Get a Life, Then a Book


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Get a Life, Then a Book

By Shawn Macomber

5/20/2005 12:06:05 AM

BOSTON -- If Angelina Jolie can help bring peace to Sierra Leone, I think I might have a compromise solution that can salve the wounds of this latest Gitmo outrage: We'll stop throwing your Korans in the toilet if you'll stop burning our flags.

A joke, of course, but one that exemplifies a larger point: In light of the travesty that was Abu Ghraib and several other published accounts of Koran desecration, it's not implausible (Newsweek's retraction notwithstanding) that something along the lines of what was reported did happen at Gitmo. Nevertheless, if the Muslim world is to advance/progress/evolve into a peaceful place where human rights are protected and a more socially and monetarily productive pluralism is embraced, getting over the uber-sensitivity with regard to their book would be a good first step.

Indeed, one of the most important steps on the way to a peaceful enlightened existence outside the Muslim world has been when people wisely started treating church more like a book-of-the-month club (albeit, with the same book every month) than a singular prescription for the ordering of society.

Try to imagine, if it is even possible, American Christians setting a New York City block afire because someone in Saudi Arabia kicked around the Bible. When American Jews had issues with the message and intent of The Passion of the Christ last year, we saw a riot of press releases and op-eds, but no actual riots. The other morning when I saw crying Pakistanis angry that a Koran might have been desecrated at Gitmo burning an American flag on the front page of the Boston Globe, my first reaction wasn't to go burn a Pakistani flag in the street in spontaneous protest with my neighbors.

In fact, you could come into my house today and throw any one of my books into the toilet and I might call you a jerk, but I guarantee you I will not scream, cry, or risk my life over it. Kick any of my books across the floor and I will not pray for God to smite you. When my neighbors get a little too enthusiastic with their hip-hop, I call the police to deal with it, not a priest, rabbi, or dial-a-fatwa.

This is not because I -- an un-baptized heathen -- am any better than anyone else, or because Christians or Jews are better than Muslims. Indeed in some parts of the world today fundamentalists from all religions still behave in absurdly backward ways. Literal interpretation Jews in settlements outside the borders of Israel -- many radicalized in America, it may as well be noted -- are holding up a peace agreement their government and every other country on the face of the earth has endorsed because they cannot tell the difference between their book and rule of law; between the Torah and a deeded title. Some evangelicals in our own country are taking credit for everything from handing Bush the last election to the creation of every worthwhile American institution.

But the simple fact is that, overall, most religious people in civilized nations -- Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Deist, whatever -- have "a life" before they have "a book." And that's a good thing. Whenever more people are dedicated to their book than their lives, disaster is bound to follow.

Need a local example? Puritanism gave us the Salem witch trials, bad teeth, and worse clothes. Religious tolerance gave us peace, commerce, and variety. It's not much of a choice, really, is it? I think we can all agree we'd much rather have the Pilgrims as characters in children's picture books than running the government.

It's sort of amusing in a tragic way that the leaders of Islamic countries where manliness and male superiority are pillars of their book-based government have ended up seeming so weak and emasculated in the face of this controversy.

"The apology and retraction are not enough," Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed wailed to Reuters after the Newsweek retraction. "They should understand the sentiments of Muslims and think 101 times before publishing news which hurt feelings of Muslims."

This is from a representative of a country that routinely burns its political prisoners with acid and boiling water, an act that hurts more than the feelings of many Muslims. The Pakistani authorities, our great allies in the righteous War on Terror, have not apologized for the rape rooms in their prisons where Muslims are sexually assaulted as a matter of course.

UNFORTUNATELY, THE REACTION of the Bush Administration has been basically to hold the collective hand of the Muslim world and have a good cry with them. Once again, the Bush Administration has opted to call for tolerance of fundamentalism, even as the nascent secular movements in these Islamic nations struggle for air.

Not that we perhaps shouldn't apologize and agree that this sort of behavior is unacceptable, but groveling so much gives the unfortunate impression that this maniacal, insane reaction that ended some lives and destroyed others was somehow justified.

Just once, wouldn't you like to hear something reasonable come tumbling out of one of our representatives to the world? Instead of Condi Rice saying, "We honor the sacred books of all the world's great religions. Disrespect for the holy Koran is abhorrent to us all," wouldn't you have rather heard her say something like, "We're really, really sorry, but, come on, seriously, don't kill yourselves over it."

