Currently, the airwaves around the world are reverberating to the news of the proposed actions of a few angry evangelical Christians. The congregation of the Dove World Outreach Center, led by Pastor Terry Jones, intends to incinerate a few thousand Korans on Saturday, the anniversary of 9/11. The small church in Gainesville Florida has no more than 50 members.

This proposal is being met with horror from representatives of the Muslim world and from the administration. Hillary Clinton, hosting an iftar dinner at the White House, made a statement to her Muslim dinner guests:

“I am heartened by the clear, unequivocal condemnation of this disrespectful act that has come from American religious leaders from all faiths… as well as secular US leaders and opinion makers.”

She also said it was disgraceful and disrespectful. Attorney General Eric Holder described the plan to burn Korans as “idiotic and dangerous.”

General David Petraeus, senior general in Afghanistan, wrote in an email that:

“images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan — and around the world — to inflame public opinion and incite violence.”

Robert Gibbs, White House spokesperson, announced: “Any type of activity like that that puts our troops in harm’s way would be a concern to this administration.” Philip J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, said:

“We think that these are provocative acts. We would like to see more Americans stand up and say that this is inconsistent with our American values; in fact, these actions themselves are un-American. We hope that between now and Saturday there will be a range of voices across America that make clear to this community that this is not the way for us to commemorate 9/11. In fact, it is consistent with the radicals and religious bigots who attacked us on 9/11.”

It is strange to hear a member of this administration declare an action to be un-American, considering the manner in which this administration has acted recently. Surprisingly, the only person to view this as a clear-cut case of freedom of expression – no matter how distasteful or offensive it may seem – is New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

He said:

“In a strange way, I’m here to defend his right to do that. I happen to think that it is distasteful. The First Amendment protects everybody, and you can’t say that we’re going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement. If you want to be able to say what you want to say when the time comes that you want to say it, you have to defend others, no matter how, how much you disagree with them.”

Michael Bloomberg’s comments have consistency. On August 3, surrounded by religious leaders, he stood on a windswept Governor’s Island and spoke  how the government had no right to interfere with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s religious freedom to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. Bloomberg had then said of 9/11:

“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedom to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams and to live our own lives. Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish.”

Whether one agrees with mosques at ground zero or not, or whether one thinks burning Korans is distasteful or not, both issues involve freedom of expression, and freedom of worship. And here, to his credit, Michael Bloomberg is being morally straightforward and uncontrived.

An administration that has argued that a mosque should be allowed near Ground Zero, despite widespread opposition from American citizens, does test credibility when its leading members loudly condemn a pastor’s freedom of expression. A general does not sound like a military leader if he suggests that a conflict will worsen if a few people burn Korans. Due to restrictive ROE guidelines, the military in Afghanistan is still compelled to act like a team of social workers rather than as a war-winning team.

Pastor Terry Jones is doing what he thinks is appropriate. It would be unrealistic to suggest that there will be no reactions in the Muslim world. It is to be expected that there will be violence, and probably deaths. However, the hysteria on the part of the establishment in reaction to this upcoming event shows how much they apparently fear the volatility of Islamic extremists.

Previous Outrages

We have been here before – the Salman Rushdie affair led to the burning of books. Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses” was deemed blasphemous and had led to a death fatwa being issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989. There were burnings of his book around the Muslim world. On February 27, 1989, an effigy of Rushdie was burned on Fifth Avenue, and in Karachi, Pakistan, a British Council library suffered a bomb attack. A Pakistani guard was killed. On July 12, 1991, the Japanese translator of Rushdie’s book – Hitoshi Igrashi – was found stabbed to death. Nine days earlier the Italian translator had been stabbed in his Milan apartment, but had survived.

In August 2002, a group of Muslims were arrested for plotting to destroy a fresco in the Basilica of St Petronio (Bologna Cathedral) in Italy. The fresco, by Giovanni a Modena depicted Hell and included an image of Mohammed, depicted as he was described (disembowelled) in Canto 28 of Dante Aligheiri’s Inferno. Two months earlier, a terror plot against the same Cathedral had been thwarted.

In November 2002, after a journalist had said of the Miss World beauty pageant that Prophet Mohammed would have wished to marry one of the candidates, riots broke out in Kaduna, northern Nigeria. Muslims attacked Christians, and vice versa, and more than 100 people died.

