A Flushed Story

Despite their best efforts to turn the charges that America servicemen mishandled the Quran into an international outrage, the MSM has found little to work with in the latest Pentagon report. That hasn't stopped the knee-jerks at the NYT from editorializing on how horrendous it is to take steps to prevent terrorists from killing us at will, and of course it's had no effect on the Washington Post's headlines this past week.

Something few commentators have noticed is that, in sharp contrast to the treatment Christians in general receive in Saudi Arabia, the persecution of Copts in Egypt, or the madness that passes for government in Iran, prisoners who fully intended to (or succeeded in) kill Americans are given their holy book to read. This alone marks a significant departure from historical methods for dealing with similar men. Does anyone doubt that, in earlier times (and in much of the world today) they would have simply been killed upon capture? Even had they been allowed to live, the idea of wringing our hands over whether or not they're given Qurans to read (and time to pray, and food in accord with their religious beliefs) would have been foreign to even the most civilized nations.

One of the better commentaries I've read on this is from Arthur Chrenkoff, who offers a partial list of the atrocities committed against Muslim holy sites and the Quran itself by . . . Muslim radicals themselves. One at Gitmo reportedly tore up his copy of the Quran, while another there actually tried to flush his down the toilet. But, as Arthur says, we've seen no mass protests against these desecrations among Muslims anywhere.

Why? It's simple:

So what's the explanation? Is there a desecration double-standard at play, where Muslims can get away with murder (literally) but it's only not OK if the infidels do it? Don't think so. Most likely this stark contrast between the outrage in one case and the deadly silence in the other is a sort of an underhanded compliment for America - the recognition of the fact that if the United States have done (or is said to have done) something wrong, you can jump up and down, burn the stars and stripes, chant against the Great Satan, and the Great Satan will profusely apologize for hurting your feelings. But if the Islamic extremists do something wrong - something sacrilegious and offensive - and you start jumping up and down in protest, the extremists will simply come over and kill you.

Remember, too, that the hand-wringing, America-is-evil crowd here at home is made up of the same folks who, until Ruddy Giuliani ran over them in NYC, insisted on the innocence of street criminals, the horror of effective policing, and the "artistic merits" of graffiti. And, on the wider stage, it was they who claimed that, pace mountains of evidence and corpses, the USSR was a modern, efficient society that would indeed some day bury us. That Third World thugs who murdered their own at will were champions of liberation from colonialism. And that Ho was really a liberal who was forced to choose communism because the West refused to support him in his time of need.

Flannery O'Connor warned us against a tenderness that becomes mere theory:

"One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him. The Alymers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied. Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."

As indeed it did, in Germany, Russia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan, China, and elsewhere. A sentimentality so separated from history and reality that it cannot name evil or recognize its source is a moral and intellectual vacuum that seeks to suck all of civilization's pillars into its maw. Too many of our elites have already made that journey; we mustn't let them bring the rest of us along for the ride.

Update: For excellent coverage and commentary on the whole Gitmo story, don't miss Michelle Malkin's post from last Wednesday, or Hugh Hewitt's round-up and commentary from this morning. And Democracy Project contributor Gordon Cucullu wrote a great post this past week, to boot.