Koranic Respect - Again!

From Captain’s Quarters we learn that the FBI failed to stop the 9/11 high jacking in part because of fears of “racial profiling.”

Ellen said that she believed that attorneys in the FBI's National Security Law Unit (NSLU) would have had to review the Phoenix EC before any action could be taken on it because the issue of racial profiling was "hot."
In other words, after determining that the lead and the theory that resulted from it had been confirmed, "Ellen" (a code name for an FBI agent) would have to run it by a
committee first to see whether it offended the tender sensibilities of "racial
profiling" before it could be shared with other FBI agents. While the entire
law-enforcement and intelligence communities knew of a brewing threat from
radical Islamists to attack the United States, at home and abroad, the FBI was
more concerned with possibly offending Arabs instead of protecting US assets and
American citizens.

It’s possible that 3,000 people died because of Political correctness.
Of course, Political correctness has not gone away. This brings me to the issue of the MSM’s obsession with Koranic desecration. Based on media reports, you would be forgiven for believing that George Bush ordered Donald Rumsfeld to give Korans to prisoners in Guantanamo for the express purpose of urinating on them or flushing them. How many people know the way the Army bends itself into a veritable pretzel to avoid treating the Koran the way the average Christian treats the Bible?

Here’s Diana West in the Washington Times:

But the Army doesn't just distribute its Korans like any other religious book. That is, the Bible may get passed around, rifled through, dropped, tossed and stuffed into hotel room drawers. But not the Koran. According to Army policy, the standard operating procedure is: "Handle the Koran as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art."

[snip]

The guard is directed to don "clean gloves ... in full view of the detainees prior to handling." He must use "two hands ... at all times when handling the Koran in a manner signaling respect and reverence." Why "respect" alone isn't abundantly sufficient isn't mentioned. While signaling two-handed respect and reverence, however, the guard must be mindful that "care should be used so that the right hand is the primary one used to manipulate any part of the Koran due to the cultural association with the left hand."

[snip]

At first glance, this scene may seem to exemplify a bizarre excess of good manners, an absurdly obsequious respect for a largely foreign faith. Since when does the United States specifically direct its soldiers to show two-handed "reverence" in the handling of any religious book? But it seems to me that there's more behind this charade. The "clean gloves" and "detainee" towels are the tip off. The fact is, under Islamic law, non-Muslims are deemed unfit to touch the Koran. That much is generally known. What is not usually considered is the reason: According to the Islamic law, we are unclean.

[snip]

In effect, then, with its official policy of clean gloves and detainee towels, the military is promoting, enabling and accepting the Islamic concept of najis -- the unclean infidel -- a barbarous notion that has helped fuel the blood lust of jihad and the non-Muslim subjugation of dhimmitude. Our soldiers are many things: self-sacrificing, bold, loyal and true. They are not unclean.

[snip]

What is it about the MSM and Liberals in general that they ridicule Christians when they express their offense – non-violently I might add – at the desecration of Christian objects such as images of a crucifix dipped in urine? Remember that controversy? Where were the sensitivity police then? Where were the NY Times, Newsweek, NBCCBSABCCNN and NPR? Is one religion to be revered above others? Is one group’s sensitivity to be respected while another group’s sensitivity is to be ridiculed? Is the violence of one group to be respected while the mildness of another is an object of contempt?

What is it about getting a Koran wet or touched by an Infidel that gets the MSM aroused? I would really like to know.

UPDATE: Here's Roger Kimball at The New Criterion on the subject:

“Handle the Koran as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art.” Hello? It’s mighty nice of the US government to provide terrorists with their spiritual resentment training manual, but how far do we have to go to mollify people who believe their religion requires them to blow up innocent people?

[snip]

Should we laugh or cry at this exhibition of politically correct hyper-sensitivity? By all means, let us treat prisoners with the dignity and respect they lack in their own lives. Let us not besmirch or ridicule the Koran. But let us also preserve some rudimentary contact with reality. These people are terrorists and suspected terrorists. Many--probably most--of them have dedicated their lives to slaughtering innocent Westerners, inspired, note well, by the very document our soldiers are enjoined to handle as a “fragile piece of delicate art” (as distinct, one supposes from a “sturdy piece of delicate art”). Operating in the realm of fiction, Evelyn Waugh might have made an amusing episode out of this absurdity (talk about “Black Mischief”!) Perambulating in the precincts of real life, however, we should have the fortitude to acknowledge that the comedy has gone rancid. Those sections of the army’s “Detention Operations Group Standard Operating Procedures” that bear on the Koran should be respectfully excised, using only the right hand. They should then be carefully conveyed in a “clean, dry detainee towel” to the nearest outhouse and . . . flushed down the toilet.

Not a bad idea.

