His inning

Mark Steyn doesn’t know it, but in his “Cricket star knows how to fire up fanatics” column in Sun-Times, he corrects the reference below to a “hot-to-trot anti-Musharraf Pakistani movie actor-activist” who read the offending Koran-flushing Newsweek story to Muslims who then rioted.  The reader is a famous cricket player (deeply sorry about that), Imran Khan.  He read the story “in a ferocious speech” on Pakistani TV, and the rest is Muslim-rioting and U.S. media history.

In that fell swoop, Khan got the cork of what Steyn calls “two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs,” thus tarring mainstream media people with an Islamicist brush.

As for Khan the onetime playboy with megabucks capitalist Jewish wife now seeking fame as a Pak pol, “he's an opportunist and that's why he went out of his way to incite his excitable followers,” says Steyn, who takes a final parting shot at “our self-worshipping vanity media whose reflexive counter-tribalism has robbed it of all sense of perspective or proportion,” which is to use a broad brush with basic, general accuracy, as anyone knows who has tried even feebly to suggest problems in their arena, which is to stir a hornet’s nest of easily wounded sensibilities.