As I posted day before yesterday it’s mind boggling to me that people are rioting about some U.S. interrogators are reported to place Qurans on toilets and maybe even flushed one down. In this country, our culture, if a non-Christian were to make a show of doing that same thing to a Bible about the worst people would do is think him rude and maybe snub him or her in public. As the protests and riots continue and I read up on it makes more sense to me what they are upset about. Not that I agree with it, but I can make sense of it within their framework. From this article:
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, insults to the Qur’an and Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, are regarded as blasphemy and punishable by death.
So… in their frame of reference our interrogators have committed crimes worthy of death sentences and we let them get away with it and perhaps even support those sort of “atrocities“. Our casual acceptance of these “heinous crimes” is as repugnant to them as cannibalism or human sacrifice is to our culture.
This is all extremely interesting to me. I have no solution, short of destroying of their culture, but getting a grasp on the nature of the problem certainly can’t hurt.
In Afghanistan, where these riots took place, many people have had relatives killed in their homes by US bombings, which are continuing. Many of them have also heard stories of their fellow citizens being tortured, sexually abused, and killed under torture by Americans in places like the Bagram Air Base. Many of them have seen their homes searched and seen their relatives humiliated by the heavy-handed tactics of the Americans. The blasphemy is for them the straw that killed the camel’s back.
I suspect that if we heard about a Muslim government desecrating the Bible to break the wills of American prisoners, some folks here would be rather upset.
See/hear: http://www.rhizomes.net/issue9/stupid.mp3
Now if it were in a major Metropolitan museum and funded by the NEA, that would be Art.
Something of a double standard, but there it is.