It seems that NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization click HERE for Wikipedia definition) is hell bent on keeping things hot in the middle east. This story broke yesterday and the public outcry from the Middle-East has shocked the world......well, the whole world minus one.
NATO Apologizes for Koran Burning
That story led to this one:
US Embassy in Kabul Closes in Midst of Anti-US Protests
and this one (where I first learned of the whole issue):
Koran on the Stake; US Closes Embassy in Kabul ("Stake"...as in : "Burned at the stake")
As upsetting and dire as the consequences of this apparent act of racism / religious oppression may well turn out to be, it is equally upsetting that this issue was even allowed to come to the public's knowledge.
Here is the skeleton of the story: at the military detention facility at Bagram Air Field in Eastern Afghanistan, copies of the Koran and other religious material were removed from the library's shelves disposed of (burnt) after extremist messages / inscriptions were found in them. NATO states that they did indeed remove the material from circulation but the burning was inadvertent. Following the breaking of this story, rioting began in Kabul prompting the lock down of the US embassy located in the city and is threatening to worsen.
Before labeling my words quasi-treasonous, hear me out.....
First, allow me to give the following obligatory disclaimer: there is never a place in a society for religious persecution, discrimination or humiliation etc; Islam has every right to exist and is to be treated every bit as valid as Christianity or any other religion. While there is no excuse for violence, let us not be too quick to look down on the Muslims for feeling the need for non-violent demonstration as that is a right so many of our young men and women fought to grant them.
That being said, my main issue is this: after having learned so many costly lessons in the about our respective cultural differences has NATO (namely the USA) even allowed this story to see the light of day?
If one looks to the text of this entry, shortly after the the link to the Italian news story they will notice that I called the Koran burning an apparent act of racism. (If not, allow me to reproduce it here: apparent.) The removal of items used to facilitate dangerous communications from inmates in a prison is by no means an uncommon act; one repeated tens of thousands of times a day just in the United States alone (given that roughly7.5% / 3 million people of it's population are currently incarcerated.) Bibles and other christian books are routinely confiscated from our own ACLU protected, non-POW citizen prisoners when they are used to break the rules. Thus, it is absolutely reasonable that the same conditions apply to opposition forces that we have captured an is a non-issue.
The problem is that NATO / the US has treated foreign prisoners as it would it's own citizens (as far as handling "contraband" is concerned anyway), it has failed to give them the all American tradition of censoring the information they are allowed to receive. The government has routinely determined that they are under no obligation whatsoever to disclose to it's citizenry the nature of contracts with private corporations, the spending of their tax dollars, or even who was responsible for the death of their soldier children (alla Pat Tillman). Americans are told what they can handle knowing as well as how they will be permitted to react to it before they are put on some list and labeled as potential terrorists. Even the very writing of this blog post has certainly added my name (along with those of our veterans returning from combat duty, 2nd amendment supporters, pro-lifers and non-liberals ) onto one of Janet Napolitano's lists. BUT we need to be 100% transparent and apologetic when protecting the civil liberties of enemy combatants?
As if that isnt bad enough, the world has seen time and again how NATO/US interests are severely threatened / compromised whenever Islam is publically insulted. In 2004,after reports surfaced from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay of "desecration of the Koran", violent demonstrations broke loose world wide, placing an untold number of people at risk. Riots leading to over 100 reported deaths broke out in 2005 when Dutch newspaper Jyllands-Posten dared to depict Mohammed in an image for a series of editorial cartoons; something that the statue and stained glass christian world was not aware was taboo. In 2010, the Islamic extremist "community" threatened similar riots when an american pastor planned a Koran burning service; prompting the US government to quietely persuade him to abandon his plan on the grounds that he would be endangering americans world-wide.
I must also point out that while there really is not any reason for this story to have ever made it public, there is also no excuse for a group of zealots to run wild every time they feel their religion is insulted. While I do fault the governments of NATO for not controlling this story, they ultimately are not the ones deciding how the representatives of various religious sects are going to react. One has to wonder how the Islamic community as a whole would react if every time western values / governments were insulted, a bunch of rednecks went nuts and started rioting in front of embassies. Unfortunately, until the day that religious extremism is no longer a problem in the world, the governments need to excersise their "stealth" modes and be more quiet about what they let leak out!
-Tmaxx
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