UPDATE 2: From Soxblog

Here’s my main point: Someday inevitably there will come another 9/12, the somber day after another disastrous terrorist strike. And virtually every American will remember the halcyon days when America felt so at ease that it stood by idly subscribing to newspapers and periodicals that made front page news out of a single kicked Koran.

And on that day, that 9/12 that sadly waits somewhere down the road, I’d like to say there will be hell to pay for the media that have covered this war in such an unabashedly America bashing manner. But there will be a far worse penalty than that – irrelevance.

There’s a popular country music song at the moment called “My Give a Damn’s Busted.” For most of the readers of this site, I bet, your “give-a-damns” were busted on 9/11. And every time we think of taking it into the shop and having it repaired, the media give us good reason to leave the darn thing inoperable. Is this what we’re supposed to get hot and bothered about? Our country is so decent that it provides our enemies with 1600 Korans. Five of those Korans are dealt with less than reverently. Still, 1595 out of 1600 ain’t bad, especially when you consider the fact that our enemy when dealing with prisoners prefers to skip the distribution of holy books and skip right to the beheadings.

None of this is to say that America is incapable of outrages and that such outrages when they occur shouldn’t be promptly and aggressively addressed. And the miss-treatment of the five Korans was wrong. But front page news? Not in my book. The problem is, the media (in its desperate attempt to relive its glory days of hobnobbing in parking garages with embittered G-men passed over for promotion) is perpetually trying to create new and embarrassing scandals.

So a warning to the Times and the L.A. Times and the Globe: Irrelevancy is barreling down the tracks. Brace yourselves.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

If you have not read Tom Wolfe's latest book you should. It's great. And here is an excerpt from a great book review by Joey Tartakovsky.

...I graduated from college, not 53 years ago, but last year. I was there, man, and I’m telling you that Tom Wolfe is spot on. If college sat down with a ghostwriter to produce an autobiography, the result would sound and feel like I am Charlotte Simmons. That is, if the ghostwriter had a wild genius for the American language.

That Wolfe is, as his ageist detractors never fail to point out, a 74-year-old Southern man, only makes his accomplishment all the more impressive. His eyes and ears are as sharp as ever. Friday nights at his fictional Dupont University, as at any school, bump with profane nursery rhymes (popularly known as gangster rap) and shrieks of girlish delight at manly antics. Wolfe notices that young men consider it a matter of duty to watch ESPN in 3-hour blocks, even when it means being up as early as ten-thirty. (My roommates went beyond the call by placing a second TV atop the main one, for ESPN-2.) He notices that the Mashed Potato or whatever dance they did in ancient days has become The Act, Clothed. Here is a sound that every college student recognizes: that terrible ascending chime of AOL Instant Messenger ringing into dorm hallways from every room. And below the computer is a nest of wires attached to the “techie alphabet toys…the PC, the TV, the CD, DVD, DSL, VCR, MP4…each asleep rattlesnake-style with a single tiny diode-green eye open….” Wolfe paints a portrait true to life itself, composed of hundreds of acute social observations, garnered through years of research on nearly a dozen campuses.

Us White Christian Republicans

A New Yorker Kind of Guy

Ben Stein takes a look at the the American Press and it's love affair with a North Vietnames spy who worked under cover as a correspondent for TIME magazine.

In this article, which I would guess to be about 8,000 words or more, there is not one hint, not one whisper, of sympathy for the American soldiers who fought and died or were maimed in Vietnam. Not one sliver of anger at a man who took American money and helped kill Americans. Not a word about the mass murder of civilians during Tet.

Prof. Bass, the perfect modern academic, obviously greatly admires this man, spent days with him, and has not one bad word to say about An's bosses, who, again, killed civilians without remorse by the thousands, who even sent An to be "re-educated" after the war because he had so much contact with Western ideas.

I am not sure how many mothers or fathers or children or widows of Vietnam war casualties read the New Yorker. I am not sure if anyone who edited the piece -- and it is edited well, although utterly without moral input -- had friends or family who fought there (such as my late father in law, Col. Dale Denman, Jr.). But how insulting, how insulting must an article like this be to them. How insulting it is to us all: to lavish praise on a man who helped kill our fellow Americans, to describe him in endearing terms, to try to make him seem like a kindly uncle.

If the New Yorker is one of the flagships of the Mainstream Media fleet, they are sailing in maddeningly disloyal, contemptuous waters and obviously have been for a while. Small wonder the media gloried in Mark Felt and Watergate last week. In those days, Americans actually trusted the Mainstream Media. The New Yorker piece by Prof. Bass makes it clear how wrong we were. He's a fine writer but a man whose piece lacks any moral compass at all. And what of the fellow journalists in Saigon cheering him on? Now we know a bit more about why the war turned out as it did.

