There are, however, a few details that should be considered by the armada of self-righteous media critics so readily offering up unqualified condemnations of the magazine. First off, Newsweek couldn't have expected its story to stir up so much Muslim anger, given that details about Guantanamo interrogators allegedly defacing the Koran have been periodically published for more than a year now. A Nexis search reveals multiple mentions of similar allegations, including a March 14, 2004 report in the London Observer that "copies of the Koran would be trampled on by soldiers and, on one occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket"; an August 5, 2004 report in the London Independent that "guards allegedly threw prisoners' Korans into toilets;" and January 2005 reports in the Denver Post and Hartford Courant that some prisoners "were forced to watch copies of the Koran being flushed down toilets." Given that none of these previous reports sparked protest, much less riots, it's unrealistic to expect the magazine's editors to have seen the protests coming -- after all, they thought the detail was insignificant enough to be confined to one sentence in a short report tucked away in the front of the magazine. (True, the Newsweek piece claimed the allegations about disrespecting the Koran came from a government report, while previous pieces relied on eyewitness accounts. But the magazine can be forgiven for not expecting protestors to parse the difference.)
In fact, there's a good chance that Newsweek's piece was cited as an excuse for rioting that would have occurred regardless. In an excellent post on the subject that also touches on the issues raised in the previous paragraph, Kevin Drum points out that "The Taliban stages a resurgence every spring [and] anti-Americanism has been on the rise for some time ... The Newsweek story is clearly just a pretext, and another story would have done just as well given their obvious animosity toward America." It's perhaps not quite that straightforward, but the Taliban's history does suggest that the rioting would have occurred around this time with or without Newsweek. And the fact that no protests followed previous reports on the topic supports that notion. Not that either evidence or logic will stop bias warriors from citing the Newsweek slip-up as one more piece of evidence that the major media tilts rabidly left. Be patient with us, and we'll explain the reasoning of conspiracy theorists, as we understand it:
