Flushing the Quran
by Jon Shea
16 May 2005
0) I can’t distill enough water out of Newsweek to make it worth reading.
1) Joe scoped me on this, but it is pretty obvious no one flushed a whole Koran down a toilet. Let’s say the army super-toilet in question can choke down an improbable 15 pages per flush. That’s still 31 flushes for the 467 page (number from Joe) paperback Quran. Plus one more for the cover.
2) Let’s say they did flush a Quran down the toilet. Let’s say they flushed 100 of the things. And that they took a dump on top of each one. You still don’t get to riot in the streets and kill people. I don’t think the “protesters” have taken enough heat for being psychotic. Could you imagine if there were a deadly riot in the US over someone flushing a Bible down the toilet?
Hell, some detainee burned part of his Bible on “Survivor: Somewhere”. I don’t think anyone got killed as a result.
3) Assuming again that a Quran actually did get flushed, and further assuming that there were pictures of a soldier doing it: Would he get court marshalled? Is that prisoner abuse? Just curious.
4) One time an Afgan organized a plot to crash jumbo jets into important buildings (holy sites, I’m tempted to call them) in my homeland. I don’t recall any anti-Afgan or anti-Saudi riots after that.
5) Maybe the Afgan toilet in question was really just a hole in the ground, like I’m told they use in poor places. Does that make it better or worse? I don’t know, but it would at least make it believable.
May 16, 09:36 AM
I don’t think the “protesters” have taken enough heat for being psychotic. Could you imagine if there were a deadly riot in the US over someone flushing a Bible down the toilet?
Back in grade school, there was always some kid who, although he was scrawny and didn’t have any command presence, managed to keep everybody off-balance and at bay by doing random crazy shit, shouting, throwing tantrums, and refusing to bathe.
Remember him?
I’d say what we have here is more or less the same thing, writ large.
May 16, 10:36 AM
While I think I agree with your main point, I would temper it a little from the tone Joe puts in your mouth.
2) Clearly I could think of better reasons to have a riot. But then I imagine that, “If you look at the streets it wasn’t about Rodney King.”
3)I was surprised to see that Geneva specifically says no to insults, intimidation and demands “respect for their persons and their honour”. (although from the context “honour” might be a 1949 way of saying no to making female prisoners wear revealing clothing or shower with boys or some such thing.)
4) Saying that there were no anti-Afgan riots is somewhat disengenuous in my book. We didn’t exactly turn the other cheek.
May 16, 07:01 PM
Some fair points, Tom, some not so fair.
There are a few issues I composed while I was off the back in P66 today that I forgot to write about, and you and Michael bring some of those up.
But first, you have to admit that it is obvious no Quran got flushed down a toilet. I mean, most toilets have trouble dealing with (heroic though they be) some things that come out of my ass.
2) You’re right to bring up the distinction between underlying and immediate cause. This might simply be an assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
3) Geneva convention or no, I’m going to give all interrogators a bye on name calling and book burning. Unless their burning, say, the original manuscript of Mohammed himself.
4) We did not respond to 9/11 by killing Arabs in our own streets.
5) If Newsweek had any credibility points with me to begin with, then I would certainly make them down. But some people are blaming Newsweek for the deaths that occurred in the resulting riots. That is beyond reason. If we believe the immediate cause hypothesis, then blaming Newsweek is like blaming Gavrilo Princip for starting WW1. If you believe that the flushing alone was the whole cause of riot, then still, blaming Newsweek takes a little too much responsibility off the actual murders for my taste.
May 17, 07:00 AM
0/5b) But I am not defending Newsweek.
1/5a) The minute that I heard the story, I came to the porto-john/outhouse conclusion (5a). I also assumed that there was peeing involved (first in my imagination). Not only that, I totally believed it. There is a book that the all the interrogators read about how to really upset a hardcore Muslim, I forget the title right now or I’d link it.
3) I would be tempted to put those things in bounds too. But do you think they would work? If not, why bother? If we want to interrogate people further than asking them nicely, we pretty much need to flush Geneva too. So the question comes down to whether you think the intel is worth “cheating” for. If so, how badly must we cheat to get it?
I like the new (4) better—it isn’t quite block quote material. But you surely realize the comparison still isn’t entirely valid.