Jonah, my problem with the Koran burning stunt is that it is counterproductive. I hear what you’re saying about decency. But on that score, I don’t find the burning any more offensive in principle than I do its opposite extreme: the bizarro hyper-reverence with which the Koran is handled by the Defense Department.
Down at Gitmo, the Defense Department gives the Koran to each of the terrorists even though DoD knows they interpret it (not without reason) to command them to kill the people who gave it to them. To underscore our precious sensitivity to Muslims, standard procedure calls for the the book to be handled only by Muslim military personnel. Sometimes, though, that is not possible for various reasons. If, as a last resort, one of our non-Muslim troops must handle or transport the book, he must wear white gloves, and he is further instructed primarily to use the right hand (indulging Muslim culture’s taboo about the sinister left hand). The book is to be conveyed to the prisoners in a “reverent manner” inside a “clean dry towel.” This is a nod to Islamic teaching that infidels are so low a form of life that they should not be touched (as Ayatollah Ali Sistani teaches, non-Muslims are “considered in the same category as urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors,” and “the sweat of an animal who persistently eats [unclean things].”
This is every bit as indecent as torching the Koran, implicitly endorsing as it does the very dehumanization of non-Muslims that leads to terrorism. Furthermore, there is hypocrisy to consider: the Defense Department now piously condemning Koran burning is the same Defense Department that itself did not give a second thought to confiscating and burning bibles in Afghanistan.
Quite consciously, U.S. commanders ordered this purge in deference to sharia proscriptions against the proselytism of faiths other than Islam. And as General Petraeus well knows, his chain of command is not the only one destroying bibles. Non-Muslim religious artifacts, including bibles, are torched or otherwise destroyed in Islamic countries every single day as a matter of standard operating procedure. (See, e.g., my 2007 post on Saudi government guidelines that prohibit Jews and Christians from bringing bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, etc., into the country — and, of course, not just non-Muslim accessories but non-Muslim people are barred from entering Mecca and most of Medina, based on the classical interpretation of an injunction found in what Petraeus is fond of calling the Holy Qur’an (sura 9:28: “Truly the pagans are unclean . . . so let them not . . . approach the sacred mosque”).
I don’t like book burning either, but I think there are different kinds of book burnings. One is done for purposes of censorship — the attempt to purge the world of every copy of a book to make it as if the sentiments expressed never existed. A good modern example is Cambridge University Press’s shameful pulping of all known copies of Alms for Jihad (see Stanley’s 2007 post on that). The other kind of burning is done as symbolic condemnation. That’s what I think Terry Jones was doing. He knows he doesn’t have the ability to purge the Koran from the world, and he wasn’t trying to. He was trying to condemn some of the ideas that are in it — or maybe he really thinks the whole thing is condemnable.
This is a particularly aggressive and vivid way to express disdain, but I don’t know that it is much different in principle from orally condemning some of the Koran’s suras and verses. Sura 9 of the Koran, for example, states the supremacist doctrine that commands Muslims to kill and conquer non-Muslims (e.g., 9:5: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war) . . .”; 9:29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the last day, nor hold forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the people of the Book [i.e., the Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya [i.e., the tax paid for the privilege of living as dhimmis under the protection of the sharia state] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”). I must say, I’ve got a much bigger problem with the people trying to comply with those commands than with the guy who burns them.
I think the big problem with what Jones did is the gratuitous insult to all Muslims, including the millions who do not subscribe to the violent jihadist or broader Islamist construction of Islamic scripture. They have found some way to rationalize the incendiary scriptures — and if it works for them, who the hell am I to say they’re wrong? They are our natural allies in this battle, and as I’ve often pointed out, without their help, we could not have done things like infiltrate the Blind Sheikh’s terror cell, gather vital intelligence, thwart terrorist attacks, and refine trial evidence into compelling proof.
These people regard the Koran as the most important of their scriptures. When someone burns the Koran in an act of indiscriminate, wholesale condemnation, the message to them is that their belief system is incorrigible. Freedom of speech means that we have to allow that argument to be made, and I’m not entirely sure it’s wrong. But good Muslim people give us reason to hope that what ails Islam can be reformed. I don’t see the upside in alienating those people. I think you can condemn the condemnable aspects of the Koran without condemning everything. But that’s just my opinion, and Mr. Jones is as entitled to his as I am to mine. And for what it’s worth, I doubt my opinion would be much more popular than his in Mazar-e-Sharif.
Why, praytell, do so many Moslems go into a destructive, even murderous frenzy because a single individual burns a Koran? There is no widespread Koran-burning in the USA and it it is patently obvious for all with eyes to see that Jones' actions and beliefs are marginal in America. Are the Islamic zealots therefore stupid? Profoundly hypersensitive? Or are they looking for any excuse to intimidate, shame and cow citizens of the Great Satan? If the latter, then they are succeeding. They imposing mental, psychological and cultural sharia in America via remote control and with the witting complicity of our elite classes.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis is the America I knew and wish we were again:
"Infidel, you must give each of us a Koran and treat it with as much respect as you can, being the unclean dog you are, or we will kill people for your disrespect."
