Quran desecration crock a win for Jihad spin docs
June 12, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's kleptocrat strongman, destroyed a mosque the
other
day. It was in Hatcliffe Extension, a shantytown on the edge of Harare
razed
by the "police." Mugabe is an equal-opportunity razer: He also
bulldozed a
Catholic-run AIDS center. The government destroyed the town in order to
drive the locals out into the countryside to live on the land stolen
from
white farmers. Quite how that's meant to benefit any of the parties
involved
or the broader needs of Zimbabwe is beyond me, but then I'm no expert
in
Afro-Marxist economic theory.
The point is the world's Muslims seem entirely cool with Infidel Bob
razing
a mosque. Unlike the fallout over Newsweek's fraudulent story about the
Quran being flushed down a toilet, no excitable young men went bananas
in
Pakistan; no western progressives berated Mugabe for his "cultural
insensitivity." And sadly most of the big shot Muslim spokespersons
were
still too busy flaying the Bush administration to whip their subjects
into a
frenzy over Hatcliffe Extension's pile of Islamic rubble.
Last week, Ambassador Atta el-Manan Bakhit of the Organization of the
Islamic Conference called on Washington to show "no leniency" to the
"perpetrators" of "this despicable crime." "This disgraceful conduct of
those soldiers reveal their blatant hatred and disdain for the religion
of
millions of Muslims all over the world," said His Excellency. The
Egyptian
foreign minister was also in a tizzy. "We denounce in the strongest
possible
terms what the Pentagon confirmed about the desecration of the Qu'ran,"
said
Ahmed Aboul Gheit, calling for strong measures, heads to roll, etc.
And what was it the Pentagon "confirmed"? That since Gitmo became the
global
center of U.S. Quran Desecration operations, there have been five
verifiable
instances of official minor "disrespect" for the holy book, three of
which
may have been intentional, which averages out at one incident per year.
The
same report also turned up 15 documented instances of "disrespect" by
Muslim
detainees. "These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out
of
the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on
the
Quran."
When three times as many detainees "desecrate" the Koran as U.S. guards
do,
it seems clear that the whole Operation Desecration ballyhoo is yet
another
media crock and the Organization of the Islamic Conference and all the
rest
are complaining about nothing. Or is Quran desecration one of those
things
like Jews telling Jewish jokes or gangsta rappers recording numbers
like
"Strictly 4 My *****"? Are only devout Muslims allowed to desecrate
the
Quran? No doubt that's why the Egyptian foreign minister and company
had no
comment on the recent suicide bombing at a mosque in Kandahar, which
killed
20, wounded more than 50 and presumably desecrated every Quran in the
building.
Yet, as is often the way, the Muslim world's whiny spokespersons have
been
effortlessly topped by the old hands of the anti-American left. Thus,
according to Amnesty International, Gitmo is the "gulag of our time."
Well then, these are diminished times for gulags. According to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, some 15 million to 30 million prisoners died
in
the Soviet gulags. By comparison, Guantanamo at its peak held 750
prisoners;
currently, there are 520; none have died in captivity, and, as I wrote
3-1/2
years ago, it has the distinction of being "a camp where the medical
staff
outnumber the prisoners." You'll get swifter, cleaner and more
efficient
treatment than most Canadians do under socialized health care. It's the
only
gulag in history where the detainees leave in better health and
weighing
more than when they arrive. This means they're in much better shape
when
they get back to their hectic schedule of killing infidels: Of the more
than
200 who've been released, around 5 percent -- that's to say, 12 -- have
since been recaptured on the battlefield.
Why would an organization in the human rights business want to
trivialize
the murder of millions in totalitarian death camps by comparing them
with a
non-death camp that flatters every aspect of the inmates' culture? If
Gitmo's a gulag, what words are left for the systemic rape being
practiced
by the butchers of Darfur? Or is it because they've so exhausted the
extremes of their vocabulary on Guantanamo that the world's
progressives
have so little to say about real horrors like Sudan?
No serious allegation of torture at the camp has been substantiated,
and in
the al-Qaida training manual found in Manchester, England, a couple of
years
back Rule 18 couldn't be more explicit: When held captive by the
infidel,
members must "complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison"
and say
that "torture was inflicted on them." A healthy skepticism would thus
seem
to be advisable. Instead, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times runs
around
shrieking like a hysterical ninny that Washington needs to shut down
Guantanamo right now -- not because of anything that actually occurred
there -- but because of negative "perceptions" of the camp in the
overseas
press.
And would caving in to those negative perceptions lead to any better
press?
Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America's being flayed as the
planet's No. 1 torturer for being insufficiently respectful to the holy
book
of its prisoners, even though the Americans themselves supplied their
prisoners with the holy book, even though Americans who fall into the
hands
of the other side get their heads hacked off, even though the
prisoners'
co-religionists themselves blow up more mosques and Qurans than the
Pentagon
ever does, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is
banned
in the home country of many of the prisoners, where respect for other
faiths
is summed up in the headline, "Seven Christians Released In Saudi
Arabia On
Condition They Renounce Private Religious Practice."
That was in the British Catholic newspaper, the Universe, last week, by
the
way. Sadly, no U.S. newspaper found room for the story due to pressures
of
space caused by all the "Al-Qaida Press Secretary Denounces
Insufficient
Respect For Koran By Rumsfeld" front page splashes. But sure, go ahead,
close Gitmo and wait for the rave reviews from the media -- right after
the
complaints that it's culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade
Center when it's the burial site of 10 revered Muslim martyrs.
Guantanamo will be remembered not as a byword for torture but for
self-torture, a Western fetish the jihad's spin doctors understand all
too
well.
--
"The U.S. military has had considerably more success in turning Iraq
around
than liberals have had in turning the ghettos around with their 40-year
'War
on Poverty.' So far, fewer troops have been killed by hostile fire
since the
end of major combat in Iraq than civilians were murdered in Washington,
DC,
last year (239 deaths in Iraq compared to 262 murders in DC). How many
years
has it been since we declared the end of major U.S. combat operations
against Marion Barry's regime? How long before we just give up and pull
out
of that hellish quagmire known as Washington, DC?" --Ann Coulter
.
|
