Back in mid-June, when the news was swirling with outrage over allegations of mistreatment of terrorists at Guantanamo, there came a news item that fit perfectly into that template: It was reported that on June 11 a burned Koran was found at the Islamic Center at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

According to The Washington Post, when members of the center returned from a prayer meeting they “made a shocking discovery: partially burned copies of the Koran had been left in a shopping bag by the center’s front door.” They quoted Blacksburg police, who said they were investigating to see if a hate crime had been committed.

But rather than wait for that jury to come in, the Post scouted out someone from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee who also found the act “shocking.” Spokesman Laila Al-Qatami added: “If pages from another holy book were burned and delivered to a place of worship, people would think yes, someone has an agenda…Pages don’t burn themselves and appear in a bag outside a place of worship. Someone willfully did this.”

The Post also hastened to put it into the Gitmo-outrage context:

The Koran burning comes at a time of particular sensitivity. The U.S. military recently confirmed five cases of U.S. personnel mishandling the Muslim holy book at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, acknowledging that soldiers and interrogators kicked the Koran, got copies wet, stood on a copy during an interrogation and inadvertently got urine on another one.

The military’s inquiry came after Newsweek magazine reported early last month that U.S. personnel had flushed a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay, setting off riots in Muslim nations that left 16 people dead. Newsweek retracted the article, and the military’s investigation determined that no such incident had taken place.

That story appeared on June 17. The Post’s version of the Koran-burning incident was 561 words long. The Associated Press’ version, which also appeared on June 17, was 385 words long. It also stressed how shocked the Islamic Center students were to find the burned Koran.

On July 5, another Associated Press story appeared on the wire, this one only 222 words. It got no fanfare, no national coverage and hardly any mention by the mainstream press. The Post, quick to dispatch one of its reporters in June, ran with the AP story this time. The headline? “Student says Quran burning was an accident.” According to the AP this time around: “A Muslim Virginia Tech student says he was the person who left a burned Quran at a local mosque last month, saying it had been damaged in a fire and he hoped it could be given a respectful disposal.” (Note: the AP’s style and The Washington Post’s style apparently differ on the spelling of Quran/Koran.)

The Koran had been burned in a house fire in 2004, the student told police. He said he had left it in the bag with a note explaining the circumstances but the note, he speculated, must have blown away.

The previously shocked local Muslims pronounced themselves relieved that this was not, after all, an anti-Islamic hate crime. “There is nothing better than knowing that Blacksburg is what we expect it to be — a caring, friendly and supportive neighborhood,” said Islamic Center Director Sedki Riad.

The citizens of Blacksburg hadn’t been given any benefit of the doubt in the June 17 AP story, however. “It’s a shame that people are so ignorant,” Idris Adjerid, a member of the center, told AP at the time the Koran was found.

The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., always ready to jump to the hate-crime conclusion, said the incident probably didn’t qualify as a crime, but certainly did qualify as “a bias incident.” A spokesman said in the June 17 AP story: “It was certainly intended as an act of hatred toward Muslims.”

Fanning the flames further on June 17, AP quoted Laila Al-Qatami of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee criticizing Blacksburg police for their wait-until-the-facts-are-in approach to the case. “If pages from the Bible were burned and put in a bag outside a church, I think the reaction of the police would be that it would be a hate crime,” she said.

She also told the AP that discrimination against Muslims had increased with reports in the news about Koran abuse in Guantanamo. AP didn’t challenge this assertion in its story. Instead, they reported this: “She blamed the incidents on a lack of zero tolerance for hate crimes and ‘a lack of information about Arabs and Islam as a whole.’”

The July 5 AP story did not contain an apology to the people of Blacksburg who had been unfairly and unjustly criticized as “ignorant” on June 17. Nor did it contain an apology to the Blacksburg Police Department for being accused of bias for proceeding in a professional manner. Apparently the reporter felt it was unnecessary to seek out such comments from the students at the Islamic Center.

Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.