"Nuts."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI compare the Koran burning to MTV's Jersey Shore - neither adds any value to society and only serve to exercise certain groups of people.
And neither should be censored.
Is Terry Jones stirring religous hate? Maybe. Possibly. Did Christians riot in the streets and burn mosques when the DoD (the freaking United States Department of Defense, for crying out loud!) burned bibles?
So why are so many people making excuses for the irrational rage of supposedly offended Muslims? Radicals like don't need an excuse to kill - they were doing it already.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis has been the lead story in every Moslem nation from Morocco to Malaysia for months. It has been portrayed as typical, and representative of all American Christians.
They didn't hear about it one day, and riot the next. This has been simmering for over a year, when Jones first threatened to burn the Koran.
A nation, society, and culture that is not free is incapable of understanding a free one. They have a communal mind, not an individual one. When one sin, all have sinned. When you explain to them that there is no such thing as the "typical" American, or "typical" Christian for that matter, they think you're speaking gibberish.
They believe the world as a whole is a collective. All bear the burden of each one's sins, therefore each has the responsibility to eliminate all sin from the world. Free will, individual rights, etc., therefore, are abominations, not enlightened attitudes.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI agree with most of what you wrote, but I strongly disagree that burning the Koran is counter productive. It is an unfortunate but necessary element of us showing to the savages that we intend to stand up for our way of life against the Jihad. To savage cultures appeasement is always seen as weakness and therefore invites aggression. This is unfortunately the way of the world...... a fact that some modern societies like ours have lost sight of.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRinson Drei: That's the result of a tribal, mideval mindset. To them, all members of a clan bear the shame of anyone clan members actions. It's also why they are so brutal towards anyone who acts in what they believe to be a shameful way. That person has not only shamed himself, he has shamed the whole clain. And the only way to remove that shame is to punish, if not kill the offender. (Thus the justification for honor killings.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseChristians believe that the only path to salvation is through Christ. I don't find it at all odd that a Christian pastor would burn a book that he believes misleads millions of people each year from obtaining that salvation. In fact, if Muslims burned Bibles, I wouldn't be shocked at all since Muslims find Christian doctrine false and damnable in the same way Christians find Islamic teaching false and damnable. Put it this way, if you thought a guide book or GPS was responsible for people driving off a bridge into the ocean, wouldn't you want that book or GPS revised/replaced/removed? I would, and the stakes are much higher when questions of eternal life are on the line.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI agree with Cy. If Koran burning were common, then any individual act of arson on top of that would be pointless. But where the entire society acts with something near the reverence Andy rightly decries at Gitmo, then somebody needs to burn the thing.
More importantly, it's not reverence, it's fear.
Right now the vast majority of Americans are afraid to upset Muslims. They risk being killed, and the response of their countrymen would generally be "serves you right". We have a woman in hiding, in America, for saying "everybody draw Muhammed".
That fear needs to be fought, and it's not fought through dainty, namby-pamby respect. It's fought by burning Korans, or by posting pseudonymous comments on a blog.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA question ... if one concluded that a book were truly vile, perhaps even insulting of God's love for us all ... would it be wrong to burn it?
Books are not sacred, Spirit is.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNice to see some common sense on this issue. Trouble is, it's all too uncommon.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt is disgraceful that Lindsey Graham and David Petraeus are far more condemning of the Rev. whatshisname (he is really irrelevant) than of the murder of our troops and people in the UN office in Afghanistan. Where are their priorities? If I hear the words "Sacred Koran" or "Holy Koran" one more time, I will become ill. If Petraeus cannot defeat the enemy, we should leave that godforsken country. Moslems routinely disrespect Jews and Christians and compare them to "apes and pigs" but we do not riot or even ask for an apology! What do Petraeus and Graham think of the American flag being burned? I guess that is a big yawner to them.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf burning a Koran is so offensive that it prompts Muslims in Afghanistan to riot and murder, shouldn't the threat to burn more Korans prompt them to stop? What if someone promised to burn a Koran every time a westerner was killed in Afghanistan? Shouldn't that cause a would-be murderer to think "hey, if I kill this person a Koran is going to be burned."
Of course, it would likely have no such effect because burning the Koran isn't really the issue for these murderers. It's whether we are submitting to Islam. Burning a Koran is a powerful statement that we are not, and that is what is offensive to them.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"That's the result of a tribal, mideval mindset."
Tribal, perhaps, but medieval--no. The medieval mindset is what brought Roman law to the tribes of Europe. The modern court system began to take shape during that period. Medieval England gave us the Magna Carta, which influenced the US Constitution. All of these developments and more were on the side of enhancing or protecting individual liberty against arbitrary power, even if in practice the old tribal customs at times prevailed.
Medieval times were not perfect, but it is only ignorance of history to describe the mentality that led to last week's massacre as "medieval." That is both too kind to the perpetrators of this savagery and unjust to history.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA. McCarthy asks concerning those who “have found some way to rationalize the incendiary scriptures,” “if it works for them, who the ... am I to say they’re wrong?” The question is obviously rhetorical, but the answer is this: you are a person to whom the Koran frequently refers in derogatory and malevolent terms. You are person against whom the Koran incites violence and over whom the Koran demands dominance.
