When an unhinged U.S. soldier gunned down 16 Afghan civilians – including women and children – in a pre-dawn massacre a couple of weeks ago, Americans immediately recoiled in horror and dismay. But to Afghans, this atrocity was far less outrageous than the accidental Koran burning at a U.S. military base a few weeks earlier. And while the Koran burning sparked violent protests in Afghanistan, the local response to the senseless murders was much more restrained.
The Associated Press reports on how religious leaders have justified the discrepancy:
When mullah Abdul Rahim Shah Ghaa thinks back to the day in February when a couple of Afghan employees at a U.S.-run detention center outside of Kabul yanked five partially burned Korans out of a trash incinerator, he shudders with anger and revulsion. “It is like a knife to my heart,” says the head of the provincial religious council. The March 11 slaying of 16 Afghan civilians by a lone U.S Army staff sergeant named Robert Bales in Kandahar province, however, has left less of a scar. “Of course we condemn that act,” he says. “But it was only 16 people. Even if it were 1,000 people, it wouldn’t compare to harming one word of the Koran. If someone insults our holy book, it means that they insult our faith, our religion and everything that we have.”
It’s a disturbing concept, and almost the inverse of our culture, which views the protection of life and freedom of expression as our top values. There’s also the long Pashtun history of revenge-killings, which bizarrely may make the recent massacre somehow understandable in their eyes. And there are the politics. Because the Taliban kills people all the time, it’s really not able to rile up as much public anger on that issue. But the Korans are a different story:
Comparing reactions to the two atrocities is not just a question of the sacred vs. the profane, says parliamentarian Fawzia Koofi. As with everything else in Afghanistan, politics plays a role. While she has no doubt that antigovernment elements and even opposition politicians sought to capitalize on both incidents, she believes that Afghans have become savvy to the political opportunities presented by yet another case of civilian deaths and have learned not to react. Bales may have murdered nine children in his rampage, she notes, but just a few days later an insurgent bomb planted in the road of a neighboring province killed nine more. “Why don’t we stand strongly against the Taliban when they massacre people?” she asks. “People are clever enough to understand that this is a political issue, and the Koran is not.”
So while the massacre may have contributed to the mess the U.S. military now finds itself in, the real provocation was always the Koran burning.
I think the shooting was a revenge killing. So the two are related.
"It’s a disturbing concept, and almost the inverse of our culture, which views the protection of life and freedom of expression as our top values." n nA LTC who served in Iraq told me something equally disturbing — "if you accidentally kill someone, there is a sum of money that everyone over there is worth, and if you go and pay it to his family, everything is OK." This shook him up — he found it as disturbing as it appears that Ms. Goodman finds this. Rightly so — to one with Western values. n nAnd I will say here what I said to him: they are not a Western culture, they are not a "small-l" liberal culture, they do not hold the values of the Enlightenment. They do not see people as individuals, your existence in that culture is that of the midevil surf — you are essentially the property of your tribal leader. (Human life does not have any intrinsic value — look at the people who turn their children into homicide bombers…) n nJohn Locke wrote that every human had rights granted from God — the right to one's life, the right to one's liberty, and the right to one's property — and that these rights, granted by God, could only be repealed by God — that no human authority could surrogate them. n nNow the word "property" had two meanings in the 18th century the way that "man" has two meanings today (human & male) so much as we would use the term "person" to make it clear that we include women, Thomas Jefferson used the term "pursuit of happiness" to make it clear that he meant everyone, not just those who owned enough real estate to be eligible to vote. n nPrior to the enlightenment, if a drunken nobleman ran over a peasant with his carriage, not only was it OK but it was the peasant's family that paid for the damage to the carriage. Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are places where this is still true — and places where women aren't treated all that well — for the very same reason. Remember that the concept of women's rights comes from the concept that women are also created by God and thus have these inalienable rights that men can't take away from them. n nDuring the combat part of the Iraq war, there was a classic AP photo of a big American solder carrying a smaller wounded Iraqi enemy soldier off to receive medical treatment from American medical folk. We saw this as a sign of strength — that we are so strong (and morally just) that we have the ability to even provide medical care to the wounded enemy. By contrast, the Iraqis saw it as a sign of weakness — that we didn't have the courage to look a wounded enemy soldier in the eye and kill him. The Iraqis believed that we should have killed him, stolen his shoes, and despoiled the body — and that we are a weak people because we didn't have the courage to do that. n nThis is the difference between our culture and theirs. They do not see human life having the intrinsic value that we do, the concept of not killing someone just because he says something with which you disagree is simply foreign to them. And as to women, the concept of a 120 lb women wearing what an American woman wears on a sunny summer day and expecting to be able to walk down the street without being raped — that is completely foreign to them. Women do not have human rights (no one does) and thus her safety exists in the context of the men who accompany her, at whose pleasure she lives her life. n nBluntly, there are two concepts of humanity. Take a 230 lb man and a 120 lb woman — in a state of nature, might makes right. In our culture, it doesn't matter that the 120 lb woman is half the size of the guy, she has her own God-given rights to her person and her property which the bigger stronger guy can't take away from her. Over there, he can — and the only thing that protects her is the other 230 lb guy whom she is the property of. n nGives you pause, doesn't it? n nI have no problem saying that our culture is superior, I just wish that our political leaders shared this view and/or simply got to live under their system of values for a while….
What the AP has refused to print is that the Korans were defaced by prisoners at the base in order to send coded messages to each other. The defaced Korans were collected and burned with unburned Koran fragments floating around were anyone could see them. The mistake was not doing a controlled burn as would be done with classified information. If Bible had been destroyed in like manner there would have been no outcry in the US.
My dark side had an initial solution to this "problem" — what does Sharia law say to the destruction of a Koran and to the punishment of one who does it? n nMy gut feeling is that death is somehow involved. n nIt is one thing to die for the pleasure of Allah — the 12 gross virgins and the rest as a reward. nBut to be executed for defaming Islam and defacing a Koran? (I would make sure that there isn't an exception to defacing Korans, like there are to breaking the fast, for situations that could be interpreted as resisting infidels.) To give them the option of being tried under Islamic law, to be executed by the US in a manner proscribed under Islamic law, with us publicly telling the Afgans that we don't believe in this barbarism, but our tradition is to respect the religious beliefs of others, even if we disagree with them. n nSo we give them the choice of either renouncing Islam or dying for defaming Islam. nCheckmate.