Daily Ramblings:
I Know You're Sorry - I'm Sorry Too ...05/15/2005 05:57:19 pm
Ouch: "Newsweek Says Erred In Koran
Desecration Report."
In all the very well deserved piling on that I
hope will take place against the editors of Newsweek,
for spicing up the truth with an illegitimate story
about the Koran being flushed down a toilet at
Guantanamo, I hope that a larger point is not
forgotten. That is, what exactly do we say is going
on when people embark on a rampage and kill other
people (16 dead and over 100 injured in Afghanistan)
in one part of the world, because they have heard
that maybe some pages of a book were destroyed at a
place 10,000 miles away?
That which one believes to be the word of God is
sacred to any religious person, but a book is a
physical container of words which cannot be wiped out
by the destruction of one particular copy of it. And
it has not been just a single hysterical Afghani mob
complicit in this. From Egypt to Yemen to Gaza and even Los Angeles, high profile Muslims
have raised their voices (in a way they never did
against Saddam Hussein's systematic murder of his own
Muslim people) to protest in the most extreme terms,
based on an allegation in a magazine that some
over-zealous prison interrogators may have destroyed
a copy of a book. A vulgar and disrespectful act,
most would agree, but surely not a reason for killing
on the other side of the world. Isn't it the
out-of-control mobs that the religious leaders might
want to be addressing?
So, Newsweek is guilty of portraying the
American military unfairly - no question, and no big
surprise - but the violence and deaths of the past
few days are, I would think, someone else's
responsibility.
Something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
Addendum 05/15/2005
09:20:10 pm:
And Newsweek's own mea culpa (sort of) story
compounds their own crime by regaling us with a
string of other sordid allegations (the wiping of
menstrual blood on a prisoner, and a good smattering
of uncorroborated stories of Koran abuse) while not
being remotely judgmental as to the murderous
reaction of some to last week's article.
Given all that
has been reported about the treatment of
detainees—including allegations that a
female interrogator pretended to wipe her own
menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports
of Qur'an desecration seemed shocking but not
incredible. But to Muslims, defacing the Holy
Book is especially heinous. "We can
understand torturing prisoners, no matter how
repulsive," says computer teacher
Muhammad Archad, interviewed last week by
NEWSWEEK in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of last
week's protests took place. "But
insulting the Qur'an is like deliberately
torturing all Muslims. This we cannot
tolerate."
Isn't Newsweek even
curious as to whether this is the official position
of Islam, including "moderate Islam" in
America? They exhibit no interest in whether it is
legitimate to seek someone's death for damaging a
holy book, or whether something might be wrong in the
hearts of those who killed fellow Muslims last week
on hearing what was in that issue of Newsweek.
Imagine if Catholics were rioting
and killing people over an alleged incident of damage
to a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Do you think the Catholic hierarchy
would get a question or two about it? Along the lines
of whether the Church endorsed that kind of violence
in response to the damage of a statue?
And then imagine if the reaction of
the hierarchy was not to condemn the rioters and
murderers, but to rail instead against whoever had
(allegedly) damaged the statue - and by extension
those individuals' fellow countrymen and government.
You'll need a good imagination to
conjure up a scenario like that one. And you'll need
an even better imagination, apparently, to dream up a
situation where Newsweek might risk looking
critically at the "religion of peace."
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