Date Posted: Friday, June 27, 2003

Associated Press

June 27, 2003

BOSTON - A state senator suggested in a flier that terrorist attacks could be deterred if convicted Muslim extremists were buried with pig entrails - a proposal that angered some Muslims.

The flier, which senators received from Democratic Sen. Guy Glodis on Wednesday, said Muslims believe contact with pig entrails and blood bars them from paradise and dooms them to hell.

It said that before World War I, Gen. John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing ordered troops to execute terrorists in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig's blood, then bury them with the blood and entrails.

The flier said news of the burial deterred other terrorist attacks for "the next forty-two years."

"Maybe it is time for this segment of history to repeat itself, maybe in Iraq," the flier concluded.

The Boston Globe, reporting on the flier, said there were questions about whether the event actually occurred.

Raeed Tayeh, public affairs director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation in Washington, said Islam doesn't teach that people are barred from heaven if they're buried with pig entrails, calling the notion "a lie, a fable."

"This is just a sad commentary on the ignorance of people who are entrusted to represent Americans, that they would pass around such offensive, distasteful and slanderous garbage," he said.

Glodis said he didn't write the flier, he just passed it on.

"If some of my colleagues are so weak-kneed and politically correct and cannot accept historical fact, I suggest they lodge a complaint with the secretary of the Army," Glodis said.

Sen. Jarret Barrios, a Democrat, defended Glodis' First Amendment right to pass out the flier. "And I am free to throw it in the garbage," Barrios said.

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