It's true even if it didn't happen.
--Ken Kesey / Chief Broom, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
by Jerome du Bois
I feel like I'm stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again, or trapped between duelling distorting mirrors. I've been looking for an answer to a question, and I've been getting the dodge and the slide all over the internet. The question is simple:
Who died in the Newsweek Qu'ran riots?
According to World Net Daily and Joseph Farah's G2Bulletin, nobody died (HT Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch):
Virtually every major news agency in the world has reported without verification that between 15 and 18 Afghanis were killed in the riots.
There's just one problem. There is no more evidence for these deaths than there is that a U.S. interrogator flushed a Quran down the toilet.
Not a single name of even one victim has been released. No details of the circumstances of the riots were released from any official sources – either U.S. or Afghan.
Who were these victims? Were they rioters killed by police or military forces? Were they innocent victims attacked by fanatics? Were they Afghanis? Were they relief workers?
G2B has examined every English-language news story about these deaths through Lexis Nexis. G2B has scoured the Internet, including foreign and non-English-language news sources for any details of these deaths. And G2B has queried both U.S. and Afghan official sources for any details about these alleged deaths.
That was posted May 25th. But Reuters reported back on May 12th, in the China Business Standard:
Police opened fire on protesters in an Afghanistan city during a second day of anti-American demonstrations that ended with four dead and dozens wounded.
The demonstrations Wednesday followed a report that American interrogators in the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had desecrated the Koran.
American troops stationed in the conservative Muslim city of Jalalabad were confined to base during the protest.
Government offices in Jalalabad were set on fire, shops looted, and United Nations buildings and diplomatic missions attacked as thousands took to the streets.
"Police had to open fire on the protesters,'' said provincial police chief Hazrat Ali.
"They were destroying the city.''
The province's health chief, Fazel Mohammad Ibrahimi, said that along with the four dead there were 52 demonstrators wounded.
Reuters had a convenient picture of W being burned in effigy in Jalalabad, but no pictures or video of any dead or wounded anywhere. Now, presumably, the G2B vacuum machine would have processed this information, did, and found it wanting. Maybe.
So who's right? Blogging and googling, the phrase "at least 15 people are dead" appears all over the place --even Mark Steyn just passed it on yesterday-- but the victims are apparently scattered all over the Eastern Hemisphere, from the Gaza Strip to the Java Sea. Fifteen people are fifteen people. Seventeen. Eighteen. Two dozen. Everybody counts or nobody counts.
Who died?
And how? And who killed who? We know for sure no Americans or Westerners have died; that certainly would have been reported. (Or would it?) But what about the rest of the unrest? Is it not important to know how many people or their names or how they died because these victims-in-limbo are brown, or their eyes are differently made, or they behave irrationally? No. They're human beings.
If nobody died, then an imaginary story led to imaginary deaths, in a world at war. All the more reason to hold everybody's feet to the fire of credibility.
That means everybody --bloggers as well, who in their zeal to slam the MSM have passed on the questionable information without so much as a by-your-leave, even though it was easy to see the conflicting reports in ledes all over the world for days. That doesn't reflect well on bloggers, who need to be the most self-critical of all pundits.
Which reminds me: some great bloggers have put together Media Slander, the only other place I've seen this story. Their take --Lies Beget More Lies-- asks some pertinent questions about media manipulation.
As for me, I find it entirely plausible that both the Qu'ran was treated like dung and that Afghan Muslims killed other Afghan Muslims about something that Americans did. Why? Because both have happened before, and because the Afghans not long ago allowed themselves to be both bullied and deluded, their women humilated, for years --for Islam and its book.
But there's also some evidence that the Afghan demonstrations had been planned in advance, organized against Karzai, timed to coincide with his US trip and return, and that the Newsweek story simply broke in the middle, thanks to Imran Khan in Pakistan.
Nobody should die for the sake of any book, not even if it was the last copy on Earth. Many Muslims seem to have a death grip on the Qu'ran. Unless they change their ways, it will be the bloody millstone which will drag them down into oblivion.
Posted by Jerome at May 26, 2005 09:00 AM | TrackBack