While the MSM is reeling in their latest attempts to convince everyone they are not simply loose cannons out shooting us all in the foot, you find the occasional bright spot where you can see some hope that things could be corrected (over time of course). While I am still trying to find actual quotes of what must be NBC lemmings going over the MSM cliff with more rumor mongering supposedly aired ad lib by Richard Engel on the Today show this morning (hat tip Newsmax) I found Thomas Friedman’s piece today in the NYTimes [registration required] a refreshing breath of fresh air.

He is rightfully stunned by the silence across the world in response to the escalating death and destruction in Iraq, especially when so much focus has been on unfounded rumors.

…I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that way.

That said, though, in the same newspapers one can read the latest reports from Iraq, where Baathist and jihadist suicide bombers have killed 400 Iraqi Muslims in the past month – most of them Shiite and Kurdish civilians shopping in markets, walking in funerals, going to mosques or volunteering to join the police.

Yet these mass murders – this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims – have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers…

How true. What kind of world are we in when rumors of a wet Koran outrage more people than the actual deaths of 100’s of innocent people simply trying to live their lives??