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bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
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Teufelswacht
Joined: 06 Sep 2004
Location: Land Of The Not Quite Right
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 Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 4:36 am Post subject: |
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| I was wondering if anyone had a link to any Newsweek, Time or AP reports concerning the 2002 invasion of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by Muslims and their use of the Bible as toilet paper. I am especially interested in any news reports detailing Muslim outrage and/apologies concerning the desecration of the Bible by Muslims. Thanks. |
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funplanet
Joined: 20 Jun 2003
Location: The new Bucheon!
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| Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 5:11 am Post subject: |
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the so-journalists are simply following the template......write anything that will hurt Bush and embarass the US
the f*s got people killed...that is CRIMINAL |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 5:18 am Post subject: |
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| I just hope the people killed were people that support Bin Laden. When they die it is not a bad thing. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 7:39 am Post subject: |
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An excellent article on Islamic hypocrisy in relation to religious respect. Any religion that sanctifies the degradation of religious minorities is worthy of contempt, not respect.
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Uhh, yeah. But the thing is, these Muslim militants don't justify their actions by saying that they're gonna build a more democratic and tolerant middle east. But Bush has sold the American public on just such a proposal, so it is kinda relevant to determining the sincerity of his claims if American interrogators are routinely denigrating the religion of the very people they claim to be liberating. |
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The Bobster
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 8:21 am Post subject: |
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Looks all about the same level as bogusness as liars who called themselves "Veterans for Truth" or somesuch during the cmapaign last summer ...
Whatever riots occurred did not seem to have been set off by the article in Newsweek, and not sure but this sure looks like an official govt website to me :
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Afghan Riots Not Tied to Report on Quran Handling, General Says
Army investigating allegations of mishandling at Guantanamo Bay facility
By Jacquelyn S. Porth
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington – The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff says a report from Afghanistan suggests that rioting in Jalalabad on May 11 was not necessarily connected to press reports that the Quran might have been desecrated in the presence of Muslim prisoners held in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Air Force General Richard Myers told reporters at the Pentagon May 12 that he has been told that the Jalalabad, Afghanistan, rioting was related more to the ongoing political reconciliation process in Afghanistan than anything else. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 8:43 am Post subject: |
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More from Susan Hu, via Andrew Sullivan:
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HERE'S THE PROBLEM FOR BUSH: Susan Hu over at Daily Kos is on the case. Here's an important piece of reporting:
I took the extra step today of contacting an attorney that is representing over ten Guantánamo detainees. He works for a prominent, private, Washington, D.C. law firm, and has visited Guantánamo four times since late last year. All of his clients share the same nationality and, partly for this reason, all of his clients have been kept in complete isolation from each other.
Seeing his clients is not easy. First of all, it requires a week's stay in barracks to meet with all his clients for a sufficient amount of time. The barracks are located on the other side of the base from the camps, and the two and half-hour transit time involves a bus and a ferry.
He must prepare, in advance, a list of which clients he wishes to see, and in what order. Once, he was told that the guards could not locate one of his clients.
He meets with his clients one-by-one, never in groups. The detainees have had no contact with each other, and no opportunity to collaborate on false allegations of abuse.
I asked him, "Have you heard any accounts of Qur'anic desecration?"
He replied, "Yes, two detainees told me completely independently that they had witnessed a Qur'an being thrown in the toilet. Another told me that he had witnessed a Qur'an being stomped on. And another told me he had witnessed a Qur'an being urinated on."
He continued, "Most disturbances, like hunger strikes, have been over religious issues, like non-Muslims handling the Koran." I asked how the guards were supposed to supply Qur'ans to the detainees without handling them? He told me that the Muslim chaplains could provide this service, but there were fewer and fewer chaplains available.
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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rok_the-boat
Joined: 24 Jan 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 5:03 pm Post subject: |
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| Has the media lost interest int his story already - or have they been told to loose interest? |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 5:28 pm Post subject: |
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Plenty of it was covered in the op-eds and letters in today's SF Chron.
While it is amusing reading the Bush administration's remarks for their irony, I do have a sliver of sympathy for it this time.
Way to go Newsweek, good job of screwing up big time. |
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gypsyfish
Joined: 17 Jan 2003
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed May 18, 2005 6:54 pm Post subject: |
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No heroes in this story.
Newsweek was wrong for not properly sourcing their story. (And then they really pissed me off by bragging about their transparency when they discovered thier mistake.)
The people who went on a rampage about it and killed people and damaged property were wrong. Blind hypocrites.
And the administration's crocodile tears about how this wrong story has hurt the USA's image overseas is ridiculous. Yeah, that was what hurt the USA's image. 
I saw a great cartoon yesterday that showed a spokesman saying that we would never flush holy documents down the toilet and behind his back he was holding an obviously recently flushed copy of the constitution. |
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Teufelswacht
Joined: 06 Sep 2004
Location: Land Of The Not Quite Right
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 7:21 am Post subject: |
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| rok_the-boat wrote: |
| Has the media lost interest int his story already - or have they been told to loose interest? |
Here's a take on the issue from another angle. This time from a Boston Globe opinion piece:
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Home > News > Boston Globe > Opinion > Op-ed
The Boston Globe
JEFF JACOBY
Why Islam is disrespected
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | May 19, 2005
IT WAS front-page news this week when Newsweek retracted a report claiming that a US interrogator in Guantanamo had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. Everywhere it was noted that Newsweek's story had sparked widespread Muslim rioting, in which at least 17 people were killed. But there was no mention of deadly protests triggered in recent years by comparable acts of desecration against other religions.
No one recalled, for example, that American Catholics lashed out in violent rampages in 1989, after photographer Andres Serrano's ''Piss Christ" -- a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine -- was included in an exhibition subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts. Or that they rioted in 1992 when singer Sinead O'Connor, appearing on ''Saturday Night Live," ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II.
There was no reminder that Jewish communities erupted in lethal violence in 2000, after Arabs demolished Joseph's Tomb, torching the ancient shrine and murdering a young rabbi who tried to save a Torah. And nobody noted that Buddhists went on a killing spree in 2001 in response to the destruction of two priceless, 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha by the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Of course, there was a good reason all these bloody protests went unremembered in the coverage of the Newsweek affair: They never occurred.
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 streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain. But when Reuters reported what Mohammad Hanif, the imam of a Muslim seminary in Pakistan, said about the alleged Koran-flushers -- ''They should be hung. They should be killed in public so that no one can dare to insult Islam and its sacred symbols" -- was any reader surprised?
The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.
From the White House down, the magazine was slammed -- for running an item it should have known might prove incendiary, for relying on a shaky source, for its animus toward the military and the war. Over and over, Newsweek was blamed for the riots' death toll. Conservative pundits in particular piled on. ''Newsweek lied, people died" was the headline on Michelle Malkin's popular website. At NationalReview.com, Paul Marshall of Freedom House fumed: ''What planet do these [Newsweek] people live on? . . . Anybody with a little knowledge could have told them it was likely that people would die as a result of the article." All of Marshall's choler was reserved for Newsweek; he had no criticism at all for the marauders in the Muslim street.
Then there was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who announced at a Senate hearing that she had a message for ''Muslims in America and throughout the world." And what was that message? That decent people do not resort to murder just because someone has offended their religious sensibilities? That the primitive bloodlust raging in Afghanistan and Pakistan was evidence of the Muslim world's dysfunctional political culture?
No: Her message was that ''disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, tolerated by the United States."
Granted, Rice spoke while the rioting was still taking place and her goal was to reduce the anti-American fever. But what ''Muslims in America and throughout the world" most need to hear is not pandering sweet-talk. What they need is a blunt reminder that the real desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an ''insurgency" in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to ''martyrdom."
But what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet's Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to ''converge on our nation's capital for a rally against terrorism" -- and having only 50 people show up.
Yes, Islam is disrespected. That will only change when throngs of passionate Muslims show up for rallies against terrorism, and when rabble-rousers trying to gin up a riot over a defiled Koran can't get the time of day.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is [email protected]. |
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/05/19/why_islam_is_disrespected/ |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 7:26 am Post subject: |
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| Reminds me of Dokdo a little. |
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Teufelswacht
Joined: 06 Sep 2004
Location: Land Of The Not Quite Right
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 7:39 am Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| Reminds me of Dokdo a little. |
Here's one more op-ed piece I happened to come across. This time from the WSJ.
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GOD AND MAN
Hypocrisy Most Holy
Muslims should show some respect to others' religions.
BY ALI AL-AHMED
Friday, May 20, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
With the revelation that a copy of the Quran may have been desecrated by U.S. military personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Muslims and their governments--including that of Saudi Arabia--reacted angrily. This anger would have been understandable if the U.S. government's adopted policy was to desecrate our Quran. But even before the Newsweek report was discredited, that was never part of the allegations.
