Friday, May 22, 2009

Imagine if it were the Quran?

This very troublesome story is covered both in World Magazine's on-line site as well as CNN's site...

Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines face a world turned upside down when they enter a combat zone. Rules of polite society are held in abeyance an the concern for one's life and the lives of his comrades become first order. This has been standard from the time Og and OOg the cavemen decided to mix it up with Ug and Umph, cavemen from the other side of the old Woolly Mammoth carcass. So, suffice to say that when a box of Arabic-English Bibles hit the ground in Afghanistan, legitimate questions arose.

Having been a Career NCO in the Air Force, I became well acquainted with the concept of "conduct/actions prejudicial to good order and discipline", the idea that in certain circumstances actions deemed otherwise benign can become inappropriate. I get this... Military command personnel considered these Bibles as potential flashpoints for muslim anger and took custody of them. So far, no foul... Rather than sealing them and marking them returned to sender, these copies of Holy Scripture were unceremoniously taken out to the garbage dump and burned. Mas Mucho Foul!

OK, here's my beef. Whether we revere them or not, we handle the sacred texts of other faiths with a sense of tolerant deference. Disagreement is not grounds for desecration. This philosophy is seen at Gitmo in the fact that our servicemen who handle muslim texts, do so while wearing gloves (stories of servicemen desecrating Qurans are fabricated out of whole cloth). But somehow in our new Politically Correct dystopia, desecration of Judeo-Christian sacred texts (a.k.a The WORD of GOD) is within bounds. Uh-uhh fellas', ya' screwed the pooch on this on!

I can't speak from personal experience, but I'm certain that it is hard duty serving king and country over in Duststormistan. Our nations best are over there in a harsh, unforgiving land trying to find mullah omar's posse before they get bushwhacked. Thousands of our young men and women with stainless steel gonads/ovaries are over there putting their all on the line in the name of freedom. The burning of those Bibles was (intentionally or not), a gob of spit in their collective eyes.

No comments: