Not a Bad Article…Just Missing a Few Facts

The Washington Post has a lengthy article this morning that’s worth reading, but not worth taking at face value. The article is a timeline of the Danish cartoon protests, from their apparent beginning until now.

It’s useful in that it shows you just how long ago the cartoons were first printed (last September) and how hard a lot of people had to work to build outrage (very hard, indeed). But it also leaves out several important facts that give a definite slant to the story. Here are some of the things the reporters missed completely:

• The reporters allege that one of the photos in Akkari’s portfolio “…depicted Muhammad as a pig …”. That photo was actually of a French man who was an entry in a pig-calling contest. It had nothing to do with Islam whatsoever. This information has been available for well over a week.
• The article fails to mention that the Egyptian newspaper Al Fagr published the same cartoons in October, 2005, during Ramadan. There was no appreciable outcry.
• The article downplays, or does not mention at all, the pivotal role played by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Syria in drumming up outrage, nor does the article note that both governments have been severely under fire very recently in the Arab world.
• The article does not mention the government of Iran in the timeline at all, despite its very vocal part in the outrage.
• The article is very careful not to note the very similarly-lettered placards carried by a good number of the protestors. Those placards, in English, called for the beheading of Westerners, a new Holocaust, and a European 9/11.

It’s unfortunate that the reporters did not include these facts in the story. If they had, they would certainly not have been able to write such a “Muslim as victim” slant into it. It would have shown a far more balanced view of a Muslim population being easily conned into riots by a cleric who falsified part of his evidence and by governments who desperately needed something to distract them from other problems. It might also have shown a Muslim population willing to fly into riot and lacking a civilized way of reacting to a slight. Admittedly, neither are quite as flattering to most Muslims as the article’s portrayal, but they are certainly more honest. In the end, I believe they’d be far more likely to help us live together in relative harmony as well.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media.