Amnesty International's Descent

From Powerline:

Amnesty International's call for the arrest of President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and pretty much any other Republican whom foreign governments can get their hands on.

In a breathtakingly short time, Amnesty International has declined from being a respectable human rights organization to its current status as a joke and a disgrace.

Democrats vs. Christians

Excerpts:

It’s easy to dismiss Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean as a hard-core ideologue, a loose-lipped lightening-rod for the Democratic Party, and a man who’s perfected a form of yoga which involves opening his mouth and inserting his foot to the knee.

It’s always a mistake to underestimate the opposition.

Dean’s seemingly casual remark that the GOP is "pretty much a white Christian party," was in fact a calculated appeal to his party’s Christian-hating base. It’s red-meat intentionally tossed to those who view Christians as public enemy #1 – a clear and present danger to democracy, liberty and tolerance.

Dean’s right, by the way. Most Republicans are white Christians (82 percent). So are most Americans (67 percent). Shame on the American people, for being so Caucasian and Christian!


[snip]

in reality, the DNC chair reflects the views of his militantly secularist party. In fact, compared to some of his colleagues, Dean is reticent here.

In a recent talk show interview, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin charged that Christian broadcasters are "sort of our home-grown Taliban." The Iowan added, "They have a direct line to God. And if you don’t tune into their line, you’re obviously on Satan’s line." On the other hand, the Democratic Party has long maintained that if you don’t agree with it on quotas, you’re a racist. If you dissent from its relentless drive to expand the welfare state, you hate the poor. If you’re not in favor of abortion-on-demand and comparable worth legislation, you’re a misogynist, etc.
During the debate on ending the permanent filibuster of Bush judges, Sen. Ken Salazar (a Colorado Democrat) called Focus on the Family and its founder James Dobson "the Anti-Christ." Does Sen. Salazar then believe that America’s most popular Christian broadcaster is "on Satan’s line"?
In a profile piece in The New Yorker, published last September, former Vice President Al Gore (who endorsed Dean for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination), observed that the faith of President George W. Bush was "the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia, in Kashmir, in religions around the world." In other words, because Bush talks about Jesus and wants to get religious groups involved in solving social problems, he is the moral equivalent of true-believers who persecute other faiths, and fanatics who behead hostages.
Getting down to the nitty-gritty, in an article in the December 1, 2003. issue of The American Prospect, Robert Reich (Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor) disclosed that the "evangelical right" despises religious liberty and tolerance and seeks nothing less than a "state-sponsored religion." Which would be what – the evangelicalism of James Dobson, the Catholicism of Pope Benedict XVI, the Methodism of President Bush or, perhaps, the Judaism of Dr. Laura Schlessinger? To ask the question is to highlight the absurdity of Reich’s pronouncement.
Thus, according to Dean Democrats:

The GOP has the agenda of Christian conservatives;
Christian conservatives are our homegrown Taliban – violence-prone fundamentalists who are identical to the Saudis and other Islamic militants;
And – oh, yes – Christian conservatives and their Republican lackeys seek to establish a state-sponsored religion which will, presumably, reprise the Salem witch trials and Spanish Inquisition.
And Democrats still can’t figure out why most Christians view them with emotions ranging from distrust to revulsion.

Mara Liasson and the Arab Media

Yesterday The Fox News panel with Brit Hume had comments by Mara Liasson regarding the bad reputation that Gitmo has among the Arabs. I was rather dumbfounded by this assertion since I read the American press, not the Arab press and it’s obvious that the bad reputation of Gitmo is found overwhelmingly in the American MSM. Perhaps Mara can cite Arab publications to prove her point, but it’s not the Arab press that’s the cause of the push to close Gitmo. In fact, while I cannot be positive, I believe that most of the reporting from Gitmo is done by the American media. Unless one is willfully blind, the connection between Gitmo and a bad reputation runs right through the American media.

Heather McDonald says it well in THIS article in National Review (well worth reading the whole thing):

You gotta admire the liberal media’s modesty. For the last three years, it has been promoting the story that the Bush administration has a policy of torturing terror detainees. Now, such mouthpieces of the anti-administration Left as the New York Times are calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on the ground that its reputation for prisoner abuse is jeopardizing the war on terror. Take some credit, guys! It may be true that Guantanamo Bay has become synonymous with lawlessness throughout vast swathes of the Western and Muslim worlds. But no one is more responsible for that reputation than the New York Times, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets, which have never encountered a prisoner-abuse story that they didn’t find credible and worthy of broadcast.

Since most of the stories of prisoner abuse are either hype or outright lies, the defense of the media that “we have to report the story” is another lie. A rumor does not have to be reported and reported and reported and amplified and rebroadcast and dissected on the editorial pages and the op ed pages until … oh, it’s not true? Never mind. Sorry about the dead. Nothing we can do. And who made you editor of Newsweek?

