The Star Tribune does that wudu, take 2

Pursuant to its two-week free access policy, the Star Tribune has already removed Curt Brown’s page-one Star Tribune article on the coming of Sharia to the Minneapolis Community and Technical College from its free archive. Here is the paragraph I quoted from the article in “Sharia in Minnesota”:

Minneapolis Community and Technical College is poised to become the state’s first public school to install a foot-washing basin to help the school’s 500 Muslim students perform pre-prayer rituals. “We want to be welcoming,” MCTC President Phil Davis said, noting a student was hurt trying to wash in a regular sink.

In its related editorial, the Star Tribune described the incident as follows:

It’s worth remembering that this question first arose at MCTC as a matter of safety, not religion. A student slipped and fell after another student used a campus sink to wash his or her feet.

As I noted in “The Star Tribune does that wudu that it does so well”:

I understood Brown to be saying that it was the Muslim student who was injured by virtue of the contortions necessary to wash his or her feet in the sink.

This past Friday the Star Tribune ran the following correction:

An April 25 editorial about Minneapolis Community and Technical College incorrectly described the incident that gave rise to safety concerns over Muslim students using sinks to bathe their feet before prayer. The student who fell was herself a Muslim student washing her feet at the time.

So the Star Tribune — which found the point in question “worth remembering” — can’t even read its own reportage with care sufficient to get the purported story straight. Or be troubled to append the correction to the original editorial so that readers might have a chance of “remembering” correctly. What is “worth remembering” is that Curt Brown never bothered to look into the identity of the victim or the nature of the injury sustained by the Muslim student hoisting his or her foot into the sink. My guess is that the story is mythical but purposive.
To comment on this post, go here.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses