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Since my piece on Newsweek's Quran desecration story, some have suggested that perhaps Newsweek isn't totally to blame for the violent response in the Middle East. For the record, the opinion I expressed in The Toilets in Cuba Aren't Better Than Ours was written to address Newsweek's actions. The fact is I agree that there were other causes of the uprisings in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the land of over-the-top reactions.

Those who are trying to piggy-back the blame for the murderous and reactionary protests sparked by the Newsweek story onto the minor abuses at Abu Ghraib are guilty of the most disingenuous and appalling rewrite of recent history that media activism has ever concocted. A slaying at the hand of a fanatic is an atrocity. Humiliating incarcerated terrorists in an effort to gain information to prevent the deaths of innocents is not.

How an unvetted story published by a mainstream media source suddenly becomes anyone else's fault but that of the reporters, their editors and the publication that employs them is astounding. Webster's American Dictionary should start to use -- officially -- the descriptors "arrogance" and "repugnant" when defining the term "mainstream media."

There is absolutely no responsibility employed by those who practice media activism. There is no responsibility employed by those in journalism who are lazy in the execution of their jobs, either. Activist journalists who take at face value unsubstantiated evidence because it favors their agenda risk catastrophic consequences. Whether they are hi-jacking public opinion through deception or contributing to the murders of innocents through incompetent reporting, a major portion of the blame rests with the mainstream media.

As negligent as Newsweek and its parent company The Washington Post were in publishing their unsubstantiated rumors, they can only be ascribed with part of the blame. An equal if not larger part of the blame for the 16 deaths and hundreds of injured should be assigned to the people who actually did the killing and the rioting.

While some in the Arab world have been socialized to protest without picking up a Kalashnikov to bolster their low testosterone counts, many have not. Perhaps it's the heat. Regardless, those wild-eyed reactionaries who take to the streets of Kabul, Tehran and all of the other Middle Eastern locales that literally have constructed their streets to accommodate reoccurring mass demonstrations of illogically justified violent outrage, have the lion's share of the blood on their hands. Common sense mandates that those who do the killing, maiming and injuring are directly responsible for the deaths, disfigurements and disabilities.

Interesting to note is the fact that Christians all over the world remained calm -- albeit outraged -- at the reports of Palestinians using bibles for toilet paper when they were holed up in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in 2002. Christians around the world, even though they are outraged, refrain from killing one another in protest of the Saudi government's routine shredding of the Holy Bible.

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