Lies & dbl stds characterise US response to anger over Qur’an desecration

[Up2Late]

(Waseem Shehzad, a free-lance writer, gets featured on Media Monitors Network (MMN) with the courtesy of Crescent International.)

Lies and double standards characterise US response to anger over Qur’an desecration

by Waseem Shehzad
(Friday June 10 2005)

"Enough evidence exists to confirm the desecration story, regardless of the spin put on it by US officials and media spokespersons. The question is why they indulge in such behaviour."

Ordinary Americans can be forgiven for failing to understand why people around the world hate their country and their government so much; successive governments in Washington and the media have kept them in the dark about the true nature of US policies that adversely affect the lives and welfare of billions of people everywhere.

The story of the desecration of the Qur’an by American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay carried by Newsweek magazine in its May 9 issue and, after political pressure was exerted, somewhat modified in its May 23 issue, is a case in point. Many US commentators have taken the position that it is not a big deal; why get worked up about a few pages of a book being flushed down a toilet? Others are in denial mode: such incidents never occurred; according to them, Newsweek was extremely irresponsible to publish such a story, and it has been accused of being part of a leftwing anti-American conspiracy. Muslims who demonstrated against the desecration of the Qur’an have been denounced as “murderous thugs”.

It is important to get the facts straight. Contrary to White House spin, Newsweek did not retract the story; it only admitted getting some parts of it wrong. It is common knowledge among Guantanamo’s ex-prisoners that American interrogators at the notorious prison repeatedly desecrated the Qur’an to provoke them or break their spirit. American interrogators have sat on, urinated on and kicked into the toilet copies of the Qur’an, according to former detainees at the torture camp.

Newsweek is not the first to report such desecrations, although they gained much greater publicity because Imran Khan, Pakistan’s cricket star turned politician, mentioned the story during a televised press conference that caught the attention of the Afghan people; from there it spread to the rest of the Muslim world. The New York Times reported on May 1 that, after one incident in March 2002, in which a copy of the Qur’an was thrown in a pile of rubbish and then trodden on, the prisoners went on hunger strike, forcing the commander of the camp to issue an apology. A former detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, interviewed by the paper, said that the protest ended with a senior officer apologising to the entire camp. It went on: “A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans.” (New York Times, May 1.)

(more at link above)

[Igel]

1. One wonders why some of the incidents rise to the status of

desecrations. That's seldom addressed.

One also wonders why other incidents that are arguably more egregious, but which involve "Muslim-on-Qur'an violence", are blithely passed over as not a problem.

There are hypocrisy and double standards in this. And they're not just on one side.