http://www.torontosun.com/2012/10/12/morality-and-tolerance
“We are the first to mock the Americans for bringing God into politics, but we spend a lot of time appeasing Islam when it insists on bringing its god into pretty much everything.”
It’s been said many times that while American pastor Terry Jones has the right to publicly burn the Qur’an, he has the responsibility not to do so. In other words, acts have consequences, and even actions that are legal may lead to illegal responses.
But here, surely, is the point. The burning of a book, any book, may be annoying, but the burning of a person, any person, is grotesque. Jones sometimes destroys words while Muslim mobs frequently kill people.
It’s the difference between action and reaction.
Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses, Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon of Mohammed, and Pope Benedict’s statement in Germany about Islam, for example, all led to hundreds of people being murdered, and countless people beaten, property destroyed, and threats made. One was a book, one a picture, one the repetition of a question asked centuries ago about the Muslim faith.
So, whom do we hold responsible for the horror and terror that ensued after these three now-seminal events in recent history: The person writing, drawing, or speaking, or those who threw themselves into paroxysms and spasms of anger and brutality?
If