Muslim double standard on religious desecration

With Muslims worldwide protesting a now-retracted Newsweak report that claimed U.S. Army interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Quran down the toilet, I want to announce that I'm also sickened by this Muslim outcry when Muslims have shown the world they don't have any respect for religion whatsoever. They lost the right to protest about disrespect for religion and holy objects a long time ago.

In October 2000, after Israeli troops evacuated the city of Nablus as a peacemaking gesture, scores of Palestinians stormed into the Joseph's Tomb compound and destroyed the site believed to be the burial place of the biblical patriarch Joseph – the son of Jacob who was sold by his brothers into slavery and later became the viceroy of Egypt.

The 1993 Oslo Accords put Joseph's Tomb under Israeli jurisdiction, but on Oct. 7, 2000, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered a unilateral retreat, based on a Palestinian agreement to protect the site.

Within hours of the Israeli withdrawal, smoke was seen billowing from the tomb as an Arab crowd burned Jewish prayer books and other holy objects. Palestinians used pickaxes, hammers and later bulldozers to tear apart the stone building. The dome of the tomb was painted green, and a mosque was subsequently erected in its place.

There was almost total silence in the Muslim world when Palestinians blew up Jews at their Passover seder, when Joseph's tomb was desecrated, and even overall with regard to terrorism.

What about the desecration of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by Palestinian gunmen in April 2002, and the dynamiting of 2,000-year old giant Buddhist statues at Bamian, Afghanistan, by the Taliban regime in March 2001?

Muslim double standard on religious desecration