Newsweek and the Quran: The Muslim holy book isn't just a "bible." It's far more sacred than that.

The Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal ^ | May 21, 2005 | Kenneth L. Woodward

[quidnunc]

Three-and-a-half years after 9/11, you would think that we Americans would get it: Muslims take their religion very, very seriously. Now 17 people are dead, Afghanistan is on edge, and there are protests in Pakistan, our most vulnerable and valuable ally among Muslim states — in part, it seems, because of six words in a brief item in Newsweek magazine. The offending passage, a small but colorful detail in a story on the investigation of abuses at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, reads in full: "Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell Newsweek: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet."

This was not the first time a major news organization had reported allegations that copies of the Quran belonging to detainees had been desecrated in this fashion — the Washington Post, the BBC and the New York Times all got there first. For this reason, perhaps, my colleagues at Newsweek, where I spent 38 years as religion editor, did not foresee how this single example among others mentioned in the story might incite Islam's most rabid anti-Americans. Neither, apparently, did the Pentagon official who read the Newsweek story before it went to press — a precaution the Newsweek editors took — and made no objection to the passage.

I am in no position to pass judgment on my Newsweek colleagues, nor would I want to. Among them are highly sensitive editors who frequently caught errors in my own copy. My concern is that all Americans understand how deeply sacrilegious such an act as Newsweek described would be to Muslims, and why it is not like flushing pages from the Bible down the drain — as Keith Olbermann on MSNBC and other commentators have suggested.

-snip-

[USF]

I'm glad we got that one cleared up... ;o)

[hershey]

Some immam in the Middle East is now demanding that they assassinate GW and nuke Wash. DC. If successful or even partially, does this mean we finally decide we're at war and dispense with the PC white gloves nonsense?

[RS]

"If successful or even partially, does this mean we finally decide we're at war ...."

With specifically who ?
There are a billion or so Muslims on the planet.

[N. Beaujon]

I agree, this is just the sort of elitism you'd expect from the MSM. They published this incendiary article, it was they who were ignorant of the consequences. I think if you had asked anyone on this board what would happen if they published this bile we could have told you. And it's because most of us are not brain dead from reading tripe like Newsweak.

[noblejones]

>>
A pile of shit on a koran
<<

How could you even tell?

[steve8714]

Would we allow a large cult of Kali-worshippers with their ritual murders in this country? Why then do we allow the practice of Islam?