On November 2, 2004, film-maker Theo van Gogh, a descendant of the brother who had been the patron of Vincent van Gogh, was murdered in the street in Amsterdam. His assailant, Mohamed Bouyeri, had shot and stabbed van Gogh, and tried to decapitate him. He had left a knife stuck in van Gogh’s chest, which pinned a note to the body, listing others who were targets to be killed. In court, Bouyeri (pictured) showed no remorse. He held a Koran and said: “the law compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet.”

There followed more days of outrage. The cartoon protests which reached their peak in February 2006 saw fifty people killed around the world. On February 3 in London, terror-supporting Muslims from the Al-Muhajiroun group organized a protest where placards carried the slogans: “Europe you will pay, 9/11 is on its way” and “Behead those who Insult Islam.”

Then, on September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered his address at Regensburg University, his alma mater. Here he quoted Manuel Paleologos II, the 14^th century Byzantine emperor, who had said: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Manuel Paleologos and his son would find themselves forced to accept the supremacy of the Ottoman Sultan Murad II in 1424 who demanded that the Byzantine Empire pay him a tribute.

After the Regensburg speech, some were not so fortunate. In Iraq, an Assyrian priest, Father Paulos Iskander, was beheaded, and a 14-year old Christian boy was crucified in Albasra. A group calling itself “Kataab Ashbal Al Islam Al Salafi” threatened to kill all Christians in Iraq if Benedict failed to apologize to prophet Mohammed. In Somalia, five days after the speech, Sister Leonella Sqorbati, a Catholic nun working in a hospital in Somalia, was murdered, shot in the back. A Somali imam, Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin, urged Muslims to “punish” the Pope. He said: “Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim.”

Since then, Christians have had their throats slit in Turkey for producing Bibles, publisher Martin Rinja had his home subjected to a firebomb attempt after he planned to publish a book on Aisha’s the child-bride of Mohammed, artist Lars Vilks was physically attacked for his pictures of Mohammed as a dog, and then Jihad Jane was arrested for allegedly assisting a plot to kill him. Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who had depicted Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, had his home invaded by a Somali Muslim brandishing an ax.

Over a very short period, the world has been forced to accept the petulant histrionics of people regarded as only a “minority” of the Muslim Ummah, and in response, the West has been expected to censor itself.

No longer bowing to threats?

Muslims may feel that they do not want their prophet insulted or their sacred books burned, and this is understandable, but the period of tolerance for Islamic threats seems to be over. After the Revolution Muslim site issued a veiled death threat to the creators of South Park, for depicting Mohammed in a bear suit, something changed in the zeitgeist.

This year, Everybody Draw Mohammed Day burst onto Facebook on May 20. Cartoons of Mohammed, some scatological and some tasteless, were posted onto a Facebook Page. What was unusual was the manner in which people – voting at a rate of around 70 per minute – were declaring that they “liked” the page. These people posted their approval under their usual names, with their faces visible. The total of “likes” came close to 100,000 before Facebook pulled the plug for the obscenities contained in some images.

Daniel Pipes notes in an article in today’s Family Security Matters that a decade ago, the vocal opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque proposals would have been “inconceivable.” He argues that the threat of Islamism could be faced down if the protesters who have now found their voice reserved their rage for Islamism only, and did not cross into the zones of attacking Islam.

Unfortunately, what is happening now, and is happening in Gainesville Florida, is a reaction that has been forced. It is undoubtedly true that most Muslims are peaceful and good citizens. But their public political representatives, those who control the “Islamic agenda” in all the countries of Western Europe and in America too, are almost exclusively Islamists. And this is the problem. When the president spoke of Imam Rauf’s freedom of religion to turn a property into a mosque, there were Muslim Brotherhood supporters in his audience in the White House Dining Hall. The Muslim advisers to many Western democratic governments have an agenda to ultimately see the West become a Muslim waqf, a scene of conquest that should never revert to anything other than Islam. These Islamist advisers would happily see Sharia enforced and democracy abolished, and are therefore the worst people to give advice to a democratic administration.

