Well, how did we THINK they'd react?

Today is the fourth day of widespread anti-American demonstrations in Afghanistan. It seems that Afghan Muslims are pissed off because of a Newsweek report on an FBI memo confirming that American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Qu'ran down a toilet.

That supporters of the Administration think that desecration of another faith's holy book is no big deal is appalling. Here we have a situation in which American Christian theocrats not only regard the American flag as somehow sacred, but also demand fealty from government to their own holy book.

American right-wing Christians like to think of the Muslim Middle East as a backwards culture and Islam as an uncivilized religion as compared to their own, "truer" faith, at the same time as they advocate spreading the American empire to that region of the world.

Kingdom of Heaven may be a crappy movie, but I'm glad it's out now, because we need a reminder that this kind of religious chauvinism has been going on for over a thousand years, and maybe the Founding Fathers, in not wanting religion to play a role in American statecraft, were on to something, and perhaps we ought not to allow craven whores like Bill Frist to change that.