Once again, Mark Steyn’s aim is true: Quran desecration crock a win for Jihad spin docs.

Why would an organization in the human rights business want to trivialize the murder of millions in totalitarian death camps by comparing them with a non-death camp that flatters every aspect of the inmates’ culture? If Gitmo’s a gulag, what words are left for the systemic rape being practiced by the butchers of Darfur? Or is it because they’ve so exhausted the extremes of their vocabulary on Guantanamo that the world’s progressives have so little to say about real horrors like Sudan?

No serious allegation of torture at the camp has been substantiated, and in the al-Qaida training manual found in Manchester, England, a couple of years back Rule 18 couldn’t be more explicit: When held captive by the infidel, members must “complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison” and say that “torture was inflicted on them.” A healthy skepticism would thus seem to be advisable. Instead, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times runs around shrieking like a hysterical ninny that Washington needs to shut down Guantanamo right now — not because of anything that actually occurred there — but because of negative “perceptions” of the camp in the overseas press.

And would caving in to those negative perceptions lead to any better press? Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America’s being flayed as the planet’s No. 1 torturer for being insufficiently respectful to the holy book of its prisoners, even though the Americans themselves supplied their prisoners with the holy book, even though Americans who fall into the hands of the other side get their heads hacked off, even though the prisoners’ co-religionists themselves blow up more mosques and Qurans than the Pentagon ever does, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is banned in the home country of many of the prisoners, where respect for other faiths is summed up in the headline, “Seven Christians Released In Saudi Arabia On Condition They Renounce Private Religious Practice.”

That was in the British Catholic newspaper, the Universe, last week, by the way. Sadly, no U.S. newspaper found room for the story due to pressures of space caused by all the “Al-Qaida Press Secretary Denounces Insufficient Respect For Koran By Rumsfeld” front page splashes. But sure, go ahead, close Gitmo and wait for the rave reviews from the media — right after the complaints that it’s culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade Center when it’s the burial site of 10 revered Muslim martyrs.

And check out how much Islam Online loves this story.