veiled4allah: she said it so I don't have to

Jeanne d'Arc of Body and Soul writes about this picture an entry called Desecration, saying:

I know what my reaction would be if this were my church. Desecration. I am not a Muslim, but the violence done to any holy place hurts. There was at least talk of concern about desecration in Najaf, and I wonder now if we have given up any pretense of caring about that. I wonder if I will look back and think that desecration was the whole point. My god is bigger than your god. Beyond that symbolism, can anyone explain what the point of attacking Falluja is? Does control of that city matter if it angers the rest of Iraq?

Whenever a Muslim complains about things like this, the common reaction is "Muslims did such-and-such thing that's even worse". First, this attitude doesn't really make sense. It's OK to do something wrong, because other people do worse things? That's the standard we judge by now, "at least we're not worse than those people we hate"? No, if we aim to be a good people, we should have certain objective standards that we hold to, no matter what other people are doing. If disrespecting someone's place of worship is wrong, then it's always wrong, it doesn't become OK because it's Americans doing it, or because some other people are doing something worse. If it's wrong, we shouldn't be doing it, period.

Second, this line of criticism usually implies "you have no right to criticize when your people are doing something bad". Well, actually, I spend quite a lot of time at this blog criticizing wrongs done by Muslims. On the sidebars of the veiled4allah page I have a large number of links to various things I've written. I've placed those links so that people can easily find and read the materials and so that I don't have to write the whole thing over and over again every time I want to criticize an American action.

Update 11/29: A rather belated update to this post. I originally posted this in part because of the picture, which was apparently on the cover page of the Los Angeles Times; sometimes a picture speaks a thousand words. I was also struck by some of the commentary I read about this incident, at Jeanne's blog and elsewhere, and wanted to make a few points about the reactions I had seen. However there was another incident that was far more outrageous and perhaps better deserving of commentary. Points remain the same, however. I'm tired of people justifying American actions by always using a "others are even worse" argument, and of people implying that Muslims can't criticize American actions because of terrorism committed by some other Muslims, even when the Muslims making the criticism have condemn terrorism and criticized other Muslims many times. It's really very tiresome.