Time Immortal

From our bulging ‘Oh God how I wish we were making this stuff up‘ file:

Syria’s top Sunni Muslim cleric urged the media Tuesday to use caution when reporting on religion, saying that the choice and timing of a report can cause a war.

“A simple piece of information can spark a war. If a man dies because of information that you have made public, his death will be on your conscience,” Shiekh Ahmed Badreddin Hassun told reporters at the European Parliament.

His remarks came in response to questions about the 2005 crisis when satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad first published in Denmark caused an uproar in the Muslim world, resulting in protests and several deaths.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think the media are the ones who would be causing the war in the Shiekh’s example here; this is not a Wag the Dog situation. Rather, as Kathy Shaidle notes, in the example that the Mufti gives, it is Muslims themselves who are causing conflict and wars, by their seeming willingness in many regions of the world to riot and engage in murder at the slightest provocation. If a man dies because a group of exciteable ‘youths’ decided to riot over a perceived slight published in a foreign newspaper that only has readership in most Middle Eastern nations due to the pervasiveness of the Internet, it’s not the fault of the publishing newspaper that the man is dead — it’s the fault of the mob that kills him.