Reading the Pictures: <i>Newsweek's "Rage" Cover: Doubling Down on Islamic Hate</i>

It takes some doing to actually turn the cover of a national news magazine into its own, one-pass version of the Muhammed hate video.
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2012-09-17-newsweekmuslimragecover2.jpg

I have to say, it takes some doing to actually turn the cover of a national news magazine, and a supposedly mainstream on at that, into its own, one-pass version of the Muhammed hate video.

It's one thing to pose a wailing, two-fisted image as a starting point to try and understand the nature of the protests in the Muslim world. It's something completely different, however, to convert your cover into a pernicious poster driven by an editorial that not only stereotypes Muslims as hysterical infidels but leverages a highly sensitive situation to provoke its own enmity.

This is so pejorative, so negating, Muslims aren't even relegated to "them," but to "it." As the anchor text contextualizes the title, the three alarm bell headline is no longer a symptom but its own disease.

Seriously? How can we end it??? (This cancer. This threat to the rationality we experience in the West?)

It's easy. Just drone them, nuke them. Because, this brilliantly irresponsible cover -- the headline, the ultimate example of a double entendre -- seeks to stoke (Our) Muslim Rage.
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