Desecrated Korans and double standards

Joe Gandalman writes about the Koran which may or may not have been desecrated at Guantanamo Bay:

It almost defies description, if it's true. What would many Americans conclude if they heard that Americans captured in a Muslim country had to watch a crucifix set on fire — or if Jews capture had to watch the destruction of their holy Torah?

Arabs desecrated Joseph’s Tomb, destroying an irreplaceable archeological and religious site. This is a thousand times worse of a crime than destroying a book that someone bought at Borders. Yet from the reaction in America, not very many people cared at all.

UPDATE

Marc at USS Neverdock expresses similar thoughts when complains that the media ignored a story about Palestinians using Bibles for toilet paper:

Where's the outrage? Where's the indignation? Why is the world media so hell bent on portraying Islam as some kind of sacrosanct religion, better and above the rest? Is their book somehow holier than everybody else's? Not bloody likely!

Comments

[Chuck Anesi]

True, and the Taliban idiots in Afghanistan destroyed colossal Buddhist statues with artillery file. Nobody in the Muslim world seemed upset about that.

Special award to the first person who finds an American journalist who, having bravely defended Robert Mapplethorpe's NEA-funded depiction of a crucifix floating in a jar of urine, is now excoriating the U.S. because a couple soldiers MAY have placed a copy of the Koran on a toilet seat.

[Half Sigma]

You're confusing Robert Mapplethorpe with Andres Serrano who did the crucifix thing. People complained a lot about Serrano, but there was no rioting and killing. In contrast, if an "artist" in a Muslim country did something similar with an Islamic symbol, he probably would be executed.

And to defend the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit, he was a famous photographer when that exhibit of his work was organized. I had a "work study" job at the Institute of Contemporary Art when I was attending the University of Pennylvania and I really didn't get the sense that the people who put the exhibit together were trying to make some big political statement. In fact everyone pretty much ignored the exhibit when it was at Penn's campus. It only became a Big Deal when some Congressman saw it in Washington, DC.

[Michael H.]

I think that we should respect each others traditions and beliefs. If Americans desecrated the Moslems' holy book, there is no excuse for that.
I agree that it cuts both ways. Moslems absolutely have to respect others, and to be honest, that has never been a strong point of Islam. Everywhere the Moslems went, the first thing they did was to destroy the existing temples and build mosques on top. Where is the dome of the rock? There were some very important temples in India that were destroyed to make mosques. And the destruction of the tomb of Joseph and the Bamiyan Statues was very recent.
Still, two wrongs don't make a right. The best way to show that the Western values of tolerance are superior to intolerance is to hold ourselves to a higher standard.