Muslim Lives Are Desecrated, Not Just the Qur’an

Muslim Lives Are Desecrated, Not Just the Qur’an

By Ramzy Baroud**
Freelance Columnist – Qatar
May 22, 2005

http://www.islamonline.net/English/Views/2005/05/article04.SHTML
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Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, chose to push the limits of cultural insensitivity to downright insult in his piece entitled “Why Islam is disrespected.”

<snip> “Christians, Jews and Buddhists don’t lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don’t call for holy war and riot in the street. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain,” and so forth. Other commentators—who refrained from scrutinizing and “exposing” Islam’s theological limitations or discrediting its cultural practices, rituals, beliefs, and so on—confined their arguments to the issue of Newsweek’s judgment, or lack thereof, regarding the running of the May 9 article.

Some sided with the White House interpretation, as uttered by Press Secretary Scott McClellan in his call on Newsweek and other outlets not to lose their “credibility.” Others questioned McClellan’s own credibility. The agreement, however, regarding Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker’s clearly forced apology and subsequent retraction of the article was across-the-board.

It is ironic that Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in fact the one speaking the unexamined words of truth. He said that Army Gen. Carl Eichenberry, the senior US commander in Afghanistan, reported that the violence “was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.”

So to what could it possibly be tied? Did it dawn on anyone in the mainstream media that the Afghan people might possibly be angry over years of American occupation? Perhaps this failed to cross anyone’s mind.
Could it possibly be that hundreds of millions of Muslims might have had enough common sense to connect the dots and to establish that the desecration of the Qur’an is only the latest episode of a consistent US military policy that hasn’t only dishonored religious symbols but the sanctity of human life, in fact hundreds of thousands of human lives?

Could the hypothesis be true that Muslims, despite their alleged backwardness, had access to TV news, print media, and the Internet and might have accidentally run into hundreds of vile photos of physically humiliated and sexually abused Iraqi prisoners? Could it be possible that these savages learned of harrowing testimonies of former prisoners at Guantanamo detailing what numerous human rights groups unhesitatingly described as “war crimes”?

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But why confine the argument to over-generalized, rhetorical questions? In its response to the scandal, Human Rights Watch issued a statement on May 19, 2005 confirming that, sadly, the Guantanamo episode is the norm. “In detention centers around the world, the United States has been humiliating Muslim prisoners by offending their religious beliefs,” according to Reed Brody, a HRW special counsel.