A cover that declares a "War on Christians" is bound to get some attention.

Writing in the February 12 issue of Newsweek, author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's argument is just as blunt. Enough with all this talk "about Muslims as victims of abuse," because really it's the other way around:

A wholly different kind of war is underway--an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

To suggest that a genocide is underway is, of course, a serious charge. And Hirsi Ali alleges that it is widespread:

In recent years, the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania.

To make matters worse the media have been cowed into silence, due to "the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation--a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia--and the Council on American-Islamic Relations." She writes:

Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called "Islamophobia"--a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.

So there is a genocide underway, and there are specific groups obscuring this fact and steering media away from covering this horror--in effect making them complicit in the genocide.

This is a remarkably serious charge. It is rather shocking to see it printed in a national magazine with so little evidence.

Ali's piece is accompanied by a large graphic (which doesn't appear to be online) labeled "Terrorist Attacks on Christians in Africa, the Middle East and Asia." According to the graph, there were 45 such attacks in 2010. Violence of this sort is tragic; the anecdotes Hirsi Ali cites from Nigeria sound horrific.

But is it a genocide? And is the violence directed against Christians on the basis of religion? It is hard to see how one could make such a leap. In Egypt, for instance, Hirsi Ali points to an incident where Christian protesters were killed by state security forces. Hundreds have been killed in similar circumstances in Egypt over the past year.  They were not all Christians, and they were not killed in a drive to stamp out members of a particular faith.

Hirsi Ali finds similar evidence elsewhere: "Since 2003, more than 900 Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed by terrorist violence in Baghdad alone." Of course, Baghdad has suffered terrible violence since the U.S. invasion and occupation. It is unclear why these particular deaths, a small percentage of total killings in Baghdad, should be considered part of a genocidal Muslim campaign against Christians. She adds that "thousands" of Iraqi Christians have fled their homes. But millions of Iraqis have done the same, across ethnic and religious lines. It's hard to conclude that anti-Christian genocide is the story that is being kept out of the media by the likes of CAIR.

Hirsi Ali pleads with readers that we must "please get our priorities straight.... Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world."

It's hard to know what she means; is there really some great danger that the West is doing too much to protect Muslims? The real implication here is that there is a genocide that must be stopped. That is an extremely serious charge. She fails to provide evidence to support that case, and manages to smear a major American Islamic advocacy group in the process.

The coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza is following  some predictable patterns. The New York Times has a headline today (8/26/11), "Israeli Strikes in Retaliation Kill Nine Gazans."  Readers should ask: Retaliation for what?

It's widely understood that this violence stems from the attack last week in the southern Israeli town of Eilat. As the Times puts it:  "The recent round of violence started a week ago, with a terrorist attack on southern Israel in which eight Israelis were killed."

The real question, though, is who committed these acts.  The Times says:

Israeli officials said the perpetrators and planners of the terrorist attack were originally from Gaza, and Israel has retaliated with strikes that have killed at least 23 Palestinians. Gazan officials say they know nothing about the source of the attack.

That's a massive understatement.

To date, no armed Palestinian groups have claimed responsibility for the Eilat attack. Israeli officials claimed the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) were behind it, but have offered no proof to back up these allegations.  And there has been almost no critical coverage of the weakness of the Israeli case.  On NPR (8/18/11), for example, listeners have heard Israeli ambassador Michael Oren claim that Palestinian militants carried out the attack, and five days later London Times reporter James Hider (8/23/11) stated the same thing as if it were a well-established fact.

A handful of journalists have been persistently pointing out that the weakness of this case. One of those writers, Yossi Gurvitz, explains in his latest piece at the Israeli website +972 (8/25/11) that Israeli media are beginning to raise serious questions:

Since Monday, there have been a few more reports in the Israeli media, casting more doubt on the official story. Yediot reported on Tuesday (Hebrew) that nameless people in the security apparatus doubt the PRC were responsible for the attacks, and raise an interesting question: If they were responsible, why was the PRC's entire leadership in the same place?

According to Yediot’s anonymous intelligence sources (bear in mind that such sources should always be viewed with skepticism; by their very nature they cannot be corroborated, and they tend to be unreliable even when speaking openly), the attribution of the attacks to the PRC stems from one somewhat incoherent comment on some Jihadi message board.

Ha'aretz reported on Tuesday (Hebrew) that at least three on the attackers were Egyptian Jihadis. American intelligence sources – the same caveat above applies here--told Globes (Hebrew) that they, too, doubt the PRC are responsible, though they may have had a small role in the attacks.

