Some Thoughts on the "Koran in the Toilet" Affair

The worms always come out after it rains.  Just as in the aftermath of  the CBS phony document story, we are now awash in stories that, even though the specific allegations made in the Newsweek story were false, the "substance" of the claims of detainee abuse are true.  Its fake but accurate again.

In other words, in spite of the fake Newsweek story, it turns out that we are being quite beastly to the Gitmo detainees.  According to allegations, one of our guards kicked a Koran that was lying on the ground.  We have used woman interrogators, who have tortured these devout Muslims by talking to them in a suggestive manner.  We have interfered  with their call to prayer by playing loud music.  And according to a complaint that is being filed by some British detainees, we even failed to give the detainees prayer mats. 

All this, we are given to understand, has shattered the delicate sensibilities of the Muslim world.  They all hate America now.

Well the time has come to cry BS on a whole lot of this.  First off, we need to understand just who we have imprisoned at Gitmo.  They are not just people that we scooped up by accident, and not even just people that took up arms against America.  These are hard core terrorists who have either received Al Qaeda training or else were commanders in the field against our forces.   Even the ones we released as supposedly less harmless than the others are turning up in combat against our people.  It shouldn't be necessary to play patty cake with people like this.

And how sincere is the outrage?   As it turns out, the only documented case of Koran abuse in the Gitmo files involved a detainee who was flushing pages of his Koran down a toilet in hopes of plugging it up.   Haven't heard about any riots over that.  And as for the notion that these sort of people are shocked and offended by a woman talking to them in a "suggestive" manner --well--what about all those visits to the strip clubs by the 9-11 attackers?   People tell me (of course, I have no first hand knowledge) that there are ladies in places like that who make a pretty good living off of being suggestive.

We are being Mau-Maued (in the sense of Tom Wolfe's book on the subject).  Our enemies in the Muslim world have turned their sensitivity meters way up high  and are looking for anything they can to take offense.    Have the infidel dogs touched the Koran without washing first, or without putting on white gloves, or placed it too close to a sink?  Outrage!  The Westerners don't respect the True Faith!   Of course, the media completely buys into this and people like Andrew Sullivan practically wet their pants.

It's just like the mosques in Iraq.  We  are consistently warned about the outrage it would cause in the Muslim world if our troops fail to respect the mosques.  But when our guys hit Fallujah it turned out that every other mosque was being used as a strong point and weapons cache.   And somebody please explain to me how the bad guys can use a mosque as a target for a car bombing, actually killing people on their way to worship with nary a peep, but a single unsubstantiated account of  an American interrogator putting a Koran in a toilet causes  a riot where people are killed. 

Victor David Hanson says the extreme Arab reaction to the toilet incident is because they are really an 8th century people with only a veneer of civilization.  I don't buy that, I think our enemies are sophisticated people who know that can't defeat our forces, and so their only hope of victory is through winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the American journalistic community.

In other words, we are being played for suckers.  In Vietnam we thought we had to respect the Tet holidays up until the NVA used our respect to catch us off guard during the Tet offensive.    It's the same thing here; the bad guys want to limit our ability to fight this war by imposing all sorts of religious restrictions on our people, and the "opinion makers" in our society are going right along.

Comments

[gh]

Win over journalists - I doubt it - they intend to wear us out until we leave. As soon as the US wants Iraq's 25% of the world's oil back on the market home we come - unless we get our butts kicked out like in Viet Nam.

[Tommy Shelton]

First thing we need to do is get the press out of Iraq. We need to start charging people with treason even if we don't get any convictions. We need to let them know that the REAL US of America's citizens think they are full of it. They keep saying the same s... over and over until some of the idiots out there really believe them.

[ma492zda]

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