 | ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
Didn’t Mean to Piss You Off
Look at me all hot shit with my new column. A freshly-built bully pulpit from which I can spew my own special brand of sociopolitical commentary and analysis, giving me the precious illusion of personal relevance. I’m happier than a pig in a wallow over here! The great thing about writing anonymously for an e-zine is that I can pretty much throw anything I want to out there with zero accountability and no thought for repercussions. I sure as hell don’t have to worry about doing what Mike Isikoff of Newsweek had to do a couple of weeks ago – make the choice between issuing a retraction for an unpleasant truth reported upon in his magazine, or risk unleashing a Muslim holy war against the Western world.
Predictably, I know some of you are already shaking your heads at the phrase "unpleasant truth". "He had to retract it because it was a LIE," some of you staunch Bushie Pollyannas are chirping. "The magazine made a mistake," some of you milder souls are saying. "Certainly it couldn’t possibly be true that our military personnel at Guantanamo Bay are flushing copies of the sacred Koran down the toilet in front of fundamentalist Muslim detainees," you’re tut-tutting. "And you’re not helping by insisting that they are!"
For those of you who are of this school of thought, let’s get a few things straight.
I don’t doubt for a minute that what Newsweek saw and reported upon was, indeed, chunks of Muslim holy text being jettisoned down the crapper like so many dead goldfish. Quite a few of the Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been there a while; the men guarding them know what will and won’t work when attempting to extract information from them. Zealous Muslim fundamentalists are infamously tough nuts to crack in an interrogative setting. Threats of pain and death don’t faze them much; to them it just means more glory and a larger number of better-looking virgins waiting to be ravished in Paradise. In more practical terms, it also means earthly glory and pride for their families, and in some cases large amounts of cash as well. Therefore the usual manner of duress won’t yield the result that it would have in, say, a Nazi or Vietcong. Interrogators have to go in a different direction – namely, attacking their symbols.
What’s more, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason why our military personnel, or any other American, shouldn’t feel perfectly free to flush a copy of the Koran down the toilet. Because it’s about time that the Muslim world got the message about what the First Amendment, and by extension the American philosophy of life, is really supposed to mean. They might be bound by their lifeblood to symbols and arcane religious rules, but WE aren’t. We are a country where one guy can put a crucifix in a glass of his own pee and call it art, another guy can burn our flag to let our leaders know he’s not happy with the job they’re doing and yes, a third guy can rip a copy of religious text up and flush it down a toilet. It’s perfectly okay for us to respect the Muslim faith, but why aren’t we doing so on OUR terms? Why all this deference and coddling, this frantic backpedaling when somebody says something a Muslim doesn’t want to hear? If we are to coexist with the Muslim world, they have to understand OUR position, the western position of open discussion, freedom of religion, and a healthy irreverence toward symbolism.
I find it ironic that the entire Muslim world was crying out for American blood over the idea of a Koran being flushed down a toilet, but most were strangely indifferent to the (well-documented) treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib. To them, respect for rules and tradition takes priority; earthly life places a distant second to doing what it takes to remain holy and make it to Paradise. To the west, earthly life is all there is; we measure our success in tangible terms that can be felt here and now. Coexistence has never been easy, and our insistence on reinforcing our presence in their region is making it even harder. If we are going to insist on taking a tough military stance against Muslim extremists, we have to be consistent in matters of culture as well. Hawks insist we’re in a fight for our way of life; if this is the case, hollow deference to Muslim traditions defeats the purpose of that fight.