By allowing the rioters to get a rise out of the highest echelons of the U.S. government, the Bush Administration has basically guaranteed this will become a regular occurrence. Like a child having a fit over a toy, acknowledging one over-reaction encourages another. And you can't blame that all on Newsweek.

(emphasis by rumbleph1sh)

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If Angelina Jolie can help bring peace to Sierra Leone, I think I might have a compromise solution that can salve the wounds of this latest Gitmo outrage: We'll stop throwing your Korans in the toilet if you'll stop burning our flags.

:rofl: :laugh:

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May 22, 2005. 01:00 AM

Bush should be talking straight to Muslims

Thomas L. Friedman says Bush team needs to tell Arabs the truth and condemn the murderous reaction to Newsweek's Qur'an allegations

The fact that the White House spokesman Scott McClellan spent part of a briefing last week excoriating Newsweek ? for printing a now-retracted article alleging the desecration of the Qur'an at Guantanamo Bay ? and telling its editors that they had a responsibility to "help repair the damage" to America's standing in the Arab-Muslim world, while not offering a single word of condemnation for those who went out and killed 16 people in Afghanistan in riots linked to the article, pretty much explains why America is struggling to win the war of ideas in the Muslim world today.

We are spending way too much time debating with ourselves, or playing defence, and way too little time actually looking Arab Muslims in the eye and telling them the truth as we see it.

In part, this is because America is so dependent on their oil ? and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.

In part, this is because the Bush administration got so carried away by the Iraqi elections that it lost focus.

And in part this is because we are afraid to say the truth, because we ? wrongly ? believe these people are incapable of rational thought and will just react violently. Therefore, if we have an information campaign, it must all be about explaining to them who we are, and why we are not bad people.

It must never involve us asking who they are and why they are behaving in ways that don't live up to the values they profess.

Instead of sending McClellan out to flog Newsweek, the president should have said: "Let me say first to all Muslims that desecrating anyone's holy book is utterly wrong. These allegations will be investigated, and any such behaviour will be punished. That's how we Americans intend to look in the mirror.

"But we think the Arab-Muslim world must also look in the mirror when it comes to how it has been behaving toward an even worse crime than the desecration of God's words, and that is the desecration of God's creations.

"In reaction to an unsubstantiated Newsweek story, Muslims killed 16 other Muslims in Afghanistan in rioting, and no one has raised a peep ? as if it were a totally logical reaction. That is wrong.

"In Iraq, where Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni Muslims are struggling to build a pluralistic new order, other Muslims, claiming to act in the name of Allah, are indiscriminately butchering people, without a word of condemnation coming from Muslim spiritual or political leaders.

"I don't understand a concept of the sacred that says a book is more sacred than a human life. A holy book, whether the Bible or the Qur'an, is only holy to the extent that it shapes human life and behaviour.

"Look, Newsweek may have violated journalistic rules, but what jihadist terrorists are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan ? blowing up innocent Muslims struggling to build an alternative society to dictatorship ? surely destroys the Qur'an.

"They are the real enemies of Islam, because they are depriving Muslims of a better future.

"From what I know of Islam, it teaches that you show reverence to God by showing reverence for his creations, not just his words. Why don't your spiritual leaders say that? I am asking, because I want to know."

Fortunately, a few courageous Arab intellectuals, such as Abderrahman al-Rashed, have asked such things.

Writing in Wednesday's Saudi daily Asharq Al Awsat, he said: "When thousands in Afghanistan are concerned about a report in a magazine that does not reach them, written in a language they do not speak, leading them to protest in a manner unprecedented among other Islamic nations that do speak English, the matter is worth pursuing further: it tells us more about the dangers of propaganda and its exploitation by opposition groups than it does about spontaneous popular sentiments."

And a few days ago, a group of Iraqi journalists actually went to Jordan and got right in the face of Jordanian columnists and editors, demanding to know why they were treating Muslim mass murderers in Iraq like anti-colonial war heroes. It's already changed the tone. That's the war of ideas.

The greatest respect we can show to Arabs and Muslims ? and the best way to help Muslim progressives win the war of ideas ? is to take them seriously and stop gazing at our own navels.

