The Islamic World’s Real Source of Fury

Tina Brown as usual has an interesting take on the Newsweek Koran story:

“At Newsweek there was no swaggering megalomaniac editor who deserved a comeuppance, no celebrity anchor with vanities to unmask. Mark Whitaker, Newsweek’s editor, errs on the earnest side. The decent, hardworking editors under him who put out the magazine each week seem largely enemy-free.

On Friday and Saturday nights, when other people are trying new Thai restaurants or are snug at home with a rented DVD, these guys are toiling past midnight, fretting with the copy desk about a headline that might mischaracterize a story, a caption that needs to be clarified with another pass.

Anti-Americanism is the Islamic world’s PC salve for the real source of their fury, the tyranny of their own corrupt governments. Newsweek is now reeling from a personal encounter with proxy rage. As the Arab scholar Fouad Ajami put it to me, “This is a chronicle of calamity foretold.”

MSNBC meathead Joe Scarborough seemed on automatic pilot Monday night as he burst a blood vessel berating token liberal punching bag Bob Jensen about Newsweek’s hatred of all that was fine and noble about America, etc.”