Rob Crilly is Pakistan correspondent of The Daily
Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. Before that he spent five years
writing about Africa for The Times, The Irish Times, The Daily Mail, The
Scotsman and The Christian Science Monitor from his base in Nairobi.
Newsweek: increasingly desperate
As angry protests spread through the Muslim world, I knew where to
head. The Red Mosque is only a five minute drive from my home in
Islamabad and protests were planned for the end of Friday prayers.
Pakistan has a reputation for extremism and the mosque was once the
scene of a bloody showdown with security forces that ended with hundreds
dead and injured. If there was to be trouble, it would be there.
By the time I arrived the crowd had already peaked at about 30. There
were rabble rousers to be sure, but on a nice September afternoon most
of the worshippers watched from a distance, bought an ice cream and headed home to their families.
None of that matters to Tina Brown and her increasingly threadbare magazine Newsweek. Sensational covers now seem to be the only way to keep selling the magazine, whether it's declaring Obama to be the first gay president or a recycled picture of asparagus spears and a juicy pair of lips to tease customers into parting with their change.
This week hits the Islamaphobia button and looks like it has come straight from a storyboard laid out by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the fraudster behind Innocence of Muslims. Two men – bearded and therefore we must assume Muslims – grab at each other in a terrifying portrait of anger, headlined "Muslim Rage".
The close-cropped image is a masterpiece of its kind, robbing the subjects of context. It could be a picture of two men who have just watched their football team go behind. It could be a funeral. It might be a crowd of 5 rather than 5000. None of that matters. Instead we are expected to think one thing: They are coming for us.
All of this is to plug a piece by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has made a neat career as a photogenic former Muslim, always on hand to denounce Islam and the Koran, and frighten the rest of us. She lays out an Arab Spring worst-case scenario, with Islamist governments spreading intolerance and hatred through the Middle East, before collapsing in on themselves.
The governments will begin to fail as soon as they set about implementing their philosophy: strip women of their rights; murder homosexuals; constrain the freedoms of conscience and religion of non-Muslims; hunt down dissidents; persecute religious minorities; pick fights with foreign powers, even powers, such as the U.S., that offered them friendship.Hers is an old-fashioned bigoted view that reduces all Muslims to unthinking thugs, intent on hatred. The examples of Iran or the Taliban are hardly representative of the Muslims I meet every day, who want to live by Islamic law but in a tolerant and reasonable society – but that is what she and Tina Brown want us to think.
The cranks who made Innocence of the Muslims have got exactly what they want. They have riled the tiny minority who want to be riled. Both sides are now so removed from the mainstream of their societies that they exist only for the validation of the opposing nutcases. Their latest trophy is a Newsweek cover which distorts the true story in a tawdry attempt to appear relevant.
What we have to concentrate on is the vast number of people who have let all of this pass them by or who expressed their anger in a reasonable and restrained way.
Let us remember that the protests have been tiny compared with those of the Arab Spring. The attack that killed Christopher Stevens in Benghazi most likely used the protests as cover for a pre-planned terrorist assault. In Sudan, demonstrators were bussed in by religious leaders. And anyone who wants their 15 minutes of fame and a fundraising drive is ready to exploit the issue.
The people I saw outside the Red Mosque are a reminder of the real picture. This is an issue which has upset many people. And understandably so. But to suggest that we are about to be engulfed by a wave of "Muslim Rage" is a sickening piece of shock journalism that cheapens a once great news magazine. And it is just plain wrong.
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