As a Muslim, I am able to purchase copies of the Quran in any bookstore in any American city, and study its contents in countless American universities. American museums spend millions to exhibit and celebrate Muslim arts and heritage. On the other hand, my Christian and other non-Muslim brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia--where I come from--are not even allowed to own a copy of their holy books. Indeed, the Saudi government desecrates and burns Bibles that its security forces confiscate at immigration points into the kingdom or during raids on Christian expatriates worshiping privately.
Soon after Newsweek published an account, later retracted, of an American soldier flushing a copy of the Quran down the toilet, the Saudi government voiced its strenuous disapproval. More specifically, the Saudi Embassy in Washington expressed "great concern" and urged the U.S. to "conduct a quick investigation."
Although considered as holy in Islam and mentioned in the Quran dozens of times, the Bible is banned in Saudi Arabia. This would seem curious to most people because of the fact that to most Muslims, the Bible is a holy book. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia we are not talking about most Muslims, but a tiny minority of hard-liners who constitute the Wahhabi Sect.
The Bible in Saudi Arabia may get a person killed, arrested, or deported. In September 1993, Sadeq Mallallah, 23, was beheaded in Qateef on a charge of apostasy for owning a Bible. The State Department's annual human rights reports detail the arrest and deportation of many Christian worshipers every year. Just days before Crown Prince Abdullah met President Bush last month, two Christian gatherings were stormed in Riyadh. Bibles and crosses were confiscated, and will be incinerated. (The Saudi government does not even spare the Quran from desecration. On Oct. 14, 2004, dozens of Saudi men and women carried copies of the Quran as they protested in support of reformers in the capital, Riyadh. Although they carried the Qurans in part to protect themselves from assault by police, they were charged by hundreds of riot police, who stepped on the books with their shoes, according to one of the protesters.)
As Muslims, we have not been as generous as our Christian and Jewish counterparts in respecting others' holy books and religious symbols. Saudi Arabia bans the importation or the display of crosses, Stars of David or any other religious symbols not approved by the Wahhabi establishment. TV programs that show Christian clergymen, crosses or Stars of David are censored.
The desecration of religious texts and symbols and intolerance of varying religious viewpoints and beliefs have been issues of some controversy inside Saudi Arabia. Ruled by a Wahhabi theocracy, the ruling elite of Saudi Arabia have made it difficult for Christians, Jews, Hindus and others, as well as dissenting sects of Islam, to visibly coexist inside the kingdom.
Another way in which religious and cultural issues are becoming more divisive is the Saudi treatment of Americans who are living in that country: Around 30,000 live and work in various parts of Saudi Arabia. These people are not allowed to celebrate their religious or even secular holidays. These include Christmas and Easter, but also Thanksgiving. All other Gulf states allow non-Islamic holidays to be celebrated.
The Saudi Embassy and other Saudi organizations in Washington have distributed hundreds of thousands of Qurans and many more Muslim books, some that have libeled Christians, Jews and others as pigs and monkeys. In Saudi school curricula, Jews and Christians are considered deviants and eternal enemies. By contrast, Muslim communities in the West are the first to admit that Western countries--especially the U.S.--provide Muslims the strongest freedoms and protections that allow Islam to thrive in the West. Meanwhile Christianity and Judaism, both indigenous to the Middle East, are maligned through systematic hostility by Middle Eastern governments and their religious apparatuses.
The lesson here is simple: If Muslims wish other religions to respect their beliefs and their Holy book, they should lead by example.
Mr. al-Ahmed is director of the Saudi Institute in Washington.
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http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006712 |
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flip ant
Joined: 01 Jul 2004
Location: He's got high hopes!
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 9:55 am Post subject: |
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As a Muslim, I am able to purchase copies of the Quran in any bookstore in any American city, and study its contents in countless American universities. American museums spend millions to exhibit and celebrate Muslim arts and heritage. On the other hand, my Christian and other non-Muslim brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia--where I come from--are not even allowed to own a copy of their holy books. Indeed, the Saudi government desecrates and burns Bibles that its security forces confiscate at immigration points into the kingdom or during raids on Christian expatriates worshiping privately. |
One of my Bibles was confiscated when I came to the Kingdom a few months ago. I have no idea what they did with it but I'm sure they're not honoring it. There are pockets of Christian "churches" but most are very secretive because of the fear of imprisonment. The outright hypocrisy of the Saudis makes me sick. When the Shoura Council lamented the supposed desecration of a Quran, I laughed out loud. |
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