the victory over our tyrannical enemies in our country. Allah, the infidel Americans and British are fighting against you. Allah, the curse of Allah will become true on the infidel Jews and on the tyrannical Americans.”). And the Post has reported that the mosque is affiliated with the Muslim American Society, which has links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Dar Al Hijrah hosted a fundraiser last month for Sabri Benkahla, who members believe was wrongly convicted of terrorism-related charges.

I mean, I’ve said before that I don’t think you need to mention mosque ties to terrorists every time you write about mosques, but when the story is terrorism, it’s kind of odd to not mention, you know, that Anwar al-Awlaki was an imam there. Right? It just seems like there’s this forced narrative sometimes that makes journalists sort of lose their sense.

Anyway, this Associated Press story, which says something about Ahmed having been influenced by the former Dar al-Hijrah imam al-Awlaki. But what’s really interesting is the nugget that the tip that led to the FBI’s subway bombing sting might have come from a source in the Muslim community.

And there are other clues in the story that there were Muslims who helped out with the investigation. It’s so basic and it’s just reporting facts from sources, but this is an important aspect of reporting on Muslims accused of terrorism. In more than a few cases, the investigations have been aided, if not instigated, by fellow Muslims. It would be nice if showing the variety of Muslim attitudes and beliefs weren’t limited to terrorism cases, but at the very least it’s important to mention in terrorism cases.

This Washington Post ran a piece about confusion among Muslims about how to react to such high-profile arrests:

As details of the arrest trickled out, many in the Muslim community avoided saying anything to outsiders, but instead quietly voiced concerns to one another about the tactics used.

The ambivalence highlights the complicated and often fraught relationship between law enforcement and Muslim Americans - an alliance some say has suffered especially in the last year with the slew of sting-like operations within their communities.

Increasingly, Muslims believe that even as they work with the FBI to combat terrorism, they are being spied upon by authorities.

It’s a great idea for a piece and it’s something that provoked some concern for me, too, as I read the details of the sting. For instance, the feds put coded messages in a Koran. But the piece also suffers by not dealing more forcefully with some of these issues. Again, we get a quote from Dar al-Hijrah:

At Dar al-Hijrah, Imam Johari Abdul-Malik said his mosque works closely with law enforcement. But at the same time, he said, he believes there’s been a chilling effect from the sting operations.

I mean, when President Obama has issued an assassination order on one of this mosque’s former imams, that should be mentioned. But it would also make for a good question of the spokesman. As in, “So your mosque has had a ton of ties to terrorists. Anwar al-Awlaki, 9/11 hijackers, etc. Why should the feds trust you to provide all the information necessary for combating terror?” Or something. You know, ask the tough questions. There are probably some really good answers to be found, too. The quote that Abdul-Malik gave was really interesting, actually, and about how new visitors to the mosque are greeted with suspicion for fear that they’re feds. But we’re talking about some serious threats here, too. It would be nice to have answers that go into those external threats, too.

The story is focused on how Muslims feel about how well they’re cooperating with the feds. The only perspective from law enforcement comes from an agency flack. That’s completely understandable for a quick follow-up such as this. But it would be great to talk to former agency officials or others who might be able to offer perspective that goes beyond what you’re going to get from a spokesman.

I did think that the next-day story from Spencer Hsu was pretty good. It’s really about the information from the affidavit filed in Ahmed’s arrest. It naturally weaves religion throughout the piece. It doesn’t reserve “religion” for a special section of the piece but incorporates it from start to finish. But it did end with a particular emphasis on religious issues:

But Ahmed also expressed concerns that he complete religious obligations before going overseas to fight, a key step that counterterrorism analysts say is observed by violent Islamic extremists. He also told the undercover operatives that he was interested in contributing money to the cause, offering $10,000 in donations, Dayoub wrote.

According to federal authorities, Ahmed told agents that he would be ready to fight after completing a pilgrimage to Mecca next month.

“On September 28, 2010, AHMED told both [operatives] that he was attending the Hajj this year and that they should all go in order to complete the five pillars of Islam before making the ‘top mark’ - by which I believe AHMED meant ‘becoming a martyr,’ ” Dayoub said.

An interesting story. The Washington Post has the resources to cover this story well and it’s nice to see them putting a bunch of reporters on it. I look forward to future coverage, too.

We’ve had an interesting discussion after a post yesterday about an article on a group that monitors Muslim extremism. One of the last commenters, Irenicum, had a few interesting parts, such as noting how often “we’re stuck in a false dichotomy of ‘every Muslim is a potential terrorist’ to ‘there is no radical Islam.’” His last line, though, made me think of another news story:

As an aside, at what point does a legitimate concern for preserving a cultural “tradition/norm” as many non-Muslim Americans want to do become a xenophobic impulse that is potentially dangerous? A good deal of the controversy I see seems to come about from this very dividing line. And since this is about journalism, who is writing in a public venue about this in a nuanced way?

