Real Desecration

Over the past week, in discussing the blatant calls to dhimmitude -- to start with the closure of the Guantanamo prison camp over a soiled Koran -- by the left, I have roundly accused the Bush administration of appeasement. Specifically, I blame their original policy of giving Korans out to terrorists in the first place for the moral quagmire they now find themselves in. Broadly:

Our only consideration in this war should be making our enemy unable to harm us by the quickest, most effective means available. ... Had Bush kept this one objective in the forefront -- both in his own mind and in the minds of the public -- we would neither be pussyfooting around with Iran and North Korea (or Venezuela for that matter) nor would we be distracted by Korans bought at public expense and soiled on government time. And we would not be at the risk of becoming demoralized by any of this nonsense because we'd have our priorities straight.

And specifically:

Amnesty International's ability to level such charges and still be taken seriously is merely a symptom of appeasement from the outset by the Bushies. Namely: Handling the terrorists at Gitmo with kid-gloves. Giving them Korans in the first place, let alone handling them reverentially, has told our terrorist and pacifist opponents that we subscribe to their moral code.

I believe I also referred to our practice of handling the Koran with two gloved hands as dhimmitude and specifically took exception to the below image from some Moslem riots.

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.

One need not know much about Moslem religious law to see a double standard here. (I don't, and you are about to see just how right I was.) Interestingly, though, via RealClear Politics, I learned of an article by someone who has researched the issue of Koran-handling and has some interesting things to say on this matter.

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.

The term is "najis." On the multilingual Web site of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shi'ite cleric, there is a catalogue of Islamic laws (www.sistani.org). This includes a list of "najis things." There are 10, beginning with an assortment of excretions and body fluids -- obvious stuff that really shouldn't need special mention. On the "najis" list with urine, feces, etc., are the pig, the dog and the "kafir." That means the Christian, the Jew, the unbeliever in Islam -- and chances are, the Gitmo guard.

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: ... bold, loyal and true. They are not unclean.

I'll spot the Moslems one point for the Koran that was accidentally "desecrated" with the fan-blown urine. Heck, I'll even turn a blind eye to what the prisoners actually did to their Korans, which included an actual attempt to flush one down a toilet. But every time an American serviceman was subjected to the outrage of acting on the premise that he was unfit to touch the book in whose name thousands died nearly four years ago, that man was desecrated. If anyone should be protesting about desecration at Guantanamo, it should be Americans, demanding a public apology from their commander-in-chief.

Such treatment is on a par with, and arguably worse, than that experienced by black servicemen in the days of Jim Crow when they traveled in the South.

Respect the Koran? Not at the expense of respecting our men in uniform we don't!

I'll be damned if I am going to kowtow to the scripture of a religion which states from the outset that my body belongs in the same class as human waste. And I will not countenance the demand that our servicemen do the same.

-- CAV

Crossposted to the Egosphere