Well, the whole world saw it. And the response, though shocking, shouldn't shock anyone, not any more. You see, there is a subset of Muslims that believes that murder is an eminently reasonable response to the burning of a book. Not even murdering the person who burned the book, either: just murdering whoever, wherever...in this case, seven U.N. workers who almost certainly never even thought about burning anybody's holy book.
Now, I agree with Dennis Prager for most of the length of his column linked above. This is moral primitivism of a sort from which cavemen would have recoiled, and he makes a very good point suggesting that evil done in the name of religion is ipso facto worse than evil done against religion. Any god that commands you to kill a fellow human being is not a god worth following, and that ought to be self-evident, but it sadly isn't.
Where I start to question Prager is where he brings Joe Klein into it. Here's what Klein actually said, in context. Prager is seizing on this--
"But there should be no confusion about this: Jones's act was murderous as any suicide bomber's."
and asserting that Klein claims moral equivalence. That's every bit as preposterous as Prager fumes it is. It's also almost certainly dead wrong.
Burning a book ranks a whole hell of a way down the scale of atrocity from murdering seven innocents in cold blood. I know it, you know it, Prager knows it...and Klein knows it too. The only people who DON'T know it are fanatical Islamists. But that's the point.
Have we learned nothing about the way these people think in the wake of the Jyllands-Posten fiasco? Apparently not. What on earth did Terry Jones imagine would happen after he burned a Koran? Did he really believe that nobody'd notice, or care? Provoke these fanatics and PEOPLE WILL DIE. Retribution is as inevitable as it is inexcusable. So if you choose to burn a Koran, you will indeed have blood on your hands.
1 comment:
Those wacky islamists, may their god have mercy on their souls.
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