So this whole Koran-burning thing has really chapped my ass. My need for Gold Bond on my bottom doesn’t spring from the Afghans’ reactions to the burning as those were pretty predictable. I mean, let’s face it: anytime you take a bunch of mostly illiterate, gun-toting cavemen with cell phones who see no problem with molesting little boys, honor killings, throwing acid on little girls, and executing women for having the audacity to get gang-raped by their male relatives and then add the figurative and literal fire of religious fervor and extremism, you can pretty much guarantee that the resulting actions will be laced with a liberal dose of backstabbing violence. No, my problem with the reaction to the debacle is OUR reaction.
The first mistake we made was allowing the trash men to get their hands on these things. Of course, they could have been burning cookbooks that were written in Arabic and most of the local nationals working on Bagram wouldn’t have known the difference between Betty Crocker and the seventh Surrah since, as I said before, most of them are illiterate so they think that anything in Arabic is the Koran. Since it was used to write messages, it should have been kept as evidence or intelligence. Either way it should have been treated as classified material. At the very least, it should have been completely destroyed before being tossed in the burn pile.
The second mistake we made was the immediate pro-extremist, anti-Joe sycophancy from our apologist in chief. Our guards saw contraband Korans that had already been desecrated by extremist messages scrawled by their owners (which, by the way, is desecration anyway), seized those books, and disposed of them. Why the hell should we apologize? I don’t see any of them apologizing for burning the Korans that were destroyed when the World Trade Center went down. What do we do next? Apologize for collecting intelligence or killing bad guys? No. Screw that. We don’t need to apologize for helping secure our personnel. And what is the end result of Obama apologizing? Well, a bunch of US personnel getting fragged by their Afghan counterparts. And our response to that? Pretty much nothing. They just killed our guys and the president’s response is to say that the apology avoided violence. Really? Tell that to the widows and orphans and next of kin. You know what we should have done? What the Pashtun understand: exponential measured response. They kill one of ours, we level a town. War is ugly; if you’re going to do it, make it so ugly that nobody ever wants to bring it to your doorstep again. Presenting a weak response to the Pashtuns is just inviting more violence on our guys, not discouraging it.
The last thing we did wrong was this:
So now, our troops cannot even get their hands on a Koran unless they are Muslim. Can Muslims get a Bible? You bet. Book of Mormon? Why not. But Korans are hands-off because apparently the Army doesn’t mind restricting the first Amendment rights of most soldiers as long as it appeases the enemy. And yes, I do consider radical Islam the enemy and anyone that doesn’t is a fool. You cannot appease an enemy that is fueled by radical religious fervor without surrendering to them; you either defeat them or you are defeated by them. Does this policy say that US service members on Bagram cannot own or purchase a Koran? Nope. But it does border dangerously close on violating the establishment clause in the Constitution by providing protected/preferential treatment to one religion over another. Oh, and it really does nothing to protect our troops or prevent more violence form the religious zealots that pervade the forces with which we are supposedly in cooperation over there. If you want to prevent the bad guys from killing our guys because of a holy book, make the bad guys hole-y men.
Tags: 1st Amendment, Al-Qaeda, Bagram, desecration, Kabuki theater, Koran, Memo, Qur'an, Taliban, violation, violence