Posted on 02/26/2012 2:17:38 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
President Obamas apology to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the U.S. military burning Qurans at Bagram Air Field, the largest NATO base in Afghanistan, has prompted a fierce reaction. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich called the apology an outrage.
Our Commander in Chief was courageous to apologize in an election year for an outrageous violation of American values that happened on his watch. But the debate that focuses only on whether it is right or wrong to burn Qurans or whether the Afghan people are justified in responding with rioting misses the larger question: What were American forces doing burning books of any kind in Afghanistan, let alone Islams most sacred text? Book burning is not something typically associated with freedom-of-speech-loving America. When books are burned in a country desperately in need of more books, where only 43% of men and 12% of women are literate, it should prompt questions.
NATO officials and President Obama the act unintentional. U.S. service members were following orders to burn the Qurans and other reading materials that may or may not have been used by Afghan inmates to pass encoded messages between themselves at Parwan Detention Facility, which adjoins the base. The incinerated materials were taken from a library at Parwan Detention Facility. The burning took place in view of local Afghan staff who felt compelled to get word of the action out to the population at large....
(Excerpt) Read more at globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com ...
Editor's Note: Allison Stanger is Russell Leng 60 Professor of International Politics and Economics and Chair of the Political Science Department at Middlebury College (Vermont). She is the author of One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.
e-mail stanger@middlebury.edu phone: 802.443.5023
Except for Bibles sent to our troops in Afghanistan by their families.
Honestly this is horrendous.
Yeah!
Don’t they know religious items should ONLY be dunked in urine or covered with elephant feces and displayes as ‘art’?
One more thing.....FUBO
Nope, I'd say that's a very relevant topic.
Did she completely miss the fact that the books were being used as terrorist communication notepads, and therefore already desecrated by the supposed Muslims themselves? Maybe we should have distributed those terror message-laden Korans to the children of Afghanistan?
Wow....what a loon.
Queerans shouldn’t be burned. They should be used for hog feed/pen lining.
This is ridiculous. The books were already “defaced” according to Islamic law (by messages in the margins sent by the terrorist prisoners to each other) and that’s the prescribed way to destroy a defaced Koran.
I don’t recall any concern from CNN when the Bibles were burned, even though they were burned for a much more political reason. They were Bibles in the Afghan language sent by some Bible society to a soldier there for distribution to the Afghanis, and while this is a harmless activity, the US government did not want to outrage the Muslims by making it look as if the US was supporting Christianity (heaven forbid!). We spend so much time worrying about outraging Muslims...and see where it gets us.
In any case, I didn’t see any concern about literacy on the part of CNN at that time.
Of course, Americas can and should burn flags...American flags, that is.
Shove it up your smelly Obamas, CNN. Whilst you’re at it, find room for some Koreans in there. That’s where they belong.
“The burning took place in view of local Afghan staff who felt compelled to get word of the action out to the population at large....”
This is the KEY to why this took place, and became worldwide attention. So who approved this being done (or ordered) this way?
Allison Stanger sounds like one of V. I. Lenin's
"useful idiots"Filling the skulls full of mush with Marxism.
>> When books are burned in a country desperately in need of more books, where only 43% of men and 12% of women are literate, it should prompt questions.
Don’t recall your concern, Stanger, when the Bibles were turned to ash.
Some authors should be burned at the stake using their own books as fuel. Alinsky alas is dead but Bill Ayers would be a good candidate. bill tied to a stake with copies of his books piled hip deep and doused with diesel fuel. What a lovely mental vision.
I vote for JP-4, in honor of our vets, but diesel will do.
As Americans we are free to burn any book we want. If someone is so ignorant as to burn a Bible Christians know that that The Word of God lives on no matter what and will be fulfilled no matter what, because it is God’s Word.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.