Two days ago, the IAF attacked the Gaza Strip again--naturally, it does not consider itself bound by the ceasefire; only the Palestinians are, and only them can be blamed for breaking it--and killed some Islamic Jihad apparatchick. Yesterday, the IDF claimed (Hebrew) that he was in charge of funding the Eilat attacks. Hold on a minute, I'm confused: I thought you said the attacks were carried out by the PRC, and now it’s the Islamic Jihad left holding the bag? As of yesterday, reported Amira Hass in Ha'aretz (Hebrew), there are no mourning tents in Gaza. As of today, one week after the attack, the IDF refrains from exposing the identity of the attackers it killed.

This is a remarkable story that deserves serious coverage. Two dozen people in Gaza have been killed in "retaliation" for an attack that very well could have originated somewhere else.

Here's the headline and subhead in a Newsweek piece (7/10/11) about the Egyptian presidential election:

Egypt's Rising Power Player

Amr Moussa is on track to succeed Mubarak. And that spells danger for Israel.

Reporter Dan Ephron characterizes Moussa like this:

"long and vocal history of anti-Israel diatribes"

"his anger against Israel"

"one of Israel’s most relentless detractors in Egypt"

"He confronted Israelis at conferences and attacked them in television interviews"

"His tirades even made him the subject of a hit song"

"his longstanding dislike of Israel"

"anger at Israel is genuine"

This would be a lot more convincing if there was some rhetoric or record from Moussa that would suggest an obsessive dislike of Israel. Instead, we get one quote from him saying the peace plan was "just [an Israeli] trick to continue talking and make the cameras flash ... but there's no substance. We shall not engage in such a thing anymore."

It would be hard to argue, whatever your position, that this "peace process" has led to much in the way of peace.

Newsweek goes on on to note that opposition to the current "peace plan" is common in Egypt. That suggests Egyptians don't believe that their views were reflected by the foreign policy of their country's previous dictatorship--one that Moussa served for a decade. But readers get less a sense of that fact, and plenty of discussion of the supposed anti-Israel obsession of a leading presidential candidate.

If you feel like there hasn't been enough attention paid to the fact that the democratic movements in the Arab world are undermining the power of U.S. elites to have troublemakers tortured and/or killed, rest assured that Newsweek's Christopher Dickey has you covered this week (6/12/11):

Among American spies there’s more than a little nostalgia for the bad old days. You know, back before dictators started toppling in the Middle East; back when suspected bad guys could be snatched off a street somewhere and delivered to the not-so-tender mercies of interrogators in their home countries; back when thuggish tyrants, however ugly, were at least predictable.

It’s not a philosophical thing, just a practical one. Confronted by the cold realities of this year's Arab Spring, many intelligence and counterterrorism professionals now see major dangers looming near at hand, while the good news--a freer, fairer, more equitable and stable Arab world--remains somewhere over the horizon. "All this celebration of democracy is just bullshit," says one senior intelligence officer who's spent decades fighting terrorism and finds his job getting harder, not easier, because of recent developments. "You take the lid off and you don’t know what's going to happen. I think disaster is lurking."

Dickey uses Egypt as one example, explaining that at one point dictator Hosni Mubarak was making plans to hand over power to feared intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. The U.S. supported that idea, but Egyptians weren't especially keen on handing over power to Mubarak's torture chief. Losing this vital link is apparently bad news for U.S. policymakers--though Dickey undercuts the point when he recalls this history:

The New York Times' David Kirkpatrick filed a report today (4/29/11) on one apparent problem with the move towards democracy in Egypt--the country might pursue policies more in line with what the Egyptian public supports. The most important news here is that Egypt doesn't want to maintain a blockade on its border with Gaza. In the Times, this news is filtered through the perspective of Israel-- thus the headline:

In Shift, Egypt Warms to Iran and Hamas, Israel's Foes

And then there is this  description of the crippling economic blockade that was enforced with the help of the Mubarak regime:

Israel had relied on Egypt's help to police the border with Gaza, where arms and other contraband were smuggled to Hamas through tunnels.

The blockade was about far more than that: blocking access to food, medicine and construction material necessary to rebuild what Israel destroyed in the recent war. (See Extra!, "Gaza's Ongoing Crisis Is Not News," 8/10.)

The Israeli government would like people to think blockading Gaza is just about weapons and tunnels contraband; the New York Times is doing its part to help that effort.

The Washington Post yesterday (2/13/11):

Mubarak Resignation Throws Into Question U.S./Egyptian Counterterrorism Work

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 13, 2011; A01

For decades, Egypt's government has been a critical partner for U.S. intelligence agencies, sharing information on extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and working hand in glove on counterterrorism operations. Now the future of that cooperation is in question.

That "work" and "cooperation" includes, among other things, rendition and torture.

It'd be more helpful if this were made clear from the outset, instead of being mentioned in the 11th paragraph of the story.

It might be hard for you to imagine covering the democratic uprising in Egypt as a way to reflect upon all the wise things you've written in the past.

