Fitzgerald: Kruse Control

And what about a systematic boycott of those papers -- the St. Petersburg Times, the Orlando Sentinel -- by their advertisers, who should be apprised of what these papers are doing, or not doing? Or, if the advertisers won't raise this issue, then why should not individuals, or groups, let those advertisers know that as long as they continue to advertise in the St. Petersburg Times, and the Orlando Sentinel, others will choose not to give them their custom?

And that can extend to others -- the people outside of the area who come as tourists. Perhaps they too will have made available to them, online, a list of all those who continue to advertise in those and other papers. Since an appeal to morality, justice, common sense, history, the ethics of journalism, and so on and so forth, appear to have little effect, then pressure on pocketbooks must be tried. I think it could work.

Faculty members at schools of journalism around the country were almost all reporters or writers for magazines and newspapers. Now they have to pretend that they know all about the newer modes, the ones they never practiced, and as they do this, whistling in the dark so as to keep their jobs (but since everyone, including the deans, fits into the same archaic category, they will keep those jobs) and teaching new generations of students who will practice their journalism, such as it is, directly on the Internet.

Well, the video posted at Jihad Watch a week ago here and reposted above shows Michael Kruse standing just to the left of Robert Spencer, listening to him unambiguously quoting Omar Ahmad of CAIR on the need for Islam to take over, to dominate, and not to be merely the "equal" of other religions. And we see Kruse with his pad and pencil, writing down what Spencer has said. Then Kruse wrote, "Robert Spencer, who writes on a blog called Jihad Watch, told reporters Islam was here to take over America."

The existence of this video shows the importance of YouTube, and of how telling events can be captured. But it does more than that. Because of this video, and what it unambiguously shows, we now understand that the most important thing captured in the video above is not what the CAIR apparatchik, practicing taqiyya, said, nor even Robert's discussion of the unsavory connections that CAIR has, beginning with its cofounder and longtime chairman of the board Omar Ahmad. No, the most important thing, for all journalism professors and their students, and indeed for the general public, is to see, right there on the screen, a reporter, one Michael Kruse, standing right next to Robert Spencer (to his left), and with a pen and pad in hand, not writing as Robert carefully attributes the quote to Omar Ahmad, but writing down only the quote itself. And then we can compare -- we have it all recorded above -- what Robert Spencer actually said, with what Michael Kruse, in the St. Petersburg Times, reported him as saying.

Surely this is an excellent pedagogic tool, showing just how one wildly tendentious reporter can misreport so egregiously.

Use it, at Berkeley, at Columbia, at B.U., at Medill, at every school of journalism you care to name. Why, it ought to be required -- along, perhaps, with a session devoted to counting the "I's" in, say, the last 100 columns by the comical Tom Friedman. Oh, there's so much that can be done to educate students in what should, and what should not, be done. Perhaps someone at the Walter Lippmann House will care to take note, too.

Oh, these days, the offenses are so rank that eventually even those who have chosen to stand back, while feeling a vague and growing unease about both the practice of journalism, and the failure of American journalists to make clear Islam's doctrine and Islam's practice, for fear of giving offense and out of a felt need to continue to propitiate the Idols of the Age.

But those Idols have crumbled into dust already. And the "offense" that might be given would be nothing at all, for by being Infidels, we already offend mightily. Telling some home truths to those who look to the press for accurate reporting and intelligent analysis would have no real effect on Muslims, while it might help non-Muslims to begin to understand, for example, why the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are idiotic, and why demographic changes in Western Europe are so scary, and why there is no "solution" -- one-state or two-state or n-state -- to the Jihad, a war-without-end, being waged by Arab Muslims on the permanently imperiled Infidel nation-state of Israel.

Googling a bit, I discovered an interview with sports reporter Michael Kruse, who apparently has written a book about the last 16.8 seconds of some basketball game (the story does not put one in mind of such classics of reporting as John Hersey's "Hiroshima" or Rebecca West's "Black Lamb, Grey Falcon"), including the following excerpt:

Interviewer: Inform readers of who you are. How long have you covered sports? Do you primarily write about college basketball?
 
Kruse: I graduated from Davidson in 2000 and I'm a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. Since I started down here in 2005, I've covered courts, business and done general assignment work -- not sports -- and at this point I'm on the paper's "enterprise team" and report to the national editor.

