Newsweek Controversy and Riots

I haven't posted on this story yet. Partially because I was trying to get my thoughts fully together on how I wanted to say it. Gib wrote the post that I intended to. Go read it. I believe that we should treat Muslim nations as equals. That means accepting they are capable of running a democratic nation AND calling them on it when something like the riots in Afghanistan made. Newsweek messed up, but they don't deserve any blame for the deaths in Afghanistan any more than interogators in Guantanamo would deserve the blame for these deaths if the story had been true. Blame those who did it. There are plenty of other nuances to this story that can be brought up. Journalistic responsibility (which is being beaten to death in the blogosphere on this,) how much respect we should give the religious beliefs of other cultures, how much, if any, that should translate into interrogation techniques. Bottom line though, the Afghans who rioted behaved like beasts and we can and should hold them responsible for their actions. (Gaigin Biker had a similar post about this yesterday and Honest Partisan had a post on the riots up last Friday, in which I made similar comments on before the story was proved to have little credibility.)