The Toilet Caper

I have refrained from blogging the flush-the-Koran story because the entire blogosphere is aflame with responses, witty and otherwise. This morning, however, I read two excellent articles on the topic. Due to my recent car accident, in which I was rear-ended by a duck-and-run Ghanian cabbie who gave false information and will not answer his phone, I don't have the time, energy, or pain-free existence to do more on the topic of the alleged flushing of a book which has some kind of talismanic value to some apparently superstitious people, other than to cite the items below.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/jg20050520.shtml :
..."First, the obvious: Newsweek messed up....Conservatives are also suddenly molly-coddling Islamic fanatics as if they can't help themselves from rioting. Look, birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and jihadi nutbags have to riot. Such is the nature of things. Normally, conservatives grasp this - but that's when the riots are inadvertently caused by something President Bush does or says. When Newsweek accidentally causes riots, the "gotcha" logic kicks in....Condescension toward the Muslim "street" is bipartisan. Indeed, liberals aren't saying the jihadi riots are inexcusable, they're saying the protests were justified because America is surely guilty of things just as bad....(Still, the idea that a Koran-sized book could be flushed in the first place never passed the smell test; if the U.S. military has such toilets and is keeping them secret, I'm filing my FOIA request tomorrow.) America has not been playing by Queensbury rules with captured terrorists....The one person who cannot be defended in any way is the guy who leaked the Koran story in the first place. If it were true, he'd be a jerk. That it's false makes him something even worse."

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20050520.shtml :
"...Muslims can be incited to violence by anything or nothing. It's as if they live poised for outrage. In 2002, the Miss World Pageant had to high-tail it out of Nigeria after rioting took more than 200 lives. Angry Muslims rampaged through the streets after a young fashion writer penned an article wondering how Muhammad would have reacted to the pageant, and suggesting that the Prophet (who had 14 wives) might have chosen a wife from among the assembled beauties. The offices of the newspaper were firebombed. A few weeks later, after many deaths, the Islamists remained unsatisfied. The deputy governor of a northern Nigerian province issued a "fatwa" declaring it the duty of religious Muslims to track down the 21-year-old author of the story and kill her. Recall that Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death while bicycling to work in Amsterdam last year. His offense? Producing a movie that exposed Muslim mistreatment of women. Salman Rushdie remains a marked man for writing a book Muslims detest. Norwegian/Swedish Pentecostal preacher Runar Sogaard received death threats last month -- not anonymous ones, but direct threats from an organized Islamic group, for using highly insulting language about Muhammad. Sogaard was impolite to be sure. But since when is the proper punishment for impertinence death? Isioma Daniel, the Nigerian journalist whose musings sparked the Nigerian riot, remains under 24-hour-a-day guard....The underlying truth is this: We are at pains not to fight a religious war. The trouble is, our enemies are fighting a religious war...."

The toilet caper may or may not be solved. What's of great importance is what this alleged event at GITMO has revealed about the followers of Islam.