That means demanding that they answer for their lies, hypocrisy and profane behaviour, just as much as we must answer for ours.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSe...id=968332188854

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i do agree with this article but then again i understand this is a delicate situation that requires immediate, careful attention.

with that said, i also think that there are muslim/arab nations which should condem the murders in lieu of the erroneous newsweek article. yes it was on US soil but stop looking to the US to fix everything. im not saying its our responsibility either, then again the same nations where the murders took place are also responsible, if not more, than the US.

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i do agree with this article but then again i understand this is a delicate situation that requires  immediate, careful attention.

with that said, i also think that there are muslim/arab nations which should condem the murders in lieu of the erroneous newsweek article.  yes it was on US soil but stop looking to the US to fix everything.  im not saying its our responsibility either, then again the same nations where the murders took place are also responsible, if not more, than the US.

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i agree as well, but it definitely applies to everyone, not just religious people.

people get very sensitive about their beliefs (and therefore symbolic representations of it), but to me, beliefs written in the blood of others can never be worth it.

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I agree too. I can understand how Muslims would be upset about hearing that, but it really is not that big of a deal. You would never hear about any Western countries doing this. Even the craziest hard-core Christians in America are pretty tame compared to the Islamic fundamentalists that seem to get all the press in the Middle-East. Burning Harry Potter books is absolutely nothing compared to killing a bunch of random people.

I do think it's pretty silly about how the White House reacted to Newsweek though. 'You guys really should make absolutely certain about something before you go and act on... oh wait.'

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Thought this was another great, although similar read.

Muslims Have Desecrated Bibles and Churches

So what is all the mob angst over the Koran?

by Bruce Thornton

Private Papers

The images of Muslims rampaging over rumors and unproven allegations of ?Koran abuse? are troubling ? but not because of the behavior of the mobs. What else should we expect from fanatics whose religion justifies a toxic combination of arrogant superiority, spiritual entitlement, and corrosive resentment over history's repudiation of their inflated estimation of their world-historical role? Their minds addled by this brew, they find it perfectly reasonable to believe gratifying fantasies in which 9/11 was the handiwork of Zionist agents, the United States has spent lives and treasure liberating Iraqi Muslims in a scheme to acquire oil, and Jews are the masterminds of a sinister plot to oppress Allah's darlings.

No, what should trouble us is our own response. For the past week high-ranking officials of the United States government have been falling all over themselves assuring the rioters that we really, really do respect their ?holy Koran? and would never, never sanction such disrespect. We like their religion, we really do; we respect and honor it and its marvelous contributions to civilization. And what have we received in exchange for all these protestations of respect and esteem? More riots and more contempt.

I don't know if this behavior expresses the administration's true belief or if it is a PR tactic. Either way it's a huge mistake that reflects the failure to understand what and who we are dealing with. The idea that everything the Islamists do is a reaction to what we do is a dangerous delusion. They have their own reasons grounded in their religion and its history, a history of aggressive expansion against the infidel that confirmed Islam's superiority and Allah's sanctioning of it as the one true faith. Persisting in that expansion and reversing its centuries-long contraction are not options for the faithful ? as taking the cross and going on crusade were for medieval Europeans ? but spiritual imperatives.

The jihadists may be irrational, but they are not stupid. They know that the traditional means of expanding Islam, conquest and colonization, are impossible given the West's overwhelming military superiority. So we have ?jihad by other means? ? terrorism, of course, but also the manipulation of the West to make it behave in ways that demonstrate its spiritual bankruptcy and the jihadists' power.

They know, for example, that the West has been corrupted by a self-loathing cultural relativism masquerading as cosmopolitan tolerance and respect for the ?other.? They know too the various psychological springs of this attitude: guilt over a presumed history of colonial and imperial crimes; indifference subsidized by wealth, comfort, and leisure; a sentimental obsession with suffering and wounds to self-esteem; and a spiritual corruption that privileges the material and sensual over the transcendent. The highest good for many in the West is simply to be comfortable, entertained, gratified, and untroubled by any thought that somebody somewhere may be suffering, even if he deserves it.

