May (Web-only) 2004

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

Where the outrage is
It's all well and good to talk about how seriously horrible the photos from Abu Ghraib are playing in the Muslim world. Sunday's The New York Times provided a hint, however, that Christians are just as upset.

"In Abu Ghraib, the fact that a woman was there—and that one gender was being exposed naked to both genders—outraged not just Iraqis but everyone in the region, not just Muslims but Christians as well," Haverford College religion professor Michael A. Sells told the paper. "Certainly, a central aspect of the Qur'an is dignity and privacy. But where to draw the boundary between religion and culture? … People in the Middle East react with the same feeling of revulsion at these images that we have, but for them the images also connect powerfully to … the profound sense of being violated in other ways by American policies and American power."

But you don't have to be a Middle Easterner, either, to be outraged by the images and tales of torture and abuse.

Friday, the Vatican condemned the abuses in the harshest words. "Violence against persons offends God himself, who made human beings in his image and likeness," said Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, who works in the Vatican's Secretary of State office. Torture, Zenit News Service quotes him saying, is "contrary to the most elementary human rights and radically opposed to Christian morality. … The scandal is even more serious if one takes into account that those actions were committed by Christians."

An unsigned editorial in the Vatican's semi-official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, issues a similar condemnation. "In the abuses and ill treatment of prisoners is consummated the radical negation of man's dignity and his fundamental values," the paper said, according ...