National Review's Andrew McCarthy makes an end-run around the right's general position on Newsweek:
Here's an actual newsflash — and one, yet again, that should be news to no one: The reason for the carnage here was, and is, militant Islam. Nothing more.Newsweek merely gave the crazies their excuse du jour. But they didn't need a report of Koran desecration to fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers, to blow up embassies, or to behead hostages taken for the great sin of being Americans or Jews. They didn't need a report of Koran desecration to take to the streets and blame the United States while enthusiastically taking innocent lives. This is what they do.
His is good counterpoint about the nature of authoritarians, though with two potential problems.
First, a comparison between the First World and the Third World isn't so apt; even if it were, one could look at questionably motivated localized hysteria in America like the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Second, and much more importantly, General Richard Myers clearly stated that Jalalabad riots were "not necessarily" caused by a near-instantaneous dissemination of and public reaction to the Newsweek falsehood. This is a remark from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; neither anonymous nor unfounded, given the general's plenary access to information. We see from press pool photographs that protesters, probably rioters, too, were causing disruption or mayhem because of a tale from Newsweek; accepting that, we base all conclusions on the assumption that market squares went ablaze over a dunked religious book terrorists don't even follow. But what if that weren't exactly the case? What if the same beliefs that put Newsweek on the side of captured Taliban poisoned reports from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia? Why would that be so difficult when reporters routinely place their own assertions, like the "raising questions" catchphrase, into news articles from politics to economics to foreign affairs? In fact, a media mischaracterization of the riots would bring culpability right back to where McCarthy is pulling it from: relativist Westerners' irrational hostility to their own liberal society. We shouldn't hold up one falsehood while standing before the backdrop of another.