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I was alerted via e-mail by several people that — lo and behold — the FBI had now weighed in in the fake Koran flushing incident (previous GetReligion items here and here) in favor of claims that the flushing had, in fact, occurred.
At a humble, green-domed mosque in the heart of Baghdad, a grizzled preacher named Sheik Ahmed Yassin stood his ground. Gunmen had killed five of his followers and kidnapped two of his sons. Threats had thinned his congregation, and the worshipers who still came rushed to their cars after prayers to avoid becoming the latest victims.
There is a point at which media criticism becomes rather censorious, and I think we’ve crossed it in the Newsweek scandal. Jonah Goldberg, in his latest column for National Review Online, writes of Michael Isikoff’s motive for breaking the story, “my guess is that [he] was more motivated by a reporter’s desire to break a story than by some Left-wing anti-Americanism.” Then he gets to the argument:
Newsweek is in full retreat amid the fallout from its Qur’an shredding story. In the current issue, editor Mark Whitaker admitted that there were some problems with the sourcing and signed off with this:
World editor Marvin Olasky, in one of his more pointed criticisms of the notion of journalistic objectivity, once wrote that journalists feel no need to quote pro-cancer sources when writing about that dread disease. Well, there’s no shortage of pro-sharia sources in The Washington Post‘s heartbreaking account of a married woman in Afghanistan who was killed — whether by a stoning or a beating — after she admitted to committing adultery with an unmarried man.
Here we go again. I have been watching to see if the MSM notices this story. Sadly, I don’t think it’s on the radar. It seems that an Assemblies of God preacher in Iran may lose his head because of his faith and his voice. Here is a brief clip from Compass Direct, a Christian wire service:
For those following the post-Christian Science Monitor Iraq story, Robert F. Worth of The New York Times has a new wrinkle. There is another sign that the Sunni leaders are not united, and what a symbolic sign it is — a group of clerics have urged their followers to join the Iraqi police. The key: “The edict, signed by 64 imams and religious scholars, was a striking turnaround for the clerics, who have often lashed out in sermons at the fledgling army and police force and branded them collaborators. Prominently missing from the signers was Harith al-Dari, the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars and one of the most influential Sunni Arab clerics in Iraq, who is said to have close ties to the insurgency. Still, the directive, which carried the signature of Ahmed Hassan al-Taha, an imam at an important Baghdad mosque who has been a strong critic of the occupation, seemed to represent a significant step.”
Perhaps The Christian Science Monitor did have a hot story in post-election Iraq. At least, the Los Angeles Times has followed up with a major story, with the headline: “Iraq’s Sunni Arabs Seek Their Voice.” Reporter Richard Boudreaux notes: “The chief, Mazin Jaber Nima, said the Sunni Arab-led insurgency against American troops would falter if Sunni Arabs joined in the U.S.-backed creation of a new political order. Applause filled the Babylon Hotel’s ballroom, but the next speaker was undeterred. “The subject today is how to represent the Sunni people in the political process,” argued Sheik Isam Sheikhli. “Do we do it with slogans? If we go on like this, we will not achieve a thing.” Uh, is it just me or is the time element rather weak in this story? When was this?
Sometimes you see a story and you can’t believe what you are reading. I have been watching Google News pretty carefully on this and, unless my search terms are not up to snuff, I think The Christian Science Monitor is way out in front on a major story in Iraq.
