As the L’Affaire Newsweek still reverberates around the world, I do have a few wonderments of my own. 

For instance, how do the prisoners in Gitmo have Korans in the first place? They were provided by the US government, right? I wonder, do they provide Bibles, or Bhagavad Gitas, or even copies of Dianetics on request? And then the government issued special rules on the proper handling of said Korans, right? Rules that are purely based upon a religion, right? So where are all the screams of Theocracy at Gitmo from Phil Donohue et al? I mean if my local school district or prison (Q. what’s the difference? A. prisoner’s get time off for good behavior) started passing out Bibles and issueing guidelines on the proper handling of the Bible based on the idea that it is the one true scripture of God, isn’t that how they’d react? I mean Hindus would be pleased with the size of the cow that a certain segment of American society would have over that.

And so what’s wrong with flushing a Koran down a toilet? Personally, I’m envious of the plumbing system at Gitmo that allows a 464 page book to be flushed when at Chez funMurph I can’t get normal human byproducts to flush reliably. I mean, it’s not like it was the prisoner’s property in the first place, if the US government can give, can’t it take as well? Is there something illegal about flushing a book down a toilet? Yes, I understand that good Muslim’s have a special reverence for the actual physicality of it (unlike Christians for the Bible), but as a secular society, we can’t attach any special importance to a book, can we? Yes, it’s an act of insensitivity, but compared to what’s been confirmed about some terrible treatment of prisoners at the hands of American captors, including death, why get worked up about the treatment of a book?

So what’s going on in the Muslim world that people don’t seem to mind people killing other people as long as no Korans were disrespected? And with Muslims getting all scatological on the symbol of the US (which by the way isn’t illegal to do, even in this country), where are those decrying the cycle of scatology? When will all this pottyism end? What are the protestors hoping to accomplish by killing and rioting over the treatment of an object besides convincing the rest of the world they’re either bunch of violent loons who deserve no sympathy or that they’re a bunch of big crybabies who can dish it out but can’t take it.