RUTHFULLY YOURS

Koran-burning preacher Terry Jones is innocent of murder: Rush to condemn him is deeply disturbing

By James Kirchick

“11 people lost their lives so Terry Jones could burn a Koran and feed the
24/7 news monster,” Luke Russert of NBC wrote on his Twitter feed just as
the news broke. “Jones’s act was murderous as any suicide bomber’s,” intoned Time’s Joe Klein.

Politicians followed pundits in the condemnation: “Free speech is a great
idea, but we’re in a war,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told CBS News on Sunday. Asked whether Congress might pass a resolution condemning the burning, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said, “We’ll take a look at this.”

The sad fact, however, is that Jones didn’t even need to broadcast an actual
Koran burning live on the internet to elicit the response he has since
called, correctly, “predictable.” Does anyone for a minute believe that had
a false report of a Koran burning been issued, the fanatics would have
desisted from their murderous rage? Such a scenario played out in 2005, when Newsweek erroneously reported that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had flushed a Koran down a toilet. To anyone who has actually used a toilet, the story seemed specious from the outset. Nevertheless, riots in Muslim countries resulted in at least 15 deaths.

It’s worth noting that this time, unable to find Americans on whom to
unleash their wrath, the Afghan mob turned to the next best target: the
United Nations, 7 of whose employees, including a Norwegian and Swede, were murdered. For radical Islamists, anyone will do, even pacifistic
Scandinavians. The randomness of the crime underscores the utter
irrationality of those who committed it, not to mention the masses that
tacitly lend them support. It also illustrates why appeasing such people is
an utterly fruitless task.

One can understand the concerns of a man like Gen. David Petraeus, who
doesn’t need another reason for pious Muslims to target the soldiers under
his command. But in a democracy, it is not the role of a military officer to
offer his opinion on how American citizens should exercise their free speech rights. Liberals tend to be more diligent about observing the
civilian-military divide, so it’s strange that those heaping blame on Terry
Jones have not commented upon this remarkable development.

Those who fault Jones for the behavior of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan
must answer: Where does the blame-shifting end?

Is Salman Rushdie, whose “Satantic Verses” earned him a fatwa from the
Ayatollah Khomoeni, to blame for the murder of his Japanese translator?
Should the Danish cartoonist who drew images of Mohammed foot the bill for repairs to his nation’s embassy in Damascus, which was burned by a mob in 2006? Why don’t we just veil our women and execute our gays while we’re at it, since that’s what the radicals want?

Christians do not kill when comedians produce a Broadway play mocking
Mormonism or when an artist displays a crucifix in a jar of urine. Neither
do Jews go on murderous rampages when Muslim preachers celebrate the
Holocaust or when Arab newspapers publish cartoons depicting hook-nosed rabbis, outrages that occur on a near-daily basis.

We do a lot of apologizing in the West, a function of our narcissistic
belief that the world revolves around us. But it’s wrong and patronizing to
believe that what we do determines the course of world events, particularly
the most miniscule occurrences in the Muslim world.

As the writer Bruce Bawer commented in response to Jones’s initial threat to burn the Koran last year, “American flags can be burned by the hundreds, by huge crowds, in the major squares of Muslim capitals, and that’s apparently hunky-dory with us. But when a guy in Gainesville whom nobody ever heard of decides to burn a few Korans, everybody from the President on down begs him to reconsider.”

It is one thing to say that Jones’s Koran-burning was a stupid and offensive
thing to do. He is not Rushdie, after all, whose “provocation” was the
exercising of the creative spirit. It is another thing entirely, however, to
move to the accusation that Jones is culpable for the murderous acts of
people half way around the world. People who riot and murder at the burning of a book do not need a pretext to act like savages. That’s exactly what they already are.