US Presidential Candidates: We Shouldn’t Apologize for Burning Quran

Local Editor

It seems that US officials view that an apology on burning the holy book for more than a 1.62 billion Islamic nation is a big mistake.

The US Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum accused Afghans on Sunday of "overreacting to Quran burning" as he stepped up his criticism of "President Barack Obama for apologizing over the incident."

"There was nothing deliberately done wrong here," Santorum told ABC's This Week today considering that "there was no deliberate act...of disrespect" when US authorities at Bagram airbase north of Kabul apparently disposed of the Islamic holy books in a fire.
The Republican presidential candidate hopeful added that Afghanistan should apologize to the US for the deaths of four US soldiers during six days of demonstrations.

"I think the response needs to be apologized for, by Karzai and the Afghan people, for attacking and killing our men and women in uniform, and overreacting to this inadvertent mistake. That is the real crime, not what our soldiers did," he claimed on NBC's "Meet the Press".
Santorum is the latest Republican to criticize Obama for apologizing for burning the religious materials.

Santorum's main Republican rival, Mitt Romney told Fox News Sunday that "with regards to the Obama apology, I think for a lot of people, it sticks in their throat.
Romney moved on claiming that "The idea that we are there, having lost thousands of individuals through casualty and death - we've made an enormous contribution to help the people there achieve freedom."
"For us to be apologizing at a time like this is something which is very difficult for the American people to countenance," he stated.

A third Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, made more strident denunciations of Obama's apology, labeling him an appeaser and saying he was "deeply offended that Obama didn't hold Karzai responsible for the killings of US soldiers."
"There doesn't seem to be any request for an apology from Karzai," Gingrich told Fox News on Saturday.
"And I frankly just think this one-sided process of apologizing for America has gone too far," he said. "Churches get burned in Nigeria, there are no apologies. Churches get burned in Egypt, there are no apologies."

It is worth mentioning that the Afghani protests came after reports emerged saying that "US troops had burned a large number of Islamic religious materials which included Qurans" at the Bagram Airbase."



Source: News Agencies, Edited by moqawama.org