Curmudgeon's Corner

Qur'an Incident Apologies

Posted by Al Campbell on March 2, 2012

U.S., Political, Quality of Life

The incident of the burning of two copies of the Qur'an has resulted in the killing of several U.S. military personnel and has also resulted in the masking of what happened originally.  The Qur'ans in question were being used by captives to communicate with their fellow captives against the rules of which they were aware.  Those captives had defaced their own holy books.  I suspect most of us would agree that the act of burning was wrong and that those who did it need to be properly reprimanded for the act.  That can quite easily be handled, and should be handled, within the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) which is the governing document applying to all members of the United States military branches.

Our government has permitted this incident to become the out-of-control situation we see today.  We quickly "fall on our sword" in such situations and should know, by now, that this posture only exacerbates the problem.  The idea that we are always wrong and the Muslims are always right is something we feed by the actions we take.  We will never make everyone love us in these kinds of situations.  But we have senior members of our government who appear to be only too happy to feed the hate directed at us.  We are not engaged in religious persecution, contrary to what our press seems to want us all to believe.

I wonder if this weren't "George Bush's war" if there might be a different face being shown by the press?  I wonder if the discussion about our military personnel being tried in some non-U.S. jurisdiction would've ever surfaced?  I wonder if those positions might've not been thoroughly beaten back the instant they were voiced rather than allowed to lay there without strenuous pronouncements to the contrary? 

There have been other situations where our forces were serving under U.N. or NATO senior officers and where some foreign entity thought our troops were their sovereigns.  Nothing could be or should be further from the truth.  Those people are American citizens and should never be subjected to the jurisdiction of some other governmental entity. PERIOD.  If there are reprimands to be made, they should only be made by our system of military justice.  It has worked very well for more than two centuries.

There are apparently some cases where religious tolerance is simply not to be found if Christians are the target.