We dirty Christians and Jews only have holidays.  Shiites have holy days, so they must be on a higher moral plane, I guess.  ~NRO Reader

Now I have no love for the Times, whose story about the Ashura bombings prompted this bit of hysteria, but even I find this sort of reading-pro-Muslim-bias-between-the-lines to be absurd and risible.  Holiday means holy day.  Holiday the English contraction of the two words into one.  If it often is used with a different sense in the English-speaking world today, that is the result of increased secularisation of our holy days themselves, which can only be rather indirectly laid at the door of The New York Times.  More relevant to the story at hand is that it reports on the deaths of dozens in yet another example of the appalling security situation in Iraq.  If I were the average NRO reader, who probably still thinks the media are keeping the “good news” from the American public in a treasonous plot to undermine the war effort, I would also want to do everything possible to talk about anything else in this story other than the event it was reporting.