But you're not Tom Friedman. He wrote today (New York Times, 2/11/11):

I spent part of the morning in the square watching and photographing a group of young Egyptian students wearing plastic gloves taking garbage in both hands and neatly scooping it into black plastic bags to keep the area clean. This touched me in particular because more than once in this column I have quoted the aphorism that "in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car." I used it to make the point that no one has ever washed a rented country either--and for the last century Arabs have just been renting their countries from kings, dictators and colonial powers. So, they had no desire to wash them.

That wasn't the first time Egypt reminded him of something smart he'd written (NBC's Meet the Press, 1/30/11):

For the first 15 years or so of his rule, Egypt really did stagnate. I visited, gosh, back 12 years ago. I remember writing that Mubarak had more mummies in his Cabinet than King Tut, OK. Then he slowly, under our pressure, and under the pressure, really, of globalization, started to open up. And in the last few years, actually appointed a lot of reformers to his Cabinet who produced a real opening, a 6 percent growth, I believe, last year.

Appearing on Charlie Rose last night (2/10/11), Friedman said this:

We've had this conversation before where we talked about the Iraq War and the whole idea of why it's important to democratize a place like Iraq.  I think I said to you the old aphorism that in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car.  And the point I made about Iraq is that no one's ever washed a rented country, either.

Is this guy wise or what?

Actually, Friedman's most memorable "conversation" about Iraq on the Charlie Rose show didn't have to do with washing cars. It was the time he explained the reason the U.S. invaded Iraq--to pop the "terrorism bubble" after 9/11. As he put it (5/30/03):

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, suck. On. This." That, Charlie, is what this war is about.

The United States sent former ambassador Frank Wisner to Egypt to talk to Hosni Mubarak. Wisner garnered headlines when he declared support for Mubarak staying in power, causing the White House to try and argue that wasn't the message the White House was trying to send.

But Wisner's background was worth more attention. As Pratap Chatterjee reported (Inter Press Service, 2/4/11):

Frank Wisner, the former U.S. ambassador that President Barack Obama dispatched to Cairo earlier this week to advise President Hosni Mubarak, is employed by Patton Boggs, a law firm and registered lobbyist. On its website Patton Boggs summarises the contracts that it has won in the last 20 years to advise the Egyptian military, leading "commercial families in Egypt" as well as "manage contractor disputes in military sales agreements arising under the US Foreign Military Sales Act."

Shortly thereafter, Robert Fisk of the Independent weighed in with a column (2/7/11) adding more details about Patton Boggs, noting that Wisner's pro-Mubarak comments were in line with his employer's long-standing ties to the regime and Egyptian corporate interests. Fisk pointed out that this wasn't getting much attention from the corporate media:

Oddly, not a single journalist raised this extraordinary connection with US government officials--nor the blatant conflict of interest it appears to represent.

That's still the case--but some reporters are attempting to debunk Fisk's story.

New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote a piece for the paper's website (2/7/11) where she pointed out that the story of Wisner's conflict "erupted in the blogosphere"--we all know what that means--and that Fisk was wrong:

Mr. Wisner's comments prompted the Independent, a British newspaper, to accuse him of conflict of interest and to assert--incorrectly, Patton Boggs said--that Mr. Wisner "works for a New York and Washington law firm that works for the dictator’s own Egyptian government."

Obviously Wisner does work for Patton Boggs.  What Stolberg is reporting is that the company doesn't work for the Egyptian government (which was part of Fisk's case).  That debunking relies on the word of a Patton Boggs spokesperson, who said this:

But Mr. Newberry said that while Patton Boggs does represent "a very small number" of corporate clients in Egypt, it has had no business with the Egyptian government since the mid-1990s, except for briefly last year, when the Egyptian embassy retained Patton Boggs on a legal matter for which the firm billed less than $10,000.

OK--so does the firm represent Egyptian corporations? Yes. And as recently as 2007 was lobbying on behalf of a company with ties to the regime.

Does it have business with the Egyptian government? No--well, except for that time last year, and many times before then.

So I think I got this one: As the Paper of Record sees it, when Fisk reported that Wisner's firm worked for the Egyptian government and various corporate interests, he was incorrect. The company in fact works for a small number of Egyptian corporations, and worked for the Egyptian government as recently as last year.

In yesterday's Washington Post (2/6/11), David Broder likened the U.S. position on Egypt to being a fan of the hapless Chicago Cubs: Big things are happening all around you, but you have no way to do anything about it.

That is the reality that confronts President Obama today. His hands are tied while Egypt erupts.

At first he expressed support and sympathy for the democratic forces filling the streets and appreciation for the Egyptian military holding fire. But when it became clear that Mubarak was on his way out, sooner or later, it dawned on everyone that the Muslim Brotherhood might seize on the resulting power vacuum and chaos to erect a hostile regime on the banks of the Suez Canal.

Whom do you root for in a situation like this?

