The reported desecration of the Qur’an by US guards at the infamous Guantanamo prison, as originally reported by Newsweek on May 9, 2005, should have been an opportunity for a thorough examination of US Army practices, and thus human rights abuses, toward Muslim inmates in the numerous detention camps erected throughout the world.
Instead, the focus was on the less urgent matter of journalistic responsibility and the seemingly inherent problem of Muslim backwardness and sadism.
The Times of London made a clever choice when it selected a Muslim, Irshad Manji, to address the fierce response to the scandal. Her article, also published by the celebrated New York Review of Books, insisted on pinning the blame on the popular and sometimes violent Muslim response to the report, rather than the anti-imperialist sentiments in Muslim nations, most notably Afghanistan.
Jeff Jacoby, a columnist for the Boston Globe, chose to push the limits of cultural insensitivity to downright insult in his piece entitled, “Why Islam is disrespected.”
He opens his article with imaginary scenarios of Christians, Jews and Buddhists violently rioting in response to the desecration of their religious symbols. This was to draw a comparison between the “barbarism” of Muslims and the nonviolent and civilized everyone else.
The message was: Christians, Jews and Buddhists don’t lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted.
Other commentators confined their arguments to Newsweek’s judgment, or lack thereof, in running the May 9 article.
Some sided with the White House interpretation, as uttered by Press Secretary Scott McClellan, in his call on Newsweek and other media not to lose their “credibility.” Others questioned McClellan’s own credibility. Nobody raised the vital question whether Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker was under pressure to apologize and retract the article.
It is ironic that Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in fact the one who spoke the unexamined words of truth.
He said that Army Gen. Carl Eichenberry, the senior US commander in Afghanistan, reported that the violence “was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.”
So to what could it possibly be tied?
Did it dawn on anyone in the mainstream media that the Afghani people might possibly be angry over American occupation? Could it possibly be that hundreds of millions of Muslims might have had enough common sense to connect the dots and to establish that the desecration of the Qur’an is only the latest episode of a consistent US policy that hasn’t only dishonored religious symbols but the sanctity of human life, in fact hundreds of thousands of human lives?
Could the hypothesis be true that Muslims, despite their alleged backwardness, had access to TV news, print media and the Internet and might have accidentally run across hundreds of vile photos of physically humiliated and sexually abused Iraqi prisoners? Could it be possible that these savages learned of harrowing testimonies of former prisoners at Guantanamo detailing what numerous human rights groups unhesitatingly described as war crimes?
But why confine the argument to overgeneralized, rhetorical questions? In its response to the scandal, Human Rights Watch issued a statement on May 19, 2005, confirming that sadly, the Guantanamo episode was the norm. “In detention centers around the world, the United States has been humiliating Muslim prisoners by offending their religious beliefs,” said Reed Brody, a HRW special counsel.
Thus, if Muslim fury is to be examined appropriately and truthfully, then the desecration of the Qur’an must be analyzed together with the violent death of at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the greater majority of them at the hands of the occupation forces, according to the first comprehensive investigation of civilian deaths in Iraq, published in the Lancet, and cited recently by respected Australian journalist John Pilger.
But the interest in appropriateness and truthfulness in the media fades away before the seemingly much more compelling and urgent topic of the theological roots of Muslim violence, and the Muslim and Arab mind’s innate deficiency and backwardness.
I am afraid that it will take more than a simple apology or a newspaper retraction to right this collective and perpetual wrong. Much more.
— Ramzy Baroud is an Arab-American journalist.