The ethics of this kind of “reporting” is the reason that MSM has lost its credibility, its standing and its readership. When the NY Times, Newsweek and NPR have the credibility of tabloids reporting space aliens you know the party’s over. Today the news business is the news, and a healthy development it is.

Update: HERE is a great article about Koranic abuse at Gitmo From Max Boot via the LA Times (read the whole thing)

[excerpt]

All the headlines about "Abuse of the Koran at Gitmo" are absolutely accurate. Brig. Gen. Jay Hood's internal investigation has uncovered some shocking incidents. On at least six occasions, Korans were ripped up. They were urinated on three times, and attempts were made to flush them down the toilet at least three other times.

Why aren't millions of Muslims rioting in response to these defilements? Because the perpetrators were prisoners, not guards. As John Hinderaker notes on weeklystandard.com, the most serious desecrations of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were committed by the Muslim inmates themselves.

You'd never know this from the news coverage, which pounced on Hood's finding of five confirmed incidents of Koran abuse as proof that Newsweek was on to something with its phony-baloney report about guards flushing a Koran down the toilet.

Far from confirming accusations of American depravity, what the report actually shows is that Guantanamo is the first gulag in history run on the principle that no sensibility of the inmates should be offended, no matter how inadvertently.

Mainstream Judges and Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Which sitting Supreme Court justice does this describe? And how many votes did this justice get in the Senate?

[justice] had attacked the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts as organizations that perpetuate stereotyped sex roles and had proposed abolishing Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and replacing them with a single androgynous Parent’s Day. [That nominee had also] called for an end to single-sex prisons on the theory that if male prisoners are going to return to a community in which men and women function as equal partners, prison is just the place for them to get prepared to deal with women. [The nominee] had opined that a manifest imbalance in the racial composition of an employer’s work force justified court-ordered quotas even in the absence of any intentional discrimination on the part of the employer. But then it was discovered that while operating [her] own office for over a decade in a city that was majority-black, this nominee had never had a single black person among [her] more than 50 hires.

Holy Koran -Piss Christ

American Digest has an interesting take on the Christian virtues as practiced by those who hate Christianity. Read the whole thing.

Nearly four years into a war that began with the death of 3,000 of our fellow citizens, a situation has evolved within these United States that is without precedence in the annals of war and religion. It would seem that, even with our troops engaging the enemy wherever he can be found, and even with our troops dying daily from enemy action, that a large and substantial portion of the American population has learned to truly "love thy enemy."

What is even more remarkable about this unexpected apotheosis of one of the central tenets of Christianity is that this large and growing segment of our fellow citizens is composed of people that are, for the most part, either indifferent to or openly hostile to Christianity.

And while the hatred, disparagement and fear of Christianity is a theme of long standing among this cohort, their open and embracing love for those that have killed innocent Americans by the thousands and who seek methods, means and opportunity to kill us in the millions is a relatively new development -- at least in its brazen openness.

The latest expression of this love is the latest of a long string of loving moments and perhaps the clearest. We have, in the last few weeks, seen an almost hysterical concern for the sanitary condition of our enemies' holy book. This rambling collection of verses about this and that is invariably called by our fellow Americans in love with our enemy, "The Holy Koran," while they are careful never to refer to the Bible as "The Holy Bible."

[snip]

What may look like and read like and sound like the love of our enemy by our fellow citizens is, I fear, a false and hypocritical expression of a Christian principle. It is merely a beard, and a shabby, poorly-fitted and glued-on one at that. As everyone can tell that takes a moment and looks at this "love" straight on and without blinders or bullshit, their love is merely a way of masking their hate. They care no more for the Koran and the treatment of prisoners than they care about the Bible or the status of our own soldiers fighting on foreign shores. What they like is the fact that the uncaptured and unkilled comrades of the terrorists in captivity continue to kill our soldiers at every opportunity. If "the enemy of your enemy is your friend," then surely the killer of your enemy must be your lover. If that is so, it is the least you can do to get the Red Cross into Guantanamo's cells so you can give them a hug.

Glenn Reynolds - Coercive Libertarian

Glenn Reynolds - a justly famous, prolific and highly acclaimed blogger - is a Libertarian who favors forcing people to do things that they believe are morally wrong.

How so, you say? Are not Libertarians opposed to coercive government control and opposed to forcing people to violate their personal ethics? Well, yes, that would ordinarily be the case, but Glenn Reynolds supports birth control and abortion. He also appears to support euthanasia – having supported the government enforced death by starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo. So Glenn’s Libertarian principles are often guided by his personal preferences. They are malleable.

On his web site “Instapundit” he identifies himself thus: I'm interested in everything, but my chief interest is in the intersection between advanced technologies and individual liberty. The vast majority of my writing touches on this in one way or another.

