"Fighting Words"
May. 17th, 2005 10:25 amFor those of you who have been paying attention, there is a huge brouhaha over whether or not the military abused a copy of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay. There are a few things about this incident that really bother me.
The first is the constant use of the word "holy" by the Bush Administration when describing the Koran. Nobody I know consistently uses the word "holy" to describe the Bible or the Torah, and would probably gag applying that adjective to the Baghavad Gita or the Kama Sutra. I don't mean to imply that "holy" is never applied to those books, but in every press conference this week over the incident members of the Bush Administration consistently referred to the Koran as "The Holy Koran" (tm).
The Bush Administration has painted itself as a friend of the fundamentalist mindset in this country, one that believes that there is no "holy" book other than the Bible, and to consistently call the Koran a "holy" book when, supposedly, no one in the Bush Administration really believes that shows just how weak-spined they are when it comes to living up to their own rhetoric.
On the other hand, over in the Middle East when the story came out, the Islamic world went nuts and killed people. I'm sorry, but in a civilized world you might call the desecration of a mass-produced religious text the act of a cad, you might call it distasteful, you might beleive the perpetrators are hell-bound barbarbians, but that is no reason for murder. Can you imagine any Western nation where the maltreatment of an object would cause mass violence that leads to pogramage and decimation? I can't believe that we are so afraid of those people and their medieval mindset that we are willing to backpeddle, kowtow, and perform obesiance to make them stop. They won't stop.
And now that Newsweek has retracted the story, it doesn't matter. They don't believe that the incident may never have happened. The rioters are incapable of suspending judgement. They want an excuse to go on rioting, killing, and making the rest of the world suffer, and they're going to hang onto this one for a while.
Here in the United States and in the rest of the modern world, we have something generally regarded as freedom of expression. This is true not just of speech, but print, and in our modern world, recordings of audio and video. The idea of supressing another's right to speak his mind is not merely abhorrent, it is immoral. The right to expression often includes the right to make that expression with whatever tools are available, so long as those tools are your property. It really is time to apply those moral standards to the rest of the world. Because if we don't fight for the ideals of the Enlightment, we are going to let the light go out.
The first is the constant use of the word "holy" by the Bush Administration when describing the Koran. Nobody I know consistently uses the word "holy" to describe the Bible or the Torah, and would probably gag applying that adjective to the Baghavad Gita or the Kama Sutra. I don't mean to imply that "holy" is never applied to those books, but in every press conference this week over the incident members of the Bush Administration consistently referred to the Koran as "The Holy Koran" (tm).
The Bush Administration has painted itself as a friend of the fundamentalist mindset in this country, one that believes that there is no "holy" book other than the Bible, and to consistently call the Koran a "holy" book when, supposedly, no one in the Bush Administration really believes that shows just how weak-spined they are when it comes to living up to their own rhetoric.
On the other hand, over in the Middle East when the story came out, the Islamic world went nuts and killed people. I'm sorry, but in a civilized world you might call the desecration of a mass-produced religious text the act of a cad, you might call it distasteful, you might beleive the perpetrators are hell-bound barbarbians, but that is no reason for murder. Can you imagine any Western nation where the maltreatment of an object would cause mass violence that leads to pogramage and decimation? I can't believe that we are so afraid of those people and their medieval mindset that we are willing to backpeddle, kowtow, and perform obesiance to make them stop. They won't stop.
And now that Newsweek has retracted the story, it doesn't matter. They don't believe that the incident may never have happened. The rioters are incapable of suspending judgement. They want an excuse to go on rioting, killing, and making the rest of the world suffer, and they're going to hang onto this one for a while.
Here in the United States and in the rest of the modern world, we have something generally regarded as freedom of expression. This is true not just of speech, but print, and in our modern world, recordings of audio and video. The idea of supressing another's right to speak his mind is not merely abhorrent, it is immoral. The right to expression often includes the right to make that expression with whatever tools are available, so long as those tools are your property. It really is time to apply those moral standards to the rest of the world. Because if we don't fight for the ideals of the Enlightment, we are going to let the light go out.
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