The Media "Insurgency"

The curious refusal of the news media to call a spade a spade with regards to terrorism has been beaten to death already. Everyone -- the news media excepted -- seems to realize by now that the Iraqi "insurgents" are terrorists. Or that "militant" is not quite a damning enough term to describe a man who bombs a civilian aircraft. Or that "freedom fighters" used with reference to the PLO is doubly oxymoronic since "fighters" enter combat like men rather than bombing civilian targets and freedom is the last thing on the minds of the PLO. Ad nauseam.

Of course, calling the refusal "curious" on my part might seem ... curious on my part. This would especially be true were the media on the side of the terrorists. The following certainly won't prove that the media are taking the wrong side in the war against the Islamofascists to everyone's satisfaction, but it will alarm anyone with a grain of sense. It reminds me of a joke usually told among economists that I can't exactly recall. It goes something like this:

An economist once noticed that a friend of his was driving around a ten year old beater. He wondered why, so he asked the friend. "Oh, what I really want is a Mercedes," the friend replied.

"Obviously not," answered the economist.

The meaning of the economist's reply is that the fact that the man does not own a Mercedes reflects upon his set of priorities, his hierarchy of values. He might really like a Mercedes, but if he does not own one and has no plan in place to get one, then owning a Mercedes really isn't one of his top priorities. His actions have spoken louder than his words.

And so it is with the news media. I am sure that, were you to ask any editor of a major paper whether he supported putting a stop to terrorism, he would doubtless say that he did. (I leave aside the question of whether some might regard our nation's attempt to defend itself from Islamofascists as "terrorism.") But were you to look at his paper on any given day, you would, like the economist in the joke, say, "Obviously not."

That's what I did today. On the front page of today's Houston Chronicle and below the fold -- because the Michael Jackson trial is obviously the most important thing going on in the world -- is a story that breathlessly proclaims that the Pentagon admitted that some Korans were indeed "desecrated" at Gitmo. (If Reuters can use scare quotes around the term "terrorist," I can damn well use them for the term "desecration" when used with regards to the book in whose name the terrorists commit atrocities. I will continue to do so until I see a Moslem demonstration against terrorism numbering over 100,000 and resulting in zero human deaths. In other words, I shall henceforth do so indefinitely. Moslems: Consider this a challenge or an insult as you will.) The star attraction, of course, is the one about the Koran, the urinator, and the air vent:

The Pentagon released new details Friday about mishandling of the Quran at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, confirming that a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book and that an interrogator stepped on a Quran and was later fired for "a pattern of unacceptable behavior."

In other confirmed incidents, a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran.

These are the first two paragraphs. Before I reveal what was buried at the very end of this story, I think it apropos to bring up an interesting fact pointed out by Charles Krauthammer in his excellent editorial on how we have reacted to allegations of Koran "desecration." (BTW: This demands a full read. It is mostly very good.)

The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran [italics added] to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside.

Note also that, again, no U.S. guard attempted to flush a Koran down a toilet. Now look at what is buried at the end of the story -- and in the middle of the print edition of the Chronicle:

Hood also said he had found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Qurans. "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," Hood's report said. It offered no explanation for those alleged abuses.

Of course, these prisoners intentionally "desecrated" their Korans, but if people die over a Koran being wetted, it is a sucker bet that they will have been murdered over the accidental wetting. Furthermore, note this wording:

Allegations of Quran desecration at Guantanamo Bay have led to anti-American passions [Is this a euphemism for "17 deaths"? --ed] in many Muslim nations, although Pentagon officials have insisted that the problems were relatively minor and that U.S. commanders have gone to great lengths to enable detainees to practice their religion in captivity. [all italics mine]

Compare how the Chronicle describes our over-generous efforts to accommodate the religious preferences of the Islamofascists with how Krauthammer describes them.

[W]hat were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book "Portraits 9/11/01" — vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11.

Indeed. I would add that, in addition to there having been many violent prote--, I mean, mass thrashings-about, over the earlier alleged "desecration" of the Koran on the part of American guards, there has not been a single one of the following:

A request (Oh, okay, the best we could hope for is an angry demand.) by any Islamic government that the United States stop supplying Korans to these prisoners on the grounds that these prisoners are not practicing "authentic" Islam.

