Newsweek Flounders
In Deepest GOP Waters

By William Finucane

It really doesn’t matter if Newsweek got its Koran desecration right or wrong in the now famous article. What does matter is that the magazine, for all it polish and clarity of style, is retracting the article.

Yet not surprisingly, this is not enough for Arab leaders or the GOP.

They want the story investigated to find out how it could possibly have been reported in the first place. And it is the object of scorn in the White House, where President George W. Bush berates the story.

Arabs don’t understand, of course, how American newsmagazines work. Many magazines are government run in other areas of the world. In such areas, nothing like this could ever get out unless it was either absolute truth, or what the government wanted readers to believe. But this did get out and was apparently wrong. So someone has to pay.

Then again maybe the Arabs know how to manipulate the ‘free’ press just as well as Mr. Bush and the GOP.

Long before this Newsweek story hit the stands there were many reports of Americans stomping, trashing, and tearing the Koran, the Muslim’s holy book. Newsweek’s report said Americans had thrown the Koran in toilet bowls. This was supposedly at the military base and prison at Guantanomo, in Cuba.

If these assertions are true – and they might still be – these are religious horrors. But nothing happened when they were discussed in the past. There were no protests, no riots, no American flags burned in protest of a desecration of the Koran. It was only after the Newsweek article appeared that anything happened.

Strangely, it was 11 days after publication when the White House howled. There was no battle against the story from the White House. Oh the Bush people may not have liked it, but the presidential people had no handle or grip on this story. That is, until Newsweek’s anonymous source piped up to say that, well, maybe he or she didn’t really see anything about Koran bashing in the pertinent documents; the story therefore immediately lost its underpinning, and clearly, instantly appeared to be wrong.

Oh? A little thing like that could have been so wrong, eh. To the Arab leaders, this was no small thing, not at all. This was monstrous. In some nations desecration of the Koran is a capital offense. Of course, as has been shown amply in recent years, there are many things that are capital offenses under Islam, and often they have much to do with maintaining absolute control over the usually illiterate masses that are dominated by that religion. It is the Saudi version of Islam, Wahhabism, that is proliferating, and it is taught to the poor and ignorant as though it replaces and makes irrelevant all other education.

Muslim Imams and Mullah’s, have long set the stage through an ‘education’ process that inculcated children essentially from kindergarten age through high school into believing that all ‘Westerners,’ especially Americans, are devils. Given that Islamic grounding, the Mullah’s and Imams had little trouble instigating riots over the Newsweek piece.

Fifteen people died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other nations. But somehow, through a convoluted and self-abasing logic among many Westerners, the Mullah’s and Imams are not blamed for inciting their followers to riot, which of course led to the deaths and, in a vast irony, to the ability of the Mullah’s and Imams to use those deaths to once again blame and denounce America.

It is interesting to recall that an Americanized version of this same twisted logic was displayed a year or so ago when a Muslim-pride parade was held in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn and some marchers prominently displayed an Israeli flag with a Swastika emblazoned on it. When a local newspaper took a picture and printed it, Muslim officials protested that the paper was prejudiced against Islam. Having it both ways seems to be the consistent goal of the fascist minded.

In the recent Newsweek debacle, some of the Arab leaders called on the magazine to pay for the damage its story caused. An interesting capitalistic twist on the politics of calculated hatred.

But nonetheless, what triggered and fed the riots was the Newsweek story based on an anonymous source.

There are advantages here for a quick thinking president, or the fast-footed aides of an ideologically driven national leader. First, condemn the magazine and its slipshod reporting. Demand apologies from the publishers, and do all of this out in the open, just like the Arab leaders seem to be doing.

It can only be imagined what has happened behind closed doors in meetings with highly paid media spin-doctors to see how this story could be played into the future. To anyone on the far-right, this could only be described as a beautiful opportunity; a chance to strike a long-sought after and dreamed about blow at the very news organization that brought down Richard Nixon through its Watergate reporting; Newsweek is of course owned by The Washington Post.

Mr. Bush was basically presented with an opportunity to bury the real story – torturing prisoners – with great dollops of criticism of the press in general and the Washington Post in particular. He could rail over the unscrupulous American press, while at the same time maneuvering to curtail reporting. After all, if the ‘liberal’ press is so anxious to get these stories that they would publish these terrible lies about Koran abuse with only an anonymous source, well, can they really be trusted with anything? After all there are limits, aren’t there?

Perhaps the United States should look into rephrasing the First Amendment. Maybe it’s too vague. As bizarre as that assertion sounds, it is ironically now possible to imagine. Why? Because it conveniently meets the radical GOP’s current criterion: it stops dissent.

Dissent is terrible to the neo-conservatives and entrenched, bible-pounding reactionaries that so thoroughly populate the Bush Administration.

Opposing views, as expressed in dissent, too quickly and obviously become the elixir that flows toward open-mindedness, which then is likely to support gay marriage, stem cell research, etc., and lead to questioning military goals and may potentially lead to war protest. It’s not hard to imagine how the road to dissent would quickly broaden to a highway where United Nations challenges to United States policies would be given a truck lane, and challenges to right-wing judicial rulings and faith-based programs might be afforded the travel lane, while efforts to match and question the GOP pressure and false urgency over Social Security ‘reform’ and similar issues would be in the high speed lane.

All of this would obviously get in the way of Mr. Bush’s march to victory, as the far-right now defines it.

And Newsweek has inadvertently and foolishly given Mr. Bush everything needed to bash all the nation’s magazines and newspapers that he and his radical GOP cohorts dislike. It doesn’t even matter that many are Republican leaning publications; if they are not attached to hard-core, right-wing politics, they are considered the voice of the enemy.

At any time, such print publications can take any position they like because of the First Amendment. It is, as always, useful to recall that only print publications are protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Electronic media has no such protection, and the government under Mr. Bush and his colleagues, through the Federal Communications Commission, FCC, have already amply shown how well they understand that fact.

But now, in the wake of what may yet be revealed to be an orchestrated scenario – in the vernacular, a set-up – the radical GOP may be able to push for what has been, up to now, the unthinkable; that is, changes to the First Amendment.

A con man might even think Mr. Bush and his GOP put up the Newsweek’s anonymous source in order to get these results, but a true con man would discount the possibility because he would not see a direct profit motive; a right-wing ideologue, however, would indeed see a vast profit in such a scenario, whether the deal was effected before or after the interview was given to Newsweek.