Neo-Neocon is on a roll this week, one great post follows another. This media-critique commentary demonstrates how a productive Karzai - Bush meeting gets spun into a quarrel by AP. She quotes from the actual transcript of the press conference (for which the headlines read "Karzai blasts US for Afghan prison abuse":
On the question of the prisoner abuse, we are, of course, sad about that. But let me make sure that you all know that that does not reflect on the American people.
Right now in Afghanistan there is an Italian lady that has been kidnapped by an Afghan man, while there are hundreds of Afghan women demonstrating outside in the streets of Kabul demanding the release of that woman, the Italian lady.
So the prisoner abuse thing is not at all a thing that we attribute to anybody else but those individuals. The Afghan people are grateful very, very much to the American people, and recognize that individual acts do not reflect either on governments or on societies. These things happen everywhere.
Neo-Neocon writes: Karzai–a devout Moslem–shows the same sort of common sense on the subject of Newsweek and the Koran-flushing story:
[The riots] were more against the elections in Afghanistan. They were more against the progress in Afghanistan. They were more against the strategic partnership with the United States.
We know who did it. We know the guys. We know the people behind those demonstrations. And unfortunately you don’t, here, follow the Afghan press. But if you listen to the Voice of America, the Radio Liberty and the BBC, the Afghan population condemned those acts of arson in Afghanistan.
Of course, we are, as Muslims, very much unhappy with Newsweek bringing a matter so serious in the gossip column. It’s really something that one shouldn’t do, that responsible journalism shouldn’t do at all.
But Newsweek story is not America’s story. That’s what we understand in Afghanistan.
Read the whole thing…
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