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Newsweek Goes for Broke with 'Muslim Rage'

Thoughtfulness has flown out the window out Newsweek this week, as Tina Brown traded in a little bit of integrity and placed her bets on Islamophobia being a big seller with the magazine's screaming "Muslim Rage" cover.

By Alexander Abad-Santos
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Thoughtfulness has flown out the window at Newsweek this week, as Tina Brown traded in a little bit of integrity and placed her bets on Islamophobia being a big seller with the magazine's screaming "Muslim Rage" cover. Sure, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's story is a worthy read, but it's mostly about Salman Rushdie and her personal departure from Islamic fundamentalism ("I know something about the subject. In 1989, when I was 19, I piously, even gleefully, participated in a rally in Kenya to burn Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses," she writes), not about last week's news. But we still can't get past that cover. Man that cover--that font, the two angry faces that are standing in for all Muslims, their fists .... Having learned their lesson from incendiary covers like making President Obama Gay and following it up with its record-setting and hardly factual "Hit the Road Barack" cover line (it was one of the magazine's best selling issues since 2010 and was penned by Hirsi Ali's husband Niall Ferguson ), we now have "Muslim Rage" staring at us in the face this morning. Never mind that President Obama and the Secretary of State have stressed that the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and the embassy raid in Egypt were the work of a minority, and that many in Middle East have even protested that the actions of those few don't represent them or Islam, Brown and Co. still went for the big, generalizing cover. And the team over there knows exactly what they're doing:

"Discuss" with handy #muslimrage hashtag, sort of screams: get outraged, BUT FIRST share this with friends! Let's check out the conversation. Here is, as of this very moment, the six most recent #MuslimRage tweets:

Ridicule or not, the payoff of being part of the discussion is clicks and money — Newsweek's financial struggles aren't really a secret at this point, especially not to IAC chairman Barry Diller a.k.a. the guy saddled with paying for Newsweek's  financial burden. Since we have news to write and stories to give you, we'll let HuffPo blogger James Miller take it away:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.