Interviewer: What triggered you to write the book? Did this idea crystallize well before Davidson's run last March?

Kruse: The basketball program was a big part of my experience at Davidson as a student -- I covered the team for the school newspaper -- but I really got sucked back in last year when I went back for a game in early December. Then I went out to California to watch the guys play UCLA. Then I pretty much didn't stop.

It was just something I knew I wanted to watch.

Didn't really know WHY other than I felt like it was interesting, and good, and SOMETHING was starting to HAPPEN, and I enjoyed seeing the people in and around the program and spending time with them.

That was the impetus.

Come March, though, tournament time, as the Davidson story developed the way it did, and certainly by the Kansas game -- that's where I started to think about a possible project.

More specifically: I was there in Detroit for the Kansas game as an alum, not as a reporter, so I was about 25 rows up behind the Davidson bench, and I certainly was close enough to watch that final play -- but I had trouble seeing. I felt like I was blinking a lot, and straining, and then it was over. For me, someone who knew a lot about what had gone into creating that moment and to even having that chance, that SHOT, I thought pretty quickly after the game that it might've been simply too much to process in such a short, powerful burst of time.

But I wanted to know more.

I wanted to know if others for whom Davidson College and its basketball team are important had had similar experiences.

So I started to look into getting some leave time from St. Pete. The folks here were very gracious to give me three months to do my thing and also the promise of a job upon my return.

And then I started to do what I do.

Report.

I love that portentous "report." Apparently, outside of dribbles and baskets, this "reporter" is not to be trusted -- as we can see from the video linked above.

And now we see, still smarting from his treatment here, Michael Kruse has picked himself up, and gotten back into the ring, wildly swinging. His attempted comeback relies, however, on more of the same -- the same ignorance, the same willful ignoring of what the texts of Qur'an and Hadith say, and what the Muslim scholars (Al-Qaradawi being the one mentioned, but there are many others) who seem to have no trouble finding that all the main schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that apostates should normally be punished with death -- why, even M. Cherif Bassiouni admits that, even as he attempts to convince us that he, and others, are working to "change" that understanding that has existed for as long as Islam itself.

But to Michael Kruse, the need to spread an emollient over his bruised amour-propre, even if it is manufactured out of nonsense and lies about what Islam teaches about apostasy (Islam, and not merely the Qur'an -- for the Hadith, and the long-settled conclusions of Islamic jurists as to what Islam teaches, take precedence). He has no responsibility to admit to his readers that he was wrong. His responsibility is to muddy the waters further, so as to salvage the wreck of his own reputation. It's quite a performance. He might have done otherwise. He might have spent the last week or two or three really studying Islam. He might have asked real scholars of Islam, and not the usual apologists, for example Carl Ernst, who so carefully lets it be known that there is no specific Qur'anic verse that mandates murder of apostates, but just as carefully does not add that the Qur'an, when read in light of the Sunnah (as set down, roughly, in Hadith and Sira) -- that indispensable gloss on the meaning of the Qur'an -- supports what Spencer maintains and Kruse denies, and that, furthermore, all the jurisconsults also appear to support not Kruse, but Spencer. What do the carl-ernsts of this world make of what M. Cherif Bassiouni and Al-Qaradawi and the other Muslim scholars of Muslim law tell us that Islam mandates for apostates?

Perhaps it is time for the editors at the St. Petersburg Times to send someone along to monitor the "reporting" that is done by Michael Kruse.

And perhaps it is time for the editors to appoint others on the paper to look into, to actually study, the contents of Spencer's discussion of Michael Kruse and his attempt, for his own selfish purpose (to avoid vocational humiliation and ridicule), to misstate what Islam so clearly inculcates.

Perhaps someone from the outside -- or even a committee -- could be asked to consider the evidence. Does Islam inculcate the notion that it is right and proper to kill apostates, and even more so in the case of apostates who noisily leave Islam, thus giving aid and comfort, as Muslims see it, to the Infidel enemy, becoming traitors to Islam, Defectors From the Army of Islam? Either Kruse is right, or Spencer is right. Readers of the St. Petersburg Times have been assured by Michael Kruse that there is no danger of Rifqa Bary being killed. They need to know if what he so confidently states as Islamic doctrine is true or false.

This needs to be addressed.

Call it Kruse Control.