It's Not Cricket
By my count, just five American newspapers mentioned the name of Imran Khan last week. No big deal. He's a world-famous cricketer, and that's five more mentions than any other world-famous cricketer got in the U.S. media last week or any other week. But it doesn't begin to compare with the over 100 newspapers which ran stories referencing Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. Isikoff was the guy who filed the phony-baloney story claiming some interrogator at Guantanamo flushed a Koran down the toilet. But Imran was the guy who, in a ferocious speech broadcast on Pakistani TV, brought it to the attention of his fellow Muslims, many of whom promptly rioted, with the result that 17 people are dead.
To date, reaction has divided along two lines. Newsweek has been hammered for being so flushed with anti-Bush anti-military fever that they breezily neglected the question of whether their fake story would generate a huge mound of corpses.
Which is true. On the other hand, there are those who point out it's hardly Newsweek's fault that some goofy foreigners are so bananas they'll riot and kill over one rumor of one disrespectful act to one copy of one book. Christians don't riot over "Piss Christ," a work of "art" comprising a crucifix floating in the "artist"'s urine, or any of the other incontinent outpourings by tedious publicly funded provocateurs. Jews take it in their stride when they're described as "a virus resembling AIDS," which is what Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris said a week ago in his sermon on Palestinian state TV, subsidized by the European Union. Muslims can dish it out big-time, so why can't they take it, even the teensy-weensiest bit?
All of which is also true, but would be a better defense of Newsweek if the media hadn't spent the last three and a half years bending over backwards to be supersensitive to the, ah, touchiness of the Muslim world - until the opportunity for a bit of lurid Bush-bashing proved too much to resist. In a way, both the U.S. media and those rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs - not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of America's federally-regulated lo-flush toilets (inflicted on the nation by the eco-zealot Al Gore), a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.
Watching the press circling the wagons around the beleaguered Isikoff this week, Martin Peretz of the New Republic described them as "a profession that is complacent, self-righteous, and hopelessly in love with itself." The media are the message: But, hey, enough about the war, let's talk about me.
As for the wackiness of Muslim fanatics, well, up to a point. But, you know, we've been told ever since 9/11 that the allegedly seething "Muslim street" was about to explode, and for four years it's remained as somnolent as a suburban cul-de-sac on a weekday afternoon. Invade their countries, topple their rulers, bomb their infrastructure from the first day of Ramadan to the last, arrest their terrorists, hold them at Gitmo for half a decade, initiate reforms setting the Arab world on the first rung of the ladder to political and economic liberty - and the seething Muslim street gives one almighty shrug.
In October 2001, Faizal Aqtub Siddiqi, president-general of the International Muslims Organization, warned that the bombing of Afghanistan would create 1,000 bin Ladens. In April 2003, Egypt's President Mubarak warned that the bombing of Iraq would create 100 bin Ladens. So right there you got a 90% reduction in the bin Laden creation program - just by bombing a second country! Despite the best efforts to rouse the Muslim street, its attitude has remained: Start the jihad without me. The short history of the last four years is: They're nuts but not that nuts.
Until, that is, Newsweek's story of Koran flushing prompted bloody riots from Yemen to Afghanistan to Indonesia. To get a rise out of these guys, it took a peculiarly vivid image of disrespect - the literal word of Allah plus the flush toilet, which in the remoter parts of the Hindu Kush is a quintessential symbol of Western decadence. Message to Bush: You can do anything but lay off of my Holy Book.
And even these riots wouldn't have happened if Imran Khan hadn't provided the short fuse between Newsweek's match and those explosive mobs. Imran is a highly Westernized wealthy Pakistani who found great fame and fortune in England. He palled around with the Rolling Stones, dated supermodels, and married the daughter of billionaire businessman Sir James Goldsmith. Jemima Goldsmith was hot but of Jewish background and, therefore, like much of Imran's stereotypical playboy lifestyle, not particularly advantageous when he decided to go into Pakistani politics. So, having demonstrated little previous interest in the preoccupations of the Muslim street, Imran then began pandering to it. I doubt whether he personally cared about that Newsweek story one way or the other, but he's an opportunist and that's why he went out of his way to incite his excitable followers.
It's not the mobs, so much as the determination of their Westernized elites to keep their peoples in a state of ignorance. The most educationally repressive form of Islam, for example, is funded and promoted by Saudi princes who, though not as handsome as Imran, also spend a lot of time in the West - gambling, drinking, womanizing, and indulging other tastes that even the wildest night on the tiles in Riyadh just can't sate. Whereas most advanced societies believe that an educated population is vital to the national interest, many Muslim elites seem to have concluded that an uneducated population is actually far more useful. And, when you look at Saudi funding of radical madrassahs in hitherto moderate Muslim regions from the Balkans to Indonesia, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they're having some success de-educating hitherto relatively savvy parts of the world.
That said, I thought this weekend's bloodcurdling demonstration in London was very revealing: British Muslims, their faces hooded, calling for the deaths of Bush and Blair over a Koran-flushing incident they knew to be entirely fictitious. They weren't authentic religious fanatics, so much as conventional European-style political fascists posing as religious fanatics - an important distinction.
The Koran catastrophe took a combination of factors. America can't do much about Muslim fanatics, nor probably its self-worshipping vanity media whose reflexive counter-tribalism has robbed it of all sense of perspective or proportion. But the U.S. ought to apply pressure on the link between the two worlds - the self-serving elites who enjoy the privileges of the West even as they exploit their coreligionists' ignorance of it. That's just not cricket, is it?
