Oh, it was on CD ROM?
:rolleyes:
Great point, which I missed. I think because he was on his heels. Once the allegation is leveled by the hypersensitive, rational thought goes out the door.
But this gives me an idea: instead of bombs, let’s drop bags of pork rinds. Ot get Slim Jim to include a little pork in their sticks and drop them over the whole coppery. I defy more than half the population to not start chomping them…then we have a deep internal rift. 
Had I known you were such an august authority on Islamic law, I would have deferred to your knowledge of all things Mohammedan. But, just for the record, what is your source for the claim that 1) writing on Koran pages renders them “desecrated”, and 2) desecrated Korans can be destroyed by American soldiers without offending Muslims? Something in the Hadiths perhaps? Or is this just common knowledge I am not privy to?
As Magellan offers us wisdom from the John Bolton school of diplomacy.
Or, you know, not let it be known we were doing it. How did anyone find out about it? If we confiscated some Korans for security purposes and decided that we were going to burn them, why couldn’t we have done so in secret? Why couldn’t Monica Lewinksy have been brought in to fuck Slick Willie by the Secret Service through the back door of the White House so nobody was the wiser?
It boggles my mind that we have these gaps in information security. What people don’t know doesn’t hurt them.
You mean, besides the fact that one of them would have ratted him out toot sweet?
Well, as Robin Williams once so eloquently put it, Bill had the misfortune of hooking up with the only Jewish woman that didn’t know how to get a stain out…
Ah here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psh2a72_JfY
But seriously…The military burns all kinds of shit all the damn time. How was this allowed to get out knowing the sensitivity of the Muslim religious climate we are/were operating in? It should have been earmarked as just trash…I still don’t get why this was allowed to become a story.
Of course she knew how, she didn’t want to. Like a momento, or a keepsuck.
Sake. Keepsake.
I love Bill Maher’s take on Bill’s self control…“the one time he DOES come in all these episodes of prison sex she saves it, and hangs him with it!”
I fear I’ve derailed the thread.
This. I’ve been wondering this the whole time. Who the fuck let this info out? They should have invited a local muckity muck in for advice on how to dispose of them and videotaped everything from conversation to ceremony.
Misusing their holy book for something as mundane as passing messages would qualify, surely?
Having one of the Muslim chaplains destroy the books in accordance with the rules of Islam would theoretically do it. Just destroying the books in an incinerator designed for secure documents (i.e. one that renders them completely illegible) would also probably suffice.
Of course, even if they did it right, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t chuck a tantrum anyway.
Oh surely; Afghani Muslims could hardly argue with an English dictianary now, could they?
Yeah, who in the civilized West ever promised people that they were fighting on God’s side, and God would be pleased to see the infidels chopped up? I mean, lately.
What was that, a while back, how a US intelligence officer, big 'un, appearing if full uniform in front of evangelicals talking about how his God had bigger balls than Allah, and his religion was stronger? Great stuff, the propaganda guys at AlQ took the day off. “Useful idiot”, that was Lenin’s term, yes?
Our enemies get a heck of an advantage, they don’t have to lie about us. They only need to focus attention on the unsavory stuff, which we supply in abundance. Add to that the fact that we recently wiped out upwards of a hundred thousand of them for no good reason whatsoever, one can understand how they might leap to conclusions.
Anyway, you wi-fi warmongers, keep up the good work. Thanks of a grateful nation, and all that good stuff.
Okay, how about this? A Muslim blogger stating that writing in the Koran even for good reasons is generally considered defilement. Does that satisfy you?
Oh, it gets better:
Wasamatter with these people; why don’t they understand it’s just a book, already?
Huh?
Because to Muslims it’s not just a book anymore than urinating on the ground near a grave is just pouring fluid on the ground that will disappear even quicker than rainwater and doesn’t disturb the body underneath any differently than rainwater.
Nevertheless, most people reading this would react quite differently if they saw me pissing on the grave of their grandfather who’d died twenty years ago and who’s body had returned to the earth long ago than if they saw me pissing on a rock in the woods.
Furthermore, a common misconception is that the Quran is to Muslims, and South Asian Muslim in particular, what the Bible is to Christians. It’s not. Christians think nothing of carrying around dog-eared, copies of the Bible in multiple different languages all the time and generally when carrying them or putting them down treat them no differently than other books.
That’s not the case with Muslims. According to tradition, they are not to be printed in any language except Quranic Arabic. My father in all his years living in Iran never saw a Farsi translation of the Quran and it’s vastly easier in Pakistan to get a hold of a King James Version of the Bible than an Urdu translation of the Quran. Even translations you’ll see in the West, will have one page in Quranic Arabic and then the next page in English, French or whatever European language it’s in.
As a result, the overwhelming majority of Muslims not only have never actually read the Quran, but for all intents and purposes can’t read it.
You’re also never supposed to touch the Quran without first washing your hands, you’re never supposed to put it on the ground, you’re never supposed to put another book on it, and there are probably a bunch of other restrictions that I don’t know because my own upbringing was fairly non-traditional to say the least.
Also, the Qurans in South Asia are often hand-written in beautiful caligraphy and bound far nicer than most Bibles you’re ever likely to see. For families that are lucky enough to own one(even though they can’t read it though they can usually recite it) its usually the most expensive thing they own.
All of this combines to add to the mystique of the Quran.
A much, much better comparison to the Quran would be Torah scrolls which Jews treat, for the same reasons as Muslims, with vastly more respect than Christians treat the Bible.
Imagine how some of the religious Jews in one of the settlements on the West Bank would react if they heard that some Palestinians had gotten ahold of copies of the Torah Scrolls and destroyed them.
Do you believe they would start murdering innocent bystanders and setting fire to shops?
It doesn’t matter. The fact is we KNOW these sorts of actions will make Afghans go ape-shit and provide propaganda gold to our enemies.
It should not happen, ever, no matter what the circumstances or excuses. And if it does you do it far, far away from the Afghan workers on the base, not leave the smouldering evidence lying about for them to find.
There should be well-established standing orders to all in-country. ‘DO NOT fuck with the Koran. This General Order supercedes all other orders and cannot be countermanded.’
Whoever the dipshits who ordered this and the dipshits who only followed orders are - they’ve done more damage than a thousand bloody Taliban could dream of doing.
They should be court-martialed and dishonourably discharged.
I was being ironic or sarcastic or, like, whatever, man.
There are those in this thread who are parocial and/or provincial enough to seemingly believe it’s ‘just a book’.