It actually hasn't "dawned on everyone" that the Muslim Brotherhood will "erect a hostile regime" in Egypt. Even a casual observer of the uprising in Egypt would likely encounter commentary and analysis that debunks the argument that the Muslim Brotherhood is about to turn Egypt into Iran.

Broder's contribution to the discussion is in line with that of other establishment pundits who express alarm at the prospect of Egyptian democracy.

From the Friday broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (2/4/11) came a discussion about how the U.S. supports dictators--which elicited some chuckles. Remember, Mark Shields is the one who plays the "left" on the program.

MARK SHIELDS: Just one little point of personal privilege on Joe Biden, who did take a hit for not being able to say dictator, but in United States politics, I mean, it's always been, if someone is on our side, he is a strongman.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK SHIELDS: If he is on the other side, he is a dictator. I mean, that has sort of been the nomenclature throughout. All of these guys who were such stalwart anti-Communists, I mean, the Marcoses of the world, they were--they became dictators when they fell.

DAVID BROOKS: Hey, strongman is a bad word, too. But this was--the policy, I mean....

MARK SHIELDS: No, I'm not arguing with policy. I'm just...

DAVID BROOKS: I mean, I'm not blaming Biden. They told him what to say.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes.

Laughing about U.S. support for dictators is one thing. Expressing outrage that the U.S. is abandoning a dictator in his hour of need is another. But that's what MSNBC host Chris Matthews appeared to be saying on Morning Joe today (2/7/11), as he explained that all dictators want to hand off control to their children:

It all comes down to the same thing. They want their oldest kid to replace them. And what was the plan for transition for our friend? Did we ever talk to him about it? Did we talk about it, encourage him? That's my view. Character and planning. And I don't see--I feel shame about this. I feel ashamed as an American, the way we're doing this. I know he has to change. I know we're for democracy, but the way we've handled it is not the way a friend handles a matter. We're not handling as Americans should handle a matter like this. I don't feel right about it. And Barack Obama, as much I support him in many ways, there is a transitional quality to the guy that is chilling.

I believe in relationships. I think we all do. Relationship politics is what we were brought up with in this country. You treat your friends a certain way. You're loyal to them. And when they're wrong, you try to be with them. You try and stick with them.

So on the one hand you have public TV pundits chuckling about U.S. support for dictators--this is just the way the world works, apparently. And on the other hand, a host from the supposedly liberal cable news channel is "ashamed" that our government is not doing enough to support Mubarak.

There have been some interesting, informative TV coverage of Egypt.

And then there was last night's Charlie Rose (2/3/11), with special guests Tom Friedman and Henry Kissinger.

Displaying the same allergy to actual democracy shown by Joe Klein (FAIR Blog, 2/3/11), Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (2/4/11) calls, like Klein, for a military regime in Egypt to impose a "period of stability" for "guiding the country to free elections"--the kind of "free elections" in which the military will "guarantee" that the right people "prevail."

The breathtaking hypocrisy of Krauthammer's column--which begins "Who doesn't love a democratic revolution?"--is on view in this passage:

Our paramount moral and strategic interest in Egypt is real democracy in which power does not devolve to those who believe in one man, one vote, one time. That would be Egypt's fate should the Muslim Brotherhood prevail. That was the fate of Gaza, now under the brutal thumb of Hamas.

Aside from the fact that Krauthammer is borrowing a phrase from apologists for apartheid South Africa (e.g., Thomas Sowell, Chicago Tribune, 8/17/85), he really ought to be aware (thanks to the "Palestine Papers" leaked via Al-Jazeera) that the United States has demanded that Palestine not hold elections--threatening to cut off all aid if they did so (Guardian, 1/24/11).

Sometimes words fail. Joe Klein, writing in the new issue of Time, wonders:

How on earth do we get saddled with such creepy clients as Karzai and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, over and over again?

Yes, why do they keep doing this to us?!

His piece is a pox-on-both-houses rant about U.S. foreign policy: The "realists" often end up coddling dictators, and the idealists don't understand how the world works. Of the latter, he writes:

the tangible fruits of the Freedom Agenda turned out to be mostly rotten: elections in the Palestinian territories, which no one but Hamas (and Bush) wanted, produced a Hamas plurality; a push for democracy in Afghanistan produced a foolish constitution, centralizing power in a notoriously decentralized country, and corrupt elections. And the jury is still out on Iraq, where the most vital "democratic" force may turn out to be the populist, Iran-leaning cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

If this is supposed to represent some special category of policy wisdom, it fails miserably--it's a fairly standard complaint among pundits that democracy that produces the wrong results (for us) is bad democracy. Klein has a better idea:

A smarter foreign policy would quietly promote a careful transition from autocracy to something more benign. The best way to do this is to latch onto institutions, not individual leaders, in the developing countries we seek as allies.

That institution? The military.