Some journalists who don’t like what one conservative columnist in Minneapolis has written about a Muslim charter school there is taking the typical left-wing approach to someone who disagrees with the lefty journalistic orthodoxy. They’re trying to get her fired.
An online petition demanding her ouster has been signed by journalists from competing papers and even by a Pulitzer Prize winner.
The columnist is Katherine Kersten and her offense is two columns she wrote about the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, named, by the way, for the Muslim general who conquered medieval Spain.
Here’s what the online petition says about Kersten:
Katherine Kersten, columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, has made a habit of demonizing Muslims in Minnesota. But in her recent smear of a local grade school, Kersten went further and committed journalistic malpractice. There is no place for her in a newspaper that claims to represent a general audience in a pluralistic society.
Notice the knee-jerk use of “demonizing” and “smear.” Also note the use of “pluralistic society,” which the petition drafter clearly uses as a synonym for “multicultural society,” two very different things.
