Thanks, Megan:
Why is it a big deal that soldiers at Guantanamo abused a Koran? Umm, because we’re not fighting a religious war here. Abusing the holy books, statues, or other religious paraphenelia of your opponents is what crusaders do. Even if you aren’t disgusted by American soldiers abusing other people’s religious objects–after we went to all that trouble amending our constitution to prevent soldiers from their faith on us by force–surely you can see . . . surely even the tiny minority that thinks we have launched a religious war against Islam (or ought to) should be able to see . . . that in this age of lightning-fast communications and angry bomb-igniting religious fanatics, it is best not to behave as if we are launching a war against a major world religion.
As I said before:
To be brutally honest, it wouldn’t really bother me if they flushed the Koran, as the book is essentially meaningless to me. I guess part of me would say- “Gee, you shouldn’t really do that, because many will see it as really offensive,” but that is about it.
That isn’t the way we decided to fuck this football, though. Wiser heads than mine, or at the very least, people in a position to make these decisions, chose to approach the whole Islam issue from a standpoint of extreme sensitivity. We said, from day one, that we wouldn’t violate any of these rules we had just created for religious tolerance and respect for Islamic rituals and artifacts.
Personally, I think degrading the Koran and Islam would be stupid, because it would seem to me you would want to dispel the rumors about the US being a bunch of heathens and gain their support during interrogations. I guess I have the ‘good cop’ mentality. But I don’t know the ins and outs of interrogation, either. And, the logic that this might inflame anti-American sentiments abroad does not escape me.
The media isn’t the problem. Playing into the terrorists hands is, and even though I think that on the scale of 1 to 10, flushing or pissing on a Koran ranks about a -6 on my own personal outrage-o-meter, lying about it, trying to pretend nothing ever happened, or attacking the media for covering said ‘abuses’ does nothing but give the people who do care all the more reasons to strap on some Semtex and blow up a HMMWV full of our boys.
Libertine
To be fair I believe the reports that some of the prisoners mishandled the Koran themselves. But that being said that doesn’t excuse what our interrogators did.
I agree John the other side is just looking for an excuse to make this into somekind of actual holy war, and our side is helping them out.
frieda
(1) lying about it
(2) trying to pretend nothing happened
(3) attacking the media
As far as I can tell, there were few, if any, deliberate mishandlings of the Koran. It appears that these reputed incidents of mishandling of the Koran were investigated and procedural changes were made. There’s a 3 page memo detailing how the Koran should be handled. To request the media refrain from reaching the most lurid of conclusions is not to attack the media. (Case in point – Andrew Sullivan on June 10th, Answer, My Friend “The obvious truth is that a guard decided to humiliate a Muslim prisoner by pissing on him through an airvent.” Nothing is obvious and the media shouldn’t cover it as such.)