They had it right the first time.
The Washington Post changed the headline on its Al-Baghdadi obituary from “Islamic State’s terrorist-in-Chief” to “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State.” pic.twitter.com/cs243EVz7W
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 27, 2019
It’s hard to know what to say about the Twitter explosion that greeted the Washington Post decision to edit the headline atop its bookish obituary for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State forces that ravaged large portions of Iraq and Syria.
By just about anyone’s definitions he was a terrorist, rapist and mass murderer. On the other hand, I must admit that I didn’t know much about his career as a “conservative academic,” to use one interesting label included in this long Post feature.
Yes, we will get to some of the searing mock headlines responding to this popular Twitter hashtag — #WaPoDeathNotices. But first, here is a basic story-about-the-story summary care of The Hill:
The Washington Post changed the headline on its obituary for ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi after initially calling him an “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State.”
Wait. “Initially” calling him what? The very next sentence notes:
The Post changed its headline for the obituary at least twice Sunday, starting by describing al-Baghdadi as the “Islamic State’s terrorist-in-chief.” The newspaper then adjusted the headline to call al-Baghdadi the “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State,” sparking some backlash on social media.
The headline has now been updated to describe al-Baghdadi as the “extremist leader of Islamic State.”
Clearly, someone thought “terrorist-in-chief” was a bit over the top and said the headline should be softened to reflect the tone of the story itself — which is dominated by information about the academic and semi-political career of al-Baghdadi, rather than his blood-soaked actions as the ISIS semi-prophet.
You can see the roots of the second Post headline in the lede that remains intact:
When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took the reins of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2010, few had heard of the organization or its new leader, then an austere religious scholar with wire-frame glasses and no known aptitude for fighting and killing.
Here’s another crucial chunk of material that captures the tone of the piece:
Conservative academic
The man who would become the founding leader of the world’s most brutal terrorist group spent his early adult years as an obscure academic, aiming for a quiet life as a professor of Islamic law. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 upended his plans and launched him on a course toward insurgency, prison and violent jihad.
Finally, near the end of the obituary, there is this nod to just a few of the deeds that made this man so infamous.
From the group’s high-water mark to its collapse, its leader remained a phantom presence. Little is publicly known about what he did, how he contributed or where he lived. Mr. Baghdadi likewise kept his family and social life carefully hidden. He married at least twice, possibly three times, and had at least six children.
Later, former hostages would reveal that Mr. Baghdadi also kept a number of personal sex slaves during his years as the Islamic State’s leader, including American hostage Kayla Mueller, who was later killed, and a number of captured Yazidi women.
Personally, I would have mentioned the deaths of thousands of moderate Muslims who stood in his way, along with the various other believers in religious minorities that his forces crushed. That would include, of course, ancient Christian communities in the Nineveh Plain — along with their monasteries and holy places packed with priceless sacred art and libraries of irreplaceable manuscripts that dated back to the first centuries of the early church.
But that’s just me.
I wonder how they described the hundreds of thousands Christians he ordered slaughtered?
The media is broken. https://t.co/xRYmKeDUTn— Fr. Joseph Krupp (@Joeinblack) October 27, 2019
The editorial drama at the Post unleashed a wave of satirical headlines linked to the #WaPoDeathNotices thread, along with #WaPoHeadlines, #WashingtonPostObituaries and several others.
The following will offer a taste of that mixture of acid and digital ink:
Osama Bin Laden, spiritual leader and architect of lower Manhattan urban revitalization projects, dead at 54. https://t.co/ZfpIrQsbQo
— John Noonan (@noonanjo) October 27, 2019
Jeffrey Epstein, financier devoted to developing young female talent, dead at 66. #WashingtonPostObituaries
— Ellen Anderson (@MochaLite) October 27, 2019
John Wilkes Booth a noted Thespian, American actor and member of a prominent theatrical family dead at 26. #WaPoDeathNotices pic.twitter.com/2DyzE9OWa5
— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) October 28, 2019
David Koresh, singer, guitarist, father of 15, and austere spiritual leader, dead at 33. #WaPoDeathNotices
— 🎃🔪Señia👿👻 (@ayasgirl) October 27, 2019
We will skip the many headlines announcing the death of the prominent German orator and architect Adolf Hitler.
Let’s end with something constructive. Readers seeking a more conventional look at the al-Baghdadi era can turn The Atlantic, where there is a feature by Graeme Wood. Here is the overture:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the hirsute rapist whom hundreds of thousands of Islamic State supporters considered their absolute leader, died yesterday during a U.S. military raid in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province, President Donald Trump announced on Sunday morning. Baghdadi became the head of ISIS in 2010 but was not seen in public until 2014, when the group designated him caliph and he addressed the world in a florid speech from the pulpit of the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq. Since then he has shown himself only once, on a dull video filmed in a windowless room and released in April.
The key was capturing the combination of radical doctrine, terror and ambition that made this man unique. Here is a summary — this is a magazine piece, not straight-forward reporting — that weaves together the crucial themes:
… Baghdadi was special. By calling for the allegiance of all Muslims — and actually being taken seriously by a large number of them — he accomplished something no previous terrorist leader had done. He channeled, for the masses, a collective sense of connection to a glorious fantasy of an Islamic past. Bin Laden had asked Muslims to rise up in defense of Islam. But his concerns were distinctly 20th-century: overthrowing Arab despotisms, snuffing out the Jewish state, knocking over skyscrapers.
Baghdadi possessed a dramatic vision, one that any Muslim could partake in, that placed himself and anyone brave enough to join him in a line of warriors that extended back to the Prophet Muhammad himself. He noted, ostentatiously, that he hailed from the tribe of Quraish, the Prophet’s own. Historically, Muslims have counted membership in that tribe as one of about half a dozen criteria required of a valid caliph. That criterion had lapsed in importance for literally centuries, with numerous caliphs having no plausible claim to Quraishi ancestry. But Baghdadi claimed that he was a caliph, sensu stricto, in the classical tradition going back to the Abbasids. Furthermore, he would bring back a version of classical Islamic law, including legalized sex slavery and other abominations, in which he partook personally.
And now, like the Abbasids, he is dead — smashed to bits, according to Trump, by a self-detonated suicide vest.
Read it all. There is more to come, I am sure.
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