Virginia 'Quran desecration' done by Muslim

Flagged by Islamic groups as a probable hate crime, a burned Quran found at the doorstep of a Virginia mosque turned out to be a case of a Muslim who wasn't sure how to properly dispose of his religion's sacred book.

Last month, members of the Islamic Center of Blacksburg said they were stunned when they arrived at the building for prayers and found a plastic shopping bag in front of the door filled with a charred copy of the Quran and the burnt pages of Arabic books, the Roanoke Times reported.

Police said they were investigating it as a possible hate crime but emphasized they had no leads.

Nevertheless, shortly after the initial report, a spokeswoman for the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C., questioned how police could consider the act anything other than a hate crime.

"Let's face it, books don't burn themselves and end up outside of a mosque. It's a willful act," Laila Al-Qatami told the Roanoke paper.

Al-Qatami said hate crimes against Muslims have increased steadily since 9-11 and spike whenever a national anti-Muslim act is covered by the media.

Recent reports of Quran desecration have set off copy-cat acts across the country, she said.

The most widely-dispersed allegation, by Newsweek, actually was retracted. The magazine had said interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention center placed copies of the Quran on toilets to torture Muslim inmates and in one case flushed one down the toilet. The false report was believed to have set off deadly protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gaza City.

But in the Virginia case, local police reported yesterday that a Muslim Virginia Tech student said he left the Quran at the local mosque because it had been damaged in a fire and he hoped it could be given a respectful disposal.

The student, whose name was not released, contacted police last week, saying he planned to travel abroad and didn't know what to do with the Quran, which had been burned in a 2004 house fire, the Times reported.

The student said he left an explanatory note with the bag, but it blew away.

The Islamic Center's directory, Sedki Riad, said local Muslims are relieved that anti-Islamic sentiments weren't involved.

"There is nothing better than knowing that Blacksburg is what we expect it to be -- a caring, friendly and supporting neighborhood," Riad told the Roanoke daily.

In June, however, the Council for American-Islamic Relations took the opportunity of a possible hate crime to issue a news release calling on "Americans of all faiths to obtain and read the Quran after burned copies of Islam's revealed text were found outside a Virginia mosque."

CAIR said at the time that its Maryland and Virginia chapter contacted the FBI's Roanoke office and were "assured that the possibility of a bias-related motive will be investigated."

"A redoubled commitment to freedom of thought and religious diversity is the best response to the burning of any sacred text," CAIR-MD/VA Director of Civil Rights Shama Farooq said in June. "We ask people of good will in Virginia and throughout the nation to help promote interfaith understanding by obtaining and reading a Quran."

Farooq said that by reading a Quran, Americans will send the message that bigots do not represent our nation's values.

The Islamic group noted that after allegations that Guantanamo guards desecrated the Islamic text, CAIR launched a campaign called "Explore the Quran," designed to provide free Qurans to Americans of all faiths. However, as WND reported, the particular version of the Quran CAIR was dispensing reportedly had been banned by the Los Angeles school district for anti-Semitic commentary notes in the text, including a reference to Allah's anger at Jews whom he "transformed into apes and swine ... "

About 14,000 people have ordered a copy, according to CAIR.