The story of Koran abuse at the prisoner camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is perhaps the most ridiculous example of media idiocy I have seen in some time. The critique is not that we have codes of conduct for a book some crackpots have some mystical affinity for, but that the codes aren’t good enough or we aren’t following them.
The Koran is just a book. If we can step on it, flush it down the toilet, burn it, wipe our butt’s with it, or do anything else to it and get information out of the psychos down there then that should be applauded as a great boon to our cause. It is almost like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur is traveling through the woods and is cowed by the Knights who say “Nih!” We can get these prisoners to spill the beans without breaking the law or resorting to the morally repugnant territory of physically torturing people.
If it makes Muslims around the world happy they can go ahead and burn down bibles, what do we care? We have no state religion and capitalism provides for the printing of billions of any book (Koran included, even I have a copy, you never know when you may need to hold it hostage to get some terrorists off your trail) even if you only intend to burn or ruin them.
How ecstatic would we be if the only thing that happened when our soldiers were captured was that their captors ripped up the American state papers, or The Federalist, or the religious texts of the individual soldiers?
The only real news in this case is that we treat these scumbags so well, giving them their precious book in the first place. They don’t care that their freedom is curtailed, it was already non-existent in the Middle East anyway, but they would be punished by keeping the words of their nonsensical beliefs away from them.
On that note, other methods of messing with their minds: 1) change the placement of the arrow which points to Mecca everyday so they can’t figure out which direction to pray; 2) feed them only wine and ham sandwiches; 3) load up derelict tankers with Muslim iconography every week to be used for target practice by the US Navy in sight of the prisoners; 4) during the five times a day when the prisoners are supposed to pray read contrary books to them over loud speaker in Arabic (suggestions: The Origin of Species, Atlas Shrugged, The Satanic Verses, etc.); 5) don’t tell them when Ramadan is so they can’t figure out when to fast; 6) give them Korans is languages they can’t figure out like Yiddish or Russian; 7) give them Korans with insulting jokes inserted into them in Arabic; 8) give them the shell of a Koran, but the inside pages will be books like The Virtue of Selfishness; 9) when the soldiers take target practice they should use pictures of Muhammad or Korans placed at different distances; 10) give them Korans, but no toilet paper, forcing them to choose; 11) plaster posters of good looking women in bikinis up everywhere.
I’m curious if in World War II prisoner of war camps that we held German prisoners in, did we issue Mein Kamph to all the prisoners and play German propaganda so that they could stay immersed in the irrational beliefs that led them to war in the first place? Of course not, back then we weren’t complete idiots yet.