A fatwa issued by a Moslem cleric against prisoners who have "desecrated" the Koran in order to slander their captors.

A peaceful protest by devout rank-and-file Moslems against terrorists who defile the holy book of Islam.

Listen with me for any of these over the next few days and you will hear only the chirping of crickets -- unless more anti-American protests erupt.

Oh, wait! I guess they have! But before I link to the story, let me point out one more thing. Krauthammer describes how we have instructed our prison guards to handle the Koran.

Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.

Now observe this image, taken from anti-"desecration" riots on June 3. Either this protestor is "desecrating" a Koran or our government is perhaps going so far as to instruct our guards to accept dhimmitude in handling the Koran as the Moslems would have nonbelievers do -- despite the fact that Bibles and Torahs are routinely destroyed in Islamic countries, not to mention innumerable Korans destroyed when Moslem sects destroy each other's mosques. We are bending over backwards for these people. We hear not one "Thank you!" but the complaints are endless. I'd rather we not be in the business of handing out free Korans, but if we do so anyway, we should let our guards handle them as they would any other book. No apologies or explanations.

The photo caption: "Members of Bangladesh Soldiers of Islam, the children wing of Youth Jamiyat, hold the Quran during an anti-U.S. protest in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Friday, June 3, 2005. The group was demonstrating against the alleged desecration of the Quran by U.S. soldiers in Guantanamo Bay."

Anyway. Remember: This is a book. The media treatment of the story, which I have dissected at length, is bad enough. What's worse? The fact that our news media consider this more important than the following story, which I found buried on page 19: "Evidence grows that Iran is hiding terrorists."

Saudi intelligence officers tracked and apprehended Khaled bin Ouda bin Mohammed al-Harbi last year in eastern Iran, officials said. The arrest came nearly three years after the cleric appeared with bin Laden and discussed details of the Sept. 11 planning during a dinner that was videotaped and aired across the world.

...

The officials said interrogations of al-Harbi, who is now in Saudi Arabia, have yielded confirmation of many al-Qaida tactics, including how members crossed into Iran after the U.S. began military operations to rout al-Qaida and the Taliban from Afghanistan.

U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies also have evidence stretching back to the late 1990s that indicates Ahmad Ibrahim al-Mughassil remains hiding in Iran. He is wanted as one of the masterminds of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans.

This is Iran. You know, the Iran that's feverishly working on the bomb. As far as I can tell, the Houston Chronicle regards a story about some urine accidentally wetting a book belonging to a captured terrorist as more important than the fact that a foreign country is allowing other terrorists to roam freely.

Welcome to the twenty-first century's version of "yellow journalism," in which a war-prisoner's yellow-stained Koran is more newsworthy than the potential for more American deaths at the hands of terrorists receiving safe haven -- and maybe first dibs on nuclear weapons or at least nuclear waste. This is abominable.

We are in the middle of a war, and the Chronicle has assigned exactly the opposite relative rankings to three stories to what they deserved. To recapitulate: (1) the Michael Jackson trial (above the fold, front page, with photo -- for a story that belongs in the lifestyle section or national news at best), (2) the Pentagon's statements on Koran "desecration" at Gitmo (below the fold, front page, no picture -- important mainly because the reaction of the Moslem world as a whole is very telling), and (3) the story on nuclear club wannabe Iran helping harbor terrorists as Afghanistan did before the September 11, 2001atrocitiess (page A19, above the fold, no picture -- vitally important because we have failed to invade this "Axis of Evil" member by now).

If the editorial staff of the Houston Chronicle say they are behind the war effort, their actions say otherwise.

-- CAV

PS: (1) Martin Lindeskog has a really nice post on this over at Ego. (2) Update: I comment further on Amnesty International's efforts (now aided by Joe Biden) to close Gitmo or render it ineffective.

Updates

6-5-05: (1) Fixed typos, HT Adrian Hester. (2) Added PS.