He comments on an issue on TNR’s Corner in which there is a discussion of pharmacists and the dispensing of birth control.

I HAVE A LIBERTARIAN SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM: Over at The Corner we're seeing a rather large number of abortion-related posts today. In this one (which really goes beyond the abortion issue) Kathryn Jean Lopez decries a poll showing that 80% of Americans think that pharmacists ought to have to fill prescriptions for contraceptives even if they're personally opposed to birth control.

Of course, this only matters because pharmacists enjoy a government-created monopoly on the dispensing of prescription drugs. Just take that away, and the problem disappears, too. In the meantime, like others who enjoy government monopolies, they are forced to make some concessions to public convenience. That doesn't strike me as an overwhelming imposition, but if the pharmacy profession feels otherwise, I'll be the first to support a move to eliminate its privileged position.

The problem for Professor Reynolds is that reality intrudes into theory. If there were ONE government licensed pharmacist dispensing drugs, it would seem that a case could be made that the scarcity of pharmacists would create a problem for people looking for birth control or the morning after pill. But, for example, the environs of Knoxville have a plentiful supply of pharmacies. Knoxville, the home of the University of Tennessee where Glenn Reynolds is a law professor, has a population (2000 census) of 173,890. The Knoxville area has 5 Kroger stores with pharmacies, 20 CVS pharmacies, 9 Walgreen’s, 17 Wal-Mart Pharmacies and this only counts the pharmacies associated with some the major national chains. To suggest that we must force the few pharmacists who have moral objections to providing either birth control or abortificants appears to be both illiberal and coercive. There is no scarcity of pharmacists or pharmacies so convenience is a smokescreen.

So we have a case where technology – in this case the technology of birth control and abortion – touches on individual liberty. And Professor Reynolds comes out against … individual liberty … for the sake of (wait for it) … convenience!

Glen then goes on to make a snarky comment about removing the special licensing requirements of pharmacists if they wish to follow their own consciences. There is a case to be made for that – on Libertarian grounds - just as there is a case for breaking up the legal monopoly and removing the privileges of university faculty, especially tenured faculty. Given the animosity generated among the non-tenured portion of the population by Ward Churchill and his ilk, I’m all in favor of that.

What I found most interesting in Professor Reynolds’s argument is the means by which the law can be molded to achieve the desired result. The tools are there: Interstate commerce, emanations and penumbras, convenience; all ways of imposing judicial preferences. Makes you ponder.

Washinton Post Makes Up Stories - Totally False Reporting

Cici Connelly, on Brit Hume’s Fox News show yesterday claimed that “close to 100” American prisoners have been murdered by the military. Brit Hume asked “How many?” with incredulity in his voice, but Ceci persisted in her claim of 100 homicides.

Where did this nice round number come from? What are her sources? Even Amnesty International only claims 27 and ,on further examination, that includes people whose cause of death has not been determined, who died in riots and for other unexplained reasons.

So Ceci, I understand that the Washington Post typically makes stories up of whole cloth and peddles them as news, as did your sister publication, Newsweek. Care to comment?

For more reaction click HERE, HERE, HERE,HERE

Amnesty International Likened to Pravda

"Pravda was the official organ of the Soviet communist party," said Mr. Bush, "Masquerading as a legitimate news organization, Pravda made false and outlandish claims against America to advance the cause of global communism and to give aid and comfort to our enemies. Let's be clear: Amnesty International is not precisely like Pravda. There are some differences between Pravda and Amnesty that would likely come to mind if you sat down and thought about it for a spell."

From Scrappelface

Lileks on Koranic Desecration

The latest example of the US Army’s Koran Humiliation Initiative has that headline-grabbing word: URINE. You’d think Private Anderson swaggered over, unholstered Private Johnson and let loose a pounding stream of tangy intentional desecration on the book as it was clutched to the sobbing breast of the terrorist. (Sorry, detainee.) Of course, what really happened was slightly less horrible; someone took a leak outside the cells, and the gentle Caribbean breeze carried a jot of pee through a ventilation grill, where it lit upon the Koran.

As the WaPo story notes: “The Sergeant of the guard . . . ensure the detainee received a fresh uniform and a new Qu’ran.”

Life in the Gulag of our times. Bastards probably didn’t take all the pins out of the uniform. As for the allegation of flushing, the Pentagon inquiry “determined that no such incident took place. The probe did find, however –“

And here we get to the pith of the gist: Newsweek’s allegations were fake but accurate. “The probe did find, however that rumors of such an event swirled around the facility in the summer of 2002 after a detainee dropped his Qu’ran on the floor and other detainees blamed that on U.S. guards.”

