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T he "call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered," reported The New York Times in April 2004. The Times story quoted a Muslim cleric in Britain touting the "culture of martyrdom," an imam in Switzerland urging his followers to "impose the will of Islam on the godless society of the West," and another radical Islamist leader in Britain predicting that "our Muslim brothers from abroad will come one day and conquer here, and then we will live under Islam in dignity." 1 For those who believe that a clash of civilizations-particularly between Islam and the non-Islamic West-is under way or at least approaching, the provocative comments in the Times article were evidence that "the clash" is not merely a figment of an overheated political imagination. Ever since Samuel Huntington presented his theory about such a clash in a Foreign Affairs article in 1993, debate has continued about whether his ideas are substantive or simplistic. For the news media, this debate is important because it helps shape their approach to covering the world. News Coverage and the Huntington Debate In Huntington's article, which he refined and expanded in his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, he argued that "the clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future." 2 In the book, Huntington said that "culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world." Huntington's corollaries to this proposition, in summary form, are these:

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