The riots over the alleged abuse of the Koran are, as much as is the homicide bomber's disregard of his own life and the lives of the innocent, a way of starkly illustrating the jihadists' spiritual superiority and our own spiritual decadence. They know, as we should, that Muslims have desecrated thousands of Korans and mosques, and that Muslims have desecrated Bibles and churches, most recently when Palestinian Arab murderers occupied the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. They know that Muslims in the West are free to practice their religion, while Christians and Jews in many Muslim countries are subjected to restrictions and often persecution. And they know they don't apologize for any of this blasphemous, intolerant behavior. But the double standard is precisely the point: it expresses power, the power of their spiritual belief to compel us to sanction and tolerate such obvious hypocrisy.

So too with our abject apologies, for to the mind of the jihadist those who are spiritually correct do not need to apologize; only the infidel weakling does precisely because he is weak and an infidel. Did any Muslim clerics apologize for the terrorists who desecrated the Church of the Nativity? Do any of them protest against the persecution of Christians and Jews that goes on every day in many Islamic states? Has Turkey apologized for its genocidal jihad against the Armenian Christians? Do we ever hear Muslim clerics ? talking when Westerners aren't around, that is ? express the same respect and tolerance for Christianity and Judaism that they demand for Islam? No, because what we consider virtues they consider signs of spiritual exhaustion, proof that they are right and in the long run will prevail, for military and economic power can not compensate for a lack of belief in something that transcends the material and so is worth dying and killing for.

We, of course, think that we're expressing our higher values when we tolerate this double standard, for we fancy ourselves so much more sophisticated in our knowledge that economics, politics, and psychology are the true cause of things, and so we can be cavalier with our own spiritual traditions. Thus eventually, by the force of such examples of sophisticated understanding and good deeds, those millions of incipient jihadists will see the light and prefer freedom, democracy, and prosperity to spiritual certainty and obedience to Allah.

And here is our gravest error: thinking that the material will always trump the spiritual, just because it has for many of us in the West. That's why we are puzzled when our good deeds for the Muslim world are ignored. Millions of Iraqi Muslims are free to rebuild their own society subsidized by billions in U.S. dollars, millions are free of a murderous psychopath who tortured and plundered them, millions are free to practice their religion without facing persecution and murder, and yet a few instances of ?mishandling? of the Koran bring on riots, while all those benefits bought with our blood and treasure are met with indifference or simply ignored.

In fact, all our good deeds, all our attempts to show how much we esteem Islam are considered signs of spiritual weakness, and so are merely invitations to more aggression. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Israel, for half a century the front line of the modern jihad against the West. Time after time Israeli concessions, most obviously those following the Oslo agreements, have been met with more murder of Israelis. The withdrawal from Lebanon led to a propaganda coup for Hizbollah and a terrorist army independent of any state authority sitting on Israel's northern border; the withdrawal from Gaza may achieve the same thing to the southwest. Meanwhile Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas ? a published Holocaust denier who is said to have sent the '72 Munich terrorists off to their work with kisses on their cheeks ? is invited to the White House and promised millions in aid, even as the Israeli army continues to intercept homicide bombers trying to cross the border to blow up more Jews. The jihadist long-term goal to destroy Israel is still on track, pursued for the present by tactical moves designed to placate and dupe blinkered Westerners.

This behavior smacks of the modern version of what Bat Ye'or calls dhimmitude, a psychological submission to Islam that accepts one's own cultural inferiority. If we do not start recognizing the current conflict for what it is, another episode in the 14-century-long jihad against the West, we will end up like Europe, in a state of full-blown psychological dhimmitude characterized by abject submission to hypocritical double-standards that validate Islam's superiority and the West's inferiority. What else explains the Italian judge who indicted journalist Oriana Fallaci for ?defaming Islam? in her book The Force of Reason? The quintessential Western political and intellectual good of free inquiry and speech is subordinated to Islamic sensibilities, an action that to the jihadist proves their beliefs are right and ours are wrong.

If we are serious about winning what has been misnamed the ?war on terror,? we need to start by renaming it the ?war against jihad? and taking seriously the millions and millions of Muslims who have made clear their passionate support for jihad against the West, including those Palestinian Arabs who cloak jihad in the Western camouflage of nationalist aspirations. We need to stop pretending that what we call Islamism is some sort of deformation of Islam instead of the modern expression of its jihadist traditions. We need to take seriously those spiritual motives and their power and stop reducing them all to our own material causes. And we need to understand that only those actions and statements unequivocally displaying our firm belief in the value and superiority of our own culture ? the culture that has made us so free and rich that we can afford the luxury of despising it ? will help us prevail.

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