Well, then. They made him drop it! Special Jew Mind Beams at work, no doubt. Say no more. No, let’s: “The story changed as detainees passed it along, escalating to rumors that U.S. troops ripped pages out of the book and then flushed it.”

So rumors escalated into more rumors. Remake page one. We continue: “But the investigation’s results also are contrary to the recent claims of top Pentagon officials that there were no credible accounts of Qur’an mishandling. The first case, in February 2002, arose when a detainee complained that guards at Camp X-ray kicked the Qur’an of a detainee in a neighboring cell. Though interrogators and guards noted the incident at the time, there was no further investigation.”

Three and a half years ago, a guard kicked a Qur’an. It’s a front page story today. Well, who am I to question the news judgment of the Post? Obviously it matters. One then must ask: is flushing worse than kicking? Flushing, after all, requires some amount of premeditation. One has to decide to flush a book. Kicking a book may be done in the heat of anger – say, when you’re interviewing someone fighting for a movement that wanted little girls to stay indoors all their lives dressed in hot sacks until the merry day when they were married off at 14 to some middle-aged guy with a nice job in the Remnants of Buddhism Demolition Division. If the guy might have info on what Al Qaeda was up to next – you know, the group from which the terro (SORRY!) detainee was plucked a mere five months after the Twin Towers thundered down, you might be tempted to shed all your civilized inhibitions and kick a book.

We continue: “Other confirmed reports included a two-word obscenity being written in the inside cover of the Qur’an, though investigators were unable to determine who wrote the phrase and concluded it was possible that the complaining detainee – who was conversant in English – may have defaced his own book.”

To squeeze it down: the investigation contradicted Pentagon reports that there were no credible accounts of Qur’an mishandling because there was a confirmed report of a naughty word written in the book, possibly by the book’s owner.

Got it? Front page summation in my paper: “Guards at Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba kicked, stepped on and splashed urine on the Qur’an, in some cases intentionally but also by accident, the Pentagon reporter. Detainees were also found to have abused it.”

Kicked, stepped on, and splashed urine. Splashed. The word suggests that someone waddled over with a brimming pot of urine and gave the vat a heave-ho, just to motivate the detainee. Stories like these must be told, of course, if only to show what the media finds important, and remind us how good things are going. I can imagine in late 2001 asking a question of myself in 2005:

What’s the main story? The smallpox quarantine? Fallout from the Iranian – Israeli exchange contaminating Indian crops? A series of bombings in heartland malls?

"Well, no – the big story today has to do with soldiers mishandling terrorists' holy texts at a detention center."

Mishandling? How? Like, you mean, they opened it up without first checking to see if it was ticking, and it blew up –

"No, they handled it in a way that disrespected it. Infidels are supposed to use gloves."

Oh. So we lost, then.

Don't get me wrong. I want us to do the right thing. I don't think there should be a policy that permits interrogators to treat the Qur'an like it was, oh, a Bible discovered in the Saudi airport customs line. But when it comes to the revelations of these Gitmo tales, I cannot care as much as they would like me to care. I cannot. Not to say we should treat the Qur’an with casual disrespect. But if an infidel touches the book with the wrong hand and people react like a two-year-old whose peas are touching the mashed potatoes, well, I understand why this matters, but when measured against the sins of headchoppery and carbombs, it pales to an evanescent translucence. Odd how the story isn’t about the rules and the precautions and the spine-cracking efforts to bend over backwards to make sure infidels get out the tongs when approaching the sacred book of the terrori – sorry, the detainees - Sorry, the murderous gynophobic gay-hating fundamentalist theocratic cultural imperialists. No, the story is the infinitesimal number of times in which the rules were breached over the course of years. It’s like doing a story about Wal-Mart’s employment practices, and following a story about forced overtime with an expose on expired non-dairy creamers in the breakroom. By hammering the tale for three weeks the MSM manages to dilute the impact of the beloved Abu Grabass scandal; pyramidal prisoners, wafting pee – all the same, all front page news. Of course, it’s all a seamless whole if your intention is to remind people of the three basic preconceptions of reporting on a war conducted by anyone whose initials aren’t JFK: the Pentagon lies, the troops are dullards and brutes, and Nixon is a criminal.

If Al Qaeda blew up a Bible depository in Malaysia tomorrow, it would be page A-16. If forty-six were killed in riots in Pakistan because of a rumor that US forces had pantomimed “The Satanic Verses” in a North Carolina PX, it would be on page A-12. When they’re nuts, it’s not news. When we’re found guilty of wind-assisted desecration, it’s A-1. You may draw your own conclusions from that. In any case, it’s had the expected result: (h/t LGF)

The Official Spokesman of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ambassador Atta El-Manan Bakhit, has stated that the confession by the southern command of the United States army on the occurrence of cases of desecration of the Holy Qur’an in Guantanamo prison was a confirmation of the practices that had been reported in the papers and strongly condemned by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

He said that this disgraceful conduct of those soldiers reveal their blatant hatred and disdain for the religion of millions of Muslims all over the world and throws into doubt the nature of the instructions given to the American soldiers on religious values and principles of tolerance.

