Newsweek deserving of apology? Pentagon Confirms Koran Incidents

It's the John Kerry model for losing a war

GWB is secretly taking his orders from John Kerry? You heard it first here at the Clutch BBS.

 

TJ, it is interesting to see you get in touch with your Muslim, feminine side.

 

Very good questions, especially no. 2. I think a lot of people from the left have not thought about this enough.

 

We might as well just give it up to the terrorists right now. With the liberal mindset that we see represented here, maybe the terrorists have already won.

You forgot Sweden.

 

Good questions.

1. Totally agree on the first one. A free press is critical to a functioning democracy even if that does occasionally cause problems.

2. People are free to have their prejudices and I for one think even KKK members should be able to parade around in their pointy hats railing about Zionists conspiracies. The issue here though is that we're in a war to win hearts and minds. Outright prejudice and towards Muslims isn't going to accomplish that.

Should Islam reform itself and become more moderate? Of course they should but at the same time we have to deal with the situation that we're given with that Muslims are very touchy about their holy books and as long as we're trying to win them over we need to respect that.

3. Yes this does have to do with the standards we hold and what we expect from others but more than that this is about being serious with the idea that we are trying to win the battle by winning over the attitudes of Muslims.

 

LOL!

 

Do you see the irony between these 2 statements?
one little alleged slip-up and you've got liberals attempting to de-legitimize the entire US military's actions by saying that the servicemen are not respecting a religion. What a crock.
and
Maybe the Muslims ought to take it upon themselves to clean up their act (and the act of those that share their religion), otherwise they really shouldn't be offended when others look down on the behavior of their own.

In the first bolded statement, we are told that liberals are degrading the entire U.S. military on the basis of a few bad apples.

In the second statement, T_J takes the liberty of telling us that Muslims need to clean up their act. Not the few bad apples, but Muslims as a whole.

On a side note, if I understand it correctly, the only country where women aren't allowed on the street without a burqa is Saudi Arabia. In the other countries where people wear burqas, they do it out of choice, which is okay last time I checked. Saudi constitutes approximately 1% of the Islamic world in terms of population, which means that 99% of the Islamic world permits it legally. An interesting fact is that Turkey bans Islamic clothing in governmental institutions, and Turkey has more Muslims than Saudi. So we can translate that to say that more people in the Islamic world are prohibited from burqas than are compelled.

 

amen.

 

Hey, AggieRocket, you must be new in the D&D if you don't know that TJ doesn't let facts get in the way of Muslim or Liberal bashing.

I love to wake up every morning to a Muslim bashing thread/post, it makes me feel like all is well in America and the D&D...

 

its funny that there are about 1.1BILLION Muslims in the world today without categorizing the different sects.... and it took the United States to figure out that it is a violent religion…..the “good guys” against the “evil” religion….its soo childish……if anything I see the united states as a tyrant nation …..i don’t believe there is large world organization called Al-Queida….its all a tactic used by the United States to gain an advantage(get to attack iraq and maybe Iran/Syria and bring a little stabilizing power in the region) from a negative”(9/11)..

 

Apparently punctuation and correct spelling are the tools of a tyrant nation.

 

Sorry, but this deserves a good ol'

 

Check above, but I believe he said <b>terrorists</b> not Muslims.

Actually, it is described both ways: the two sides of T_J!!

 

TJ did say Muslims. Here it is

 

Here is T_J's first post on this subject:

"

He later generalized it to Muslims but I believe in the context of the rest of the post (which was not quoted) he is speaking of Muslims who root for the terrorists but don't themselves commit acts of terror.

 

In the context of his overall tone in this thread it was muslims in general. He even attempted to blow off the fact that the 4 nations with the largest muslim populations in the world had all had female heads of state. He tried to brush that off by saying 'a few countries' in order to makes his bigotted generalization sound founded.

If TJ did only mean those few muslims then he should have been more careful, considering he has strived so hard to justify a negative incorrect stereo-type in this thread already.

 

Leave T_J alone guys, he can't help it.

It is OK T_J, I know where you coming from man, I have met a few people like you in the past.

 

Crikey!

Y'all are deconstructing TJ's posts?

This can come to no good end..

 

He's reading this, giggling mightily.

 

From James Lileks
http://www.lileks.com/screedblog/index.html


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.

Hey, Newsweek: call up Tommy Franks and ask for the banner they put on the ship Bush visited. You know the one. Mission Accomplished.