Flush This

Why do they tweak so easily? And, once tweaked, why then do they go on a rampage, burn their own shops, overturn their own cars and kill a bunch of local folks? I know all about cultural differences, and I understand the emotionalism that attaches to religious symbols. But, I still don’t understand the wisdom of destroying everything around you in a fit of high moral outrage when someone tells you that someone thousands of miles away reportedly did something, somewhere that you might find offensive.

I’m talking about the fictitious Quran flushing at Quantanamo. Flush This

Let’s just stand back for a moment and consider the physical probability of the act. You’ve got a toilet. It flushes semi-solid waste with a congressionally mandated 1.6L splash of water. Now, you’ve got a religious book. It’s a minimum of a couple of hundred pages of fine print on thin paper, with a leather, cardboard or cloth binding. Try it yourself in the privacy of your own home. Take Jane Fonda’s or Hillary Clinton’s ghost-written "auto"-biography and place it carefully in the porcelain receptacle. Now flush. Try again. Let soak for an hour or two. Flush once more. Now, get mop to clean up overflow and consult Yellow Pages for plumbers to unclog toilet. It simply doesn’t work.

But, I suppose one would have to have some familiarity with the appliance in question to apply that logic.

Of concern here is not a bunch of third-world, illiterates responding in knee-jerk fashion to the encouragement of the fundamentalist ideologues, but the responsibility of an American news magazine to confirm beyond the shadow of a doubt such inflammatory accusations before publication. Didn’t they learn a thing from Rather-gate? Do they really hate their own nation so much and distrust the morality, ethics and motivation of their own military so sincerely that they will publish this drivel?

Now, fifteen people are dead, thousands more who don’t read the retractions (or for that matter anything) will forever believe the newly established urban legend and Newsweek simply says, golly we’re sorry. If one were consciously trying to undermine the creation of democracies in the Middle East, jeopardize our troops and embassies, and destabilize the region by fomenting hatred for America, it would be hard to find a simpler and less costly strategy than that of Newsweek. Simply publish some outrage, watch the fires burn and blood flow, then note on page 26 of the B-section two weeks later that you were wrong.