He added that these unequivocally rejected practices could only lead to an incitement of religious feelings and a deepening of the gulf of difference and intolerance between the Muslim world and the United States of America.

The OIC Spokesman urged the United States Government to live up to its responsibilities and not be lenient with the perpetrators of the desecration. He also demanded that those responsible for this despicable crime should be brought to justice immediately and that urgent measures should be taken to calm the tension in the Muslim world and ensure that such detestable acts are not repeated in the future.

What Were You Doing When You Heard About Koranic Desecration?

As horror stories about Qurans with frayed binding markers continue to surface(left), many recall the exact moment they heard about such abuses, but register little if any memory of Nick Berg's attempts to plead for his life through a gaping hole in his trachea(right).

Anytown--56 years-old Charlotte Campbell recalls it like it happened yesterday. A toilet. A Muslim bible. Unspeakable literary carnage.

"I was on my way to Owen's Pharmacy to pick up medication for my acid reflux, " she said. "When the man on the radio said that a Quran may have been subjected to deliberate and willful binding overflex. I looked at my own self, and said life is so short."

Campbell said she went home and hugged her own books, "not taking any of them for granted."

24 year-old Josh Lupine noted similar reactions on his part.

"I remember studying about the German death camps in school by watching Schindler's List," he said. "It took days for me to get the implied images out of my mind. Then the other day, our coach pulls us aside in the middle of a varsity game and told us about Quran's having bookmarks removed from select 'kill the infidel' passages. I literally felt the cold winds of the Third Reich blowing through that game."


Read the whole thing.

Memorial Day

Paul, an apostle—(not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;)

And all the bretheren who are with me, unto the churches in Galatia:

Grace be to you and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from the present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father:

To whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Fair and Balanced - the St. Petersburg Way

Anita Kumar writes for the St. Petersburg Times. This is how she begins an article about Students for Academic Freedom, a group founded by David Horowitz to promote greater ideological balance in colleges and universities.

Across the nation, liberal professors are being accused of abusing their conservative students by humiliating them in classes, lowering their grades, forcing them to listen to radical leftist views.

Some lawmakers want to even the score. They want to forbid professors from bashing President Bush, mandate that they teach creationism alongside evolution and require them to explain in history class that some doubt the Holocaust existed.

This is, of course, a bizarre misrepresentation of the aims of Students for Academic Freedom. With this in mind, I decided see how a biased writer would begin an article about media bias.

Across the nation, writers for the mainstream media are being accused of Liberal bias, humiliating the readers that don’t agree with them, calling them Neanderthals, forcing them to listen to radical leftist views.



Despite their plummeting believability and drop off in readership, members of the MSM are fighting back. They want to force conservative talk radio off the air and are threatening Rush Limbaugh with jail, they are advocating the assassination of President Bush and believe that journalists are being systematically killed in Iraq by American troops. While praising the image of a crucifix in urine they become outraged by having the Koran touched by a non-Muslim.

I then asked her the following question:

There, do you think that’s a fair representation of the views of the mainstream media? If you don’t, what possessed you to so seriously misrepresent the mainstream views of those who seek more balance in academia?

If you read the entire article you will note the omission of certain facts that make the case against academic bias less forceful. This paragraph, for example omits several easily obtainable facts:

Several national studies are on Horowitz's side, showing that liberal professors outnumber conservative professors on campuses. This year for the first time, universities made the list of top organizations ranked by employees' contributions to a presidential candidate, John Kerry, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

What's missing? The numbers! In an academic study done by political scientist Stanley Rothman of Smith College, communications professor S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University, and Canadian polling expert Neil Nevitte, published in the online journal Forum, paints a stark picture of a politically skewed academy. Nearly three quarters of the professors in a 1999 survey of college faculty identified themselves as left/liberal, only 15 percent as right/conservative; 50 percent were Democrats and 11 percent Republicans.

In OpenSecrets.org we learn that 78% of contributions over $200 went to Democrats and only 21% went to Republicans. At Harvard, 96% of the money went to Democrats.

If you include the numbers, the Liberal bias in academia - especially "elite" academia gets so bad that even Anita Kumar dare not include it in her article, lest she weakens the case against ideological bias.


Good luck on keeping a lid on this.

We've got Pictures - Burning the Koran

Hindus Burn Koran - No One Riots!

The Big Pharaoh is an Egyptian who just posted a picture of the Koran being burned by a crowd of Hindus.