Ed Cline has recently claimed that there are aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Moses’ genocidal behavior towards the Midianites) that are violent. It is obvious that until fairly recently, people were burned or hanged as witches in European courts, and at Salem, Massachusetts, under Christian law. The Catholic Church burned heretics, as did Protestants. When Calvin took control of Geneva, executions of heretics took place. The worst excesses of the protestant and Catholic churches ended with the Enlightenment.

While the West went through its Enlightenment, Muslim nations (the Barbary States) were still kidnapping Christians and holding them to ransom or working them to death. The Founding Fathers were forced to pay ransoms to the despots of North Africa, to save the lives of American sailors who had been taken hostage. Only firepower, in the Second Barbary War of 1815, put an end to this practice.

I have not had space to cover the frequent abuses of Christian minorities in Muslim countries, such as Pakistan. Here, a mere false rumor of a Koran being burned caused a Muslim mob to descend upon Sangla Hill in Punjab province on November 12, 2005. Chanting “Christian dogs” the mob attacked three churches and church properties. In Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood has become more influential, attacks upon Copts and their churches have escalated over the last five years. In Egypt, Christians make up 10 percent of the population, and in Pakistan, they are less than 3 percent.

The Muslim World exists as if there never was, and never will be, an Enlightenment. And despite the prettified words of Western leaders who want to gain Muslim votes, many aspects of strict Islam will never meld with Western “liberal” democracy. But the people see what is happening and are alarmed.

France has been fiercely secular since the Revolution of 1789, but even there, recent bullying by Muslims has led to scenes in Paris. Here, certain regions have been hijacked by Muslims who blatantly break the law by holding prayer meetings in the streets, blocking traffic while “guards” patrol menacingly.

Robert Redeker is a French philosopher who wrote of the intolerance of many Muslims to French secular ideals, and the manner in which the left-wing appeased Islamist thought. He wrote an article, published in Le Figaro newspaper of September 19, 2006, entitled “What should the free world do in the face of Islamist intimidation?”As a result of this article, Redeker was subjected to death threats and had to move home several times.The last sentence of the article stated:

“Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites reject and delegitimize violence. Islam is a religion that, in its own sacred text, as well as in its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred.”

Instead of getting universal support, Redeker found himself being grilled by France’s intellectual thought police, condemned for “political incorrectness.” As Christian Delacampagne writes:

Among members of the media, Redeker was scolded for articulating his ideas so incautiously. On the radio channel Europe 1, Jean-Pierre Elkabach invited the beleaguered teacher to express his “regret.” The editorial board of Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, characterized Redeker’s piece as “excessive, misleading, and insulting.” It went so far as to call his remarks about Muhammad “a blasphemy,” implying that the founder of Islam must be treated even by non-Muslims in a non-Muslim country as an object not of investigation but of veneration.

My translation of Redeker’s original article can be read here. In France, the resistance to Islamic extremism takes the form of pork and wine parties. Other groups have set up in Europe, though some of these could be seen as “reactionary” rather than having a defined purpose.

In America the current administration’s apparent love affair with Islam, including Islamism (judging by the Islamist representatives invited to iftar dinners) has alienated many Americans.

The affair of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville is just a reaction to the current situation. It is rare for anyone in the administration to dare to take time to praise Christianity or Judaism, yet Islam – which is still a minority religion in America – is on the front pages ad nauseam, and is constantly being engaged with and apparently promoted by politicians who should be upholding the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Such apparent bias towards a religion that is alien to, and (in its strictest form) even antithetical to the American Way of Life, is bound to create a backlash. The Ground Zero Mosque has heightened the sensitivities surrounding 9/11, and a sense that the administration has “sided with the enemy,” with that enemy being Islamism.

Pastor Terry Jones is preparing to do something that is perhaps unwise, and is certainly going to offend many Muslims, including the vast majority of Muslims who try to live their lives as good citizens. But Pastor Jones is resolute, and his bravery can be respected. Now the media has become involved, he could become a target.

Burning Korans, or burning any book, is genuinely distasteful. But if Muslims have the freedom to worship in their mosques in America, and are supported in this by the administration, then Christians who choose to burn books must also be allowed to carry out their freedom of expression. No laws are broken, and no-one is physically hurt.

If the only reasons to argue against this event in Florida are that such actions will invoke violence, then what does that say about the nature of Islam? And if an administration responds cooperatively to fears of threats and intimidation by extremists, what does that say about the nature of the West today?

 

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.

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