Virginia Postrel has a pretty good post about the Newsweek/Koran fiasco.
It puts me in mind of the furor over Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, back in 1988. A lot of Christians were pissed off when this one came out. People who’d never seen the movie called for protests, not realizing the humor factor in hearing Judas-by-way-of-Brooklyn, by Harvey Keitel.
Anyway, my point is, these Christians were irate about a movie portraying Jesus Christ as a man with some human feelings. You can argue about the validity of what they were mad about, but what’s incontrovertible is that no one started a riot over it. No one threatened the lives of Scorsese, Willem Dafoe, or Paul Schraeder (although some of my friends really disliked Bringing Out the Dead).
Or, as Ms. Postrel puts it:
With its Western biases, Newsweek thought it was writing about allegations of prisoner abuse, a human rights issue. Its overseas audience had a different reading. The differences between us and them really are bigger than the differences between us and us.
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