Today I saw the demonstration that the Muslim Brotherhood organized to protest against the "desecration of the Quran". Hundreds of protesters carrying Qurans and banners were surrounded by thousands of security policemen. They chanted slogans against the US and carried banners with the words "The desecration of the Quran is an unforgivable sin" written on them. Several Arab/Muslim countries witnessed the same protests today. It is very interesting to notice that in nearly all those countries the demonstrations were organized by Islamist parties who wanted to seize the "Quran into the super Gitmo toilet" story in order to flex their political muscles in their countries.

So, today thousands were angry because of the story that turned out to be untrue. Ummmm, interesting. Well, take a look at the above picture. It shows a group of radical Indian hindus burning the Quran in front of a camera. So here you go, a Quran getting burned on camera for the entire world to see. Isn't that more serious than Newsweek's story?

Why didn't the Arab/Muslim world erupt in flames? Where was the outrage against hindus? Why didn't we see Indian flags getting burned? Why didn't we see pictures of hindu gods getting "desecrated"? Well, you know the rule: the US is guilty even if proven innocent. Add to that the hypocrisy of those who call themselves Islamists. Those who see hindus (as long as they are not American hindus) burning Qurans and do not give a hoot. Those who see Iraqis getting killed by fellow Muslims and they do not give a hoot as well.

Linda Foley Helps

"Journalists, by the way, are not just being targeted verbally or … ah, or … ah, politically. They are also being targeted for real, um … in places like Iraq. What outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there's not more outrage about the number, and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq."

Linda Foley is President of the Newspaper Guild, a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO which claims a membership of 34,000.

On May 13, 2005 in St. Louis, Ms. Foley is quoted as saying that the U.S. military is literally targeting and killing journalists. A transcript and link to a video of her comments are HERE.

A virtually identical charge was made by former CNN executive Eason Jordan at a conference in Davos, Switzerland. As a result of criticism of his statement he resigned as head of CNN News.

Now Ms. Foley has repeated these accusations. There has been little comment in the MSM, with the exception of Thomas Lipscom in Editor and Publisher

Now a member of Linda Foley’s union has asked her to respond. Hiawatha Bray has asked for a retraction or a clarification.

Those are the facts.

Now my opinion: I doubt that there will be either a retraction or a clarification of her comments. They are already clear. Further, I have no doubt that Linda Foley believes what she said. In her mind, if a reporter is killed those who killed the reporter did so deliberately and in the knowledge that they were killing reporters. Among certain people these things are articles of faith; a priori assumptions not subject to disproof.

Her remarks are being disseminated by the internet bloggers and the non-coverage by the MSM will not prevent these comments from becoming general knowledge. They will become general knowledge to the politically attuned, the well-informed and the opinion leaders in the country. And they will aid in the self immolation of the MSM. In the last century we have seen both technological and intellectual revolutions take place. What we are now seeing is a revolution in communication and the dissemination of information that is rapidly eroding the role of the monolithic one-way media in favor the democratization of information. Think of it as the Samizdat for the American people. And it will have as profound an effect on American society as Samizdat did for the USSR.

Thank you for your help Linda Foley.

Senatorial Unction

Have you noticed how the Republic has been saved? By 14 members? Led by John McCain, certified Hero, who has a movie coming out on Monday?

And why is the Republic saved? Because the “comity” of the Senate has been restored. Have you noticed the comity there? Aren’t you glad? Isn’t that what you wanted? Didn’t you pray for that: “Lord, of only Senators got along, I could die happy?”

I have observed the members of the Gang of 14 breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. Listen to their reasoning: it’s all about “restoring comity” to the Senate.

That is the great result of the compromise that the "Senate 14" achieved. The most exclusive club in the world – inhabited by the most exclusive people in the world – agreed to get along. So the former-KKK-Grand-Kleagle is now bosom buddies with Elizabeth Taylor's seventh husband (only because she married Richard Burton twice).

So we have comity in the Senate.

Forget about the makeup of the Supreme Court; without comity in the Senate, the Republic cannot stand.

Forget about a 200+ year tradition of not filibustering court nominees. Senate comity trumps other traditions since; we are – after all – a club.

Forget about the effects of four years of having your reputation slandered by members of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Forget having an alcoholic member of the club, who killed his paramour in an auto accident, tell the nation that you are morally inferior.

There are members of the club, and non-members. It must be comfortable being a member like John Warner, Robert Byrd and John McCain. The issues of the membership of the Federal judiciary, Presidential prerogatives, and two centuries of tradition regarding appointments are as nothing. Not when it comes to members of the club being clubbable.

There is a reason why there exists in most societies an undercurrent of hatred in a ruling caste. I’m beginning to understand why.

UPDATE: For another, similar view, read Krauthammer.

UPDATE 2: Fixed, I hope.