I don’t care to argue with moderates either, but we must realize that a moderate’s Koran is like a liberal’s constitution; it’s either a “living document” or it means whatever they prefer for whatever reasons they prefer it. By humoring them, we propagate undeserved respect for the Islam of the Koran that will always be beneath the surface of the Islam that nice self-proclaimed Muslims look at it through their mystical lens of epistemological subjectivism.
That said, you’re doing great work Andrew McCarthy. Please carry on.
Eric Bohnet nailed the motivation behind the rioting and killing… submission to Islam (and “Islam” does in fact mean “submission” in Arabic).
Griswel’s excellent comments hint at this: T. Jones’s Koran burning may be more important as a message to us, his fellow non-Muslims than as an insult to Muslims. It’s blunt call to man up and face the fact that the Koran calls for our submission either as Muslims or as second class citizens in a Muslim world. Do not submit.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou know how Muslims face Mecca and pray five times a day? Each of those prayers includes a passage called "al-fatiha." The five prayers combined repeat this passage a total of 17 times. Thus, every Muslim, from earliest childhood to the grave, repeats these words 17 times per day. The passage goes like this: "In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate: Praise belongs to God, the Lord of all Being, the All-merciful, the All-compassionate, the Master of the Day of Doom. Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour. Guide us in the straight path, the path of those whom Thou hast blessed, not of those against whom Thou art wrathful, nor of those who are astray."
Ask any five year old Arabic Muslim, who are these people who have been led astray, whose path the Muslims condemn 17 times per day? They are the Christians. Who are the people whom every Muslim acknowledges 17 times per day to be the objects of Allah's wrath? They are the Jews.
These are not radical views. This is mainstream Islam. This is the view of 100% of Muslims, repeated by the faithful a minimum of 17 times per day: that Allah has condemned the path of the Christian as wrongful, and that the Jew is the target of a divinely just anger: i.e., an anger to which all Muslims should aspire.
This kind of rote indoctrination, from cradle to grave, necessarily warps its practitioners. We must acknowledge at least this much: that the Arab Muslim, and many non-Arab Muslims, is *not* just another regular Joe like you and me.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe real problem is laid out well by Rinson: they do not grasp that we are individuals in a secular society. We are not a collective, but a society of individuals. MarkW got that much right, but didn't go the next step: the collective they live in is a theocracy - every thing they do is based (supposedly) on their relationship to their god. Our society is based on living together - founded on religious principles, but free to depart from the religion itself.
When we burn a Koran, or have a protest, they assume it must be because our whole society believes in the act or it is directed by our leaders. They can't understand the concept of 'grassroots' or even that 100,000 people marching in Washington DC may represent a very minority view.
This is why we have failed to create truly 'liberal' societies in all those places we have tried. They have no concept of freedom. And, they never will have it until they are willing to confront the natural enmity between Islam and freedom.
lan astaslem - I will not submit
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAll we should ask for is equality of cultural respect. Surely that's a concept all can agree on.
As Christians, we often say that "The eyes are the windows to the soul." As such, we believe it "pollutes" our souls to have non-believers look us in the eye.
For this reasons, our military should institute a policy in which all "non-believers" must stare at the ground in the presence of Christians. (Perhaps we can give some pagans a break for a small fee.)
Christians will not handle the Muslims' Korans, and Muslims will agree to stare at the ground in the presence of Christians. If one side changes their policy, so will the other. Anything less would be culturally disrespectful.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSo, their religious fanatics behead people, while the worst that can be said of our religious fanatics is that they burn books.
Lord help us, what else needs to be said?
Anyone who attempts to inject anything else into this discussion is delusional, a coward, or both.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"I think the big problem with what Jones did is the gratuitous insult to all Muslims, including the millions who do not subscribe to the violent jihadist or broader Islamist construction of Islamic scripture."
The insult is not 'gratuitous'. It is direct to Muslims--including the mythical group you refer to here. In fact, to them most of all. They do nothing and let evil thrive.
Are the Islamic nations whose policy is to burn other faiths holy books upon confiscation(what is done if it is discovered you have one)non-subscribers to violent jihad?
You rely on there being this huge silent group of 'moderate' Muslims who do not seek the death of the West--in all the years Islam has been at war with us, Andrew, where are they?
They don't exist. Accept that.
Maybe then we'll start giving the Gitmo detainees korans wrapped in pigskin AS a 'gratuitous' insult to our ENEMIES.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"...every thing they do is based (supposedly) on their relationship to their god."
That does not explain adequately the murderous rage of the mob in Mazar-e-Sharif, since there are many Christians who live this way but do not then go on to slaughter the employees of an art commune or museum on the other side of the globe whenever their holy symbols are profaned. They may protest or call for the withdrawal of public funding from the artist or venue, but at the end of the day everyone in the art world gets to keep their heads firmly attached to the rest their bodies.
I tell you what may *this* Christian into a murderous rage, though--this confounded, illegible image verification that NRO has implemented for comments. CAPTCHA DELENDA EST.
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