TruthNews Commentary, May 17, 2005

We were particularly intrigued last week at the events in Afghanistan. Upon hearing a report from Newsweek magazine that the Koran had been desecrated by U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, the Afghans and other Muslims across the globe protested by killing each other. According to news reports, 17 people were killed and more than 100 injured. Here’s a description of the violence from the Arab News, a Saudi English-language newspaper,

Incensed at the blasphemy, Afghans have lashed out in fury in all directions. The fact that not only government and UN buildings were burned but even mosques shows the depths of their rage. The same level public anger has been reported from Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt and many other Muslim countries.

There are several intriguing factors about this story. The first is that the protestors showed their displeasure by killing each other and burning down mosques. This sounds a lot like certain American cities, where if the local sports team loses a major event, the fans show their displeasure by killing each other, turning cars over, and setting things on fire. Oddly enough, this is also what they do when their team wins.

Maybe Christians should try this type of protest. "Hey, the Supreme Court has just banned the public display of the Ten Commandments. Let’s protest the court’s decision by burning down our church and lynching the pastor!" On second thought, this does not seem to be a highly effective way to protest, which makes it all the more puzzling that Muslims from the Middle East to Indonesia chose to voice their displeasure in such a fashion.

The second intriguing factor about this story revolves around the report that the method of desecration supposedly chosen by the American interrogators was to flush the Koran down a toilet. Now, anyone who’s tried to flush anything down a modern toilet knows that this is highly improbable, but we decided to test it out for ourselves. Not wanting to provoke another bloodletting across the Muslim world, we used a simulated Koran, specifically Al Franken’s scholarly tome Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (we were going to use Franken’s more recent book with the slightly more humorous title of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, but we couldn’t find any laying around that we could pick up for free in the 30 minutes we allotted for this research).

Franken’s homage to Rush Limbaugh, which Jeane Kirkpatrick described as a "dreadfully foul little book," runs to 336 pages, while the Penguin classic edition of the Koran is 464 pages. Since the Franken book is shorter than the Koran, we thought, "if Franken can’t be flushed down the toilet, then neither can the Koran."

So we dumped Al Franken in the toilet, flushed it repeatedly, and observed the results. Basically, the book got wet but refused to go down. By the twentieth flushing, Franken’s face on the cover had begun to look rather tattered, but the book never, ever, ever went down the toilet or even stopped up the toilet. So we concluded that the source of the Koran-desecration story, specifically Newsweek magazine, was lying.

After we had used a pair of pliers to fish the wet soggy Franken mess out of the toilet, we noted a blurb on the back from Newsweek calling Franken’s book "wickedly funny." Actually, watching Franken’s face swirling around in the toilet was kind of funny. However, during the five seconds we spent perusing the pages (before we tried to flush the book down the toilet) we didn’t notice anything either wicked or funny. Apparently Newsweek's book reviews are about as trustworthy as their news articles. Of course, Franken wasn't particularly funny when he was on Saturday Night Live, so it's probably too much to expect that his book would be "wickedly funny."

Actually another scenario is possible in the Koran desecration story, which is that the U.S. interrogators flushed the Koran down a Canadian toilet. In 1994, the last Democratic-controlled Congress passed a low-flow toilet law requiring that all toilets sold in the U.S. operate on 1.6 gallons of water per flush, compared to 3.5 gallons previously. So two flushes of the modern toilets are required (even more if you’re trying to flush Al Franken), thereby saving 0.3 gallons of water to be used for higher priority pursuits like washing our cars. But some Americans are tired of having to flush their toilets twice, so they've taken to smuggling high-flow toilets from Canada -- if the Department of Homeland Security can't stop the cross-border flow of terrorists, illegal aliens, and dope, how can they stop a few toilets?

So, we wonder, did the U.S. interrogators in Guantanamo Bay (or is that beside Guantanamo Bay?) import a Canadian toilet to desecrate the Koran? This could lead to an another international incident if the pacifist government of Paul Martin found that the CIA were using a Canadian toilet to torture terrorists. Not that this scenario is very likely either. The Franken book simply floated on top, and a high-flow Canadian toilet wouldn't make much difference. One would assume that the Koran has buoyancy characteristics similar to Al Franken's screed; however, out of respect to the religion of peace, we did not experimentally verify this hypothesis.

One final incongruity about the Guantanamo story is that the interrogators would be so stupid as to expect flushing the Koran down the toilet to actually produce any results. We can just see a captured Al Qaeda terrorist saying, "Don't do it! I'll tell you where Osama Bin Laden is! Just don't flush the Koran down the toilet!" To which the CIA interrogator would respond, "Ha, ha! I fooled you! It floats!"

Now that Newsweek has recanted their story, it's difficult to see why the editors didn't realize how absurd the story was in the first place. Afghanistan's government said Tuesday that Newsweek should be held responsible for damages caused, while neighboring Pakistan said Newsweek's apology and retraction were "not enough." However, Mark Whitaker, the editor of Newsweek, has magnanimously offered his "sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst." Well, that ought to make everything all right!