What you probably haven’t heard regarding the recent Koran-burning scandal is that the holy books had been defiled by Muslim detainees using them as extremist message drops. The Korans were in the prison library of a US base for all to use. This is not a case of US soldiers arbitrarily deciding to burn Korans as the media and our government would have you believe. But never fear, all is well, our government has already apologized at the international level. We’ve gotten rather good at that over the last three years.
In typical knee-jerk fashion that unfortunately has become common practice in the armed forces of PCUSA, our soldiers must all sit through additional training on “proper handling of religious materials.” The misguided but well intentioned actions of a few demand remedial training for all. This PC-for-all stuff is nothing new, I fondly remember enduring mandated sexual harassment training no less than three times in the wake of Tailhook ’91 (I was on deployment in the Med yet had to sign several sworn statements denying I was anywhere near Vegas on or about 8-12 September 1991). All so I could learn what I already knew thanks to my parents and teachers.
Sitting in the warmth of our homes half a world away from a place most of us would think of as hell, it’s easy to say burning the Korans was stupid and the grunts should have known better. Don’t pass judgement unless you have all the facts and can place the incident within proper context – most of us, myself included, are not qualified to make such a call. Luckily we have the media to do it for us (sarcasm fully intended).
Back in the day (big Navy, Hollywood was in the white house for a reason) the official statement of our government would have been something along the lines of: “We regret that we had to destroy the Korans and promise to stop doing so just as soon as your brothers cease scribbling filthy messages of insurrection in them and treating them like cheap notebooks.” Sadly those days have passed along with objective reporting by the mainstream media. We used to rely on the networks to report the news not manufacture it or put the appropriate spin on it.
I’m tired of hearing how sorry we are for everything and then learning “the rest of the story” as Paul Harvey used to say.
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Thanks for this very succinct explanation of the incident, Steve. I, too, am so very tired of our country always being painted as “in the wrong” – especially by people who should be defending our actions.
Those were the days…Big NAVY, Big RR in the WH, Big Stick…
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