I thought it was interesting because I’d only moments before finished reading the Pope’s Message for World Migrant and Refugee Day. Why was I doing this? I don’t know. Anyway, I decided to look at the media coverage of this message because the message itself was so, well, nuanced. For instance, note this passage:

Venerable John Paul II, on the occasion of this same Day celebrated in 2001, emphasized that “[the universal common good] includes the whole family of peoples, beyond every nationalistic egoism. The right to emigrate must be considered in this context. The Church recognizes this right in every human person, in its dual aspect of the possibility to leave one’s country and the possibility to enter another country to look for better conditions of life.”

At the same time, States have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers, always guaranteeing the respect due to the dignity of each and every human person. Immigrants, moreover, have the duty to integrate into the host Country, respecting its laws and its national identity. “The challenge is to combine the welcome due to every human being, especially when in need, with a reckoning of what is necessary for both the local inhabitants and the new arrivals to live a dignified and peaceful life.”

It’s not that the church’s views — at least those presented in the first paragraph above — haven’t been well documented in the press. I think the media actually has done a generally good job of reporting on the Catholic church’s position that refugees are to be welcomed. But the second message, which, admittedly, may be a new emphasis, hasn’t been well covered. The Pope thinks that countries have the right to regulate their borders and that migrants need to integrate into their host country? That’s interesting stuff.

I figured that in this election year when border regulation is having a serious impact, this would get some noteworthy coverage. But it appears that it hasn’t, at least yet. The Associated Press issued a four paragraph piece. Reuters had seven graphs. The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal mention was only a few dozen words. The Catholic press did more thorough coverage. Here’s Catholic News Service’s piece and here’s Catholic Culture, which said that the message sounded several familiar themes about treating all refugees with dignity while being more explicit about the right to defend borders and the need for migrants to assimilate.

But in general, this nuanced message was too nuanced to receive significant media coverage. It really is a shame when only the loudest or most extreme voices in contentious fights are heard.

One exception was a brief but notable BBC report, which didn’t just highlight Benedict’s remarks but used them as a hook to discuss immigration issues in Europe. It began:

Pope Benedict has called on immigrants to respect the laws and national identity of their host countries.

He said that every country had the right to regulate the flow of migration and immigrants had a duty to integrate.

The Pope’s comments are likely to add to the Europe-wide debate about integration of foreigners.

The Vatican traditionally identifies with migrants and refugees and recently criticised France for deporting 1,000 Roma (gypsies) to Romania and Bulgaria.

This is a hot-button topic in Europe. It is here, too. I really wish that more reporters would avail themselves the opportunity to discuss the topic with more light than heat. Does it have an effect on policy and discourse when the only times we discuss issues is when more extreme news events provoke it?

This morning, I received my annual email from The Jewish Daily Forward, announcing the “Forward 50,” the newspaper’s list of the year’s 50 women and men who have made a “significant impact on the Jewish story in the past year.”

Sure enough, there was the smiling face of the man of the hour here in the desperate city of Washington, D.C., a city in which the ruling Democrats are crying out for a symbol of sanity, humor, hope and chutzpah, a man who is brave enough to serve as a voice of moderation, which, of course, means criticizing President Barack Obama from the cultural and political left.

That man, of course, is Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz.

To tell you the truth, I was stunned that he was not listed in the Forward Top 5, overall. His Forward 50 biography states the case this way:

A Democrat in the White House has hardly tempered the irreverent and distinctly Jewish voice of the liberal-leaning fake news anchor Jon Stewart. The 47-year-old funnyman has entered his 11th year as host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” which has grown into a popular nightly platform to skewer politics and government. …

Stewart is quick to play the Jewish card, drop a Zabar’s reference or cozy up to bubbes and zaydes at the 92nd Street Y. Young Jews identify with Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz (his given name) and admired his tact after former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez made anti-Semitic comments about him and then was fired. Stewart recently came out with a new book, “Earth: A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race,” which is filled with squishy science and funny one-liners. …

The problem, of course, can we stated in a simple, yet eternal, question: What does the word “Jewish” mean?

This is an important, yet ultimately almost meaningless question, in this postmodern age. As the Hollywood Jew weblog puts it:

For some Jews it’s perplexing that Jon Stewart, an American Jewish icon, isn’t religious. How could the Jew who makes Jewish “cool” be so indifferent to Judaism?

Buried beneath the laughter from his jokes — that he ritually delights in Big Macs with bacon on Yom Kippur or mocks Israel’s leaders for skipping a U.N. meeting on Sukkot “you mean, the holiday with the huts?” — is a deep and hidden disappointment that he isn’t really doing what we’re doing.

Earlier this week, The Berman Jewish Policy Archive, a research and analysis outfit at NYU, offered their findings on the state of Jewish journalism in the aftermath of a controversy at The Jewish Standard in New Jersey. One critique, from Andrew Silow-Carroll, expressed a wish “that journalists would move beyond their serial habit of assessing the ‘Jewishness’ of various public figures.”

However, in this case, journalists really do not need to pull back from asking some variation on that question as they trek to the National Mall to cover our nation’s latest festival of semi-political hero worship.

However, that is exactly what the principalities and powers at the Washington Post did the other day in the massive Style section look at Stewart and that thing that he keeps doing. This is the opening salvo of “Just who does Jon Stewart think he is?”, which captures the spirit of the whole:

These days, he can claim to be many things: political satirist, pseudo-anchorman, media critic, author, successful businessman, philanthropist, Emmy Award magnet. On Monday he arrives in Washington in a new, self-anointed role: as our national voice of reason, moderation and rationality — a uniter, you might say, not a divider.

Jon Stewart’s Saturday afternoon “Rally to Restore Sanity” (merged with partner-in-satire Stephen Colbert’s concurrent “March to Keep Fear Alive”) may become the largest “nonpartisan” event to hit the national Mall since … well, since a couple of months ago, when another basic-cable TV star, Glenn Beck, hosted his “Restoring Honor” rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Beck claimed his event was nonpartisan, too.

With less than a week to go, it’s still not exactly clear how Stewart will be using this new platform. No guests or musical acts have been announced, Stewart has done only a couple media interviews, and he’s offered few details about the rally on his nightly program.

Nevertheless, the similarities to Beck’s rally are just the sort of thing Stewart himself would satirize on his show if, of course, it weren’t his rally and his TV show in the first place. In his few pre-rally comments, Stewart has reached for some of the broad values and high-minded themes that Beck’s did — civility, decency, making America better — though admittedly with fewer religious allusions and more comic panache.

And, of course, he has chosen to work with those notable moderates Arianna Huffington and Oprah Winfrey. There are no political, or religious, overtones in the work of that dynamic duo. Nope.

Thus, I think it is very strange that if one reads the rest of the Style piece, one finds absolutely zero references to how the religious or not-so religious worldview of this Leibowitz fellow — OK, Stewart — affects his work or how he views words such as “sanity,” “reason,” “civility,” “moderation” and even “patriotism.” On this front the article is completely silent or, one might even say, haunted.

Yet do the following equation in your mind.

Beck equals, what? The mainstream media coverage stressed that he is a Mormon, yet with a large (and most journalists incorrectly assume united) conservative Christian base. That was part of the story, no way around it.

Colbert equals, what? The media is beginning to catch on (RNS here, my Scripps piece here) that he is a Catholic who is quite progressive on basic political issues, yet has done a good job of offering a mixture of statements on social issues that take the doctrines of his church quite seriously. He tries to show respect for Catholicism, in other words. It’s his faith and it is the faith that he is teaching to his children and to others. That is part of the Colbert story, no way around it.

Leibowitz (that would be Stewart) equals, what? Is he a cultural-secular Jew, a worldview that would shape how he views a wide variety of religious traditionalists, from Orthodox Jews to orthodox (small “o”) Christians to who knows who? A cultural-vaguely religious Jew, not secular, but with dashes of postmodern “spirituality” that blends with all of those snickers and smirks? A secret religious Jew who is pretending to be a secular Jew?

None of this matters, as long as he’s funny?

Yet, that Style piece accurately noted that, “Stewart has reached for some of the broad values and high-minded themes that Beck’s did — civility, decency, making America better — though admittedly with fewer religious allusions and more comic panache.”

The key word? That would be “fewer.” After all, his worldview — whatever it is — is shaping his humor on issues that are clearly touched by debates about religion, culture, ethics and morality.

The faith element should be in the story, since it is in Stewart’s humor and his public image. On top of that, religion was a major part of the Beck rally that Stewart will be dissecting, if not mocking.

That is part of the Leibowitz (that would be Stewart) story, no way around it.

Just after 7 a.m. today, I found myself driving a minivan full of middle-school students. This still-dark-outside carpool duty frustrated me for two reasons. First, I was up late last night watching my suddenly vintage Texas Rangers throw batting practice to the San Francisco Giants. Second, a school bus that my children could ride for free stops just down the street from my house.

“Why not let your kids ride the bus?” a logical person might ask.

In fact, a logical person (at least I consider myself logical) asked his wife that very question. The logical person’s wife assured him that the carpool is the best solution to the foul-mouthed bullies who were harassing our 13-year-old son on the bus. She’d tried calling the bus driver and transportation director. That didn’t really fix the problem. I proposed that I might make a single visit to the bus and employ a baseball bat. For some reason, the logical person’s wife didn’t think that was the best idea, either.

So here we are.

So, if you ask me, “Are bullies a problem at school?” I’d answer yes. If you ask me, “Are schools doing all they can to prevent this problem?” I’d answer no. I’m not at all surprised to see this CNN report this week:

Half of all high school students say they have bullied someone in the past year, with nearly as many saying they have been the victims of bullying, according to a new study released this week.

But if you ask me to tie school bullying to religion, I’d be more hard-pressed to answer definitively. My son’s bullies certainly don’t use any kind of language that I’ve ever heard from the pulpit.

Yet the national media narrative on bullying keeps focusing on what NPR this week described as “growing concern that there may be a religious undercurrent to the harassment of teens who are seen as gay.” Surely the flood of headlines making that case has nothing to do with the “growing concern.”

Actually, NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s report is pretty good — much better than most that I have read on this subject.

For one thing, she uses real-life examples rather than vague generalities:

Consider Justin Anderson, who graduated from Blaine High School outside Minneapolis last year. He says his teenage years were a living hell. From sixth grade on, he heard the same taunts.

“People say things like, ‘Fags should just disappear so we don’t have to deal with them anymore’; and, ‘Fags are disgusting and sinful,’ ” he told the Anoka-Hennepin School Board. “And still, there was no one intervening. I began to feel so worthless and ashamed and unloved that I began to think about taking my life.”

Anderson told his story at a public hearing last month — a hearing convened because in the past year, the district has seen a spate of student suicides. Four of those suicides have been linked to anti-gay bullying.

Justin Anderson survived. Justin Aaberg did not. Aaberg, 15, loved the cello, both playing and composing numbers like “Incinerate,” which he posted on YouTube. Justin was openly gay. He had plenty of friends, but he was repeatedly bullied in his school. In July, his mother, Tammy, found her teenage son hanging from his bed frame.

“They were calling him, ‘Faggot, you’re gay,’ ” she recalls. ” ‘The Bible says that you’re going to burn hell.’ ‘God doesn’t love you.’ Things like that.”

“Fags are disgusting and sinful.” “God doesn’t love you.” Such taunts certainly legitimize the question of religion’s role.

But the anonymous they nature of the bullies makes it impossible to really know what role religion played in these specific cases. Therein lies the rub. If you see any media reports that interview actual bullies, I’d love to hear their perspective on how their faith influences them to call classmates “faggots” and tell them to burn in hell. I am only half-joking.

Concerning the “spate of suicides”: How many is a spate? What is the overall student population? How do suicides in this district compare with national averages? Are suicides up in this district? If so, why?

More from the NPR report:

Tammy Aaberg says the school never called her, even after her son was physically assaulted. She was furious at first, but then began to understand why.

“A lot of teachers do care and do want to do something, but they’re afraid to lose their job if they step in and they’re not neutral,” she says.

Aaberg says teachers felt they couldn’t get involved — even when her son was bullied — because of the school district’s “neutrality policy,” which prohibits employees from taking sides on matters regarding sexual orientation. The district says the policy is meant to apply to the curriculum. But teachers say it’s so broadly written that they’re loath to intervene even when they hear anti-gay slurs.

Look up cop-out in your dictionary. That’s my reaction to any teacher or school official who would refuse to deal with a physical assault because of a “neutrality policy.” Give me a break.

Of course, the story relies entirely on the mother’s version of events. There’s no response from a teacher or school official. I’d love to hear firsthand from a teacher, “Yes, we knew that this child had been attacked on the playground, but the neutrality policy kept us from doing anything. Hopefully, we can change school policy to allow us to keep bullies from beating up students at our school.”

The report quotes officials from the Minnesota Family Council, “an evangelical group,” as well as the Family Research Council, also identified as “evangelical.” In both cases, more detailed descriptions of the groups involved would be helpful, as evangelical can mean so many different things.

Likewise, the story features the “Christian” mother of an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide. Again, more detailed information on the family’s religious background — and their specific faith group’s teachings on homosexuality — would be helpful.

Hagerty ends her piece this way:

And yet, despite the shifting views and alliances, there is an ongoing dilemma: How do parents and schools protect vulnerable kids without turning schools into a battleground for the culture wars?

Good question.