Never mind...
Mark Steyn: "http://www.JewishWorldReview.com Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's kleptocrat strongman, destroyed a mosque the other day. It was in Hatcliffe Extension, a shantytown on the edge of Harare razed by the 'police.' Mugabe is an equal-opportunity razer: He also bulldozed a Catholic-run AIDS center. The government destroyed the town in order to drive the locals out into the countryside to live on the land stolen from white farmers. Quite how that's meant to benefit any of the parties involved or the broader needs of Zimbabwe is beyond me, but then I'm no expert in Afro-Marxist economic theory.
The point is the world's Muslims seem entirely cool with Infidel Bob razing a mosque. Unlike the fallout over Newsweek's fraudulent story about the Quran being flushed down a toilet, no excitable young men went bananas in Pakistan; no western progressives berated Mugabe for his 'cultural insensitivity.' And sadly most of the big shot Muslim spokespersons were still too busy flaying the Bush administration to whip their subjects into a frenzy over Hatcliffe Extension's pile of Islamic rubble.
...
Gitmo has the distinction of being "a camp where the medical staff outnumber the prisoners." You'll get swifter, cleaner and more efficient treatment than most Canadians do under socialized health care. It's the only gulag in history where the detainees leave in better health and weighing more than when they arrive. This means they're in much better shape when they get back to their hectic schedule of killing infidels: Of the more than 200 who've been released, around 5 percent — that's to say, 12 — have since been recaptured on the battlefield.
Why would an organization in the human rights business want to trivialize the murder of millions in totalitarian death camps by comparing them with a non-death camp that flatters every aspect of the inmates' culture? If Gitmo's a gulag, what words are left for the systemic rape being practiced by the butchers of Darfur? Or is it because they've so exhausted the extremes of their vocabulary on Guantanamo that the world's progressives have so little to say about real horrors like Sudan?...
And would caving in to those negative perceptions lead to any better press? Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America's being flayed as the planet's No. 1 torturer for being insufficiently respectful to the holy book of its prisoners, even though the Americans themselves supplied their prisoners with the holy book, even though Americans who fall into the hands of the other side get their heads hacked off, even though the prisoners' co-religionists themselves blow up more mosques and Qurans than the Pentagon ever does, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is banned in the home country of many of the prisoners, where respect for other faiths is summed up in the headline, "Seven Christians Released In Saudi Arabia On Condition They Renounce Private Religious Practice."
That was in the British Catholic newspaper, the Universe, last week, by the way. Sadly, no U.S. newspaper found room for the story due to pressures of space caused by all the "Al-Qaida Press Secretary Denounces Insufficient Respect For Koran By Rumsfeld" front page splashes. But sure, go ahead, close Gitmo and wait for the rave reviews from the media — right after the complaints that it's culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade Center when it's the burial site of 10 revered Muslim martyrs.
Guantanamo will be remembered not as a byword for torture but for self-torture, a Western fetish the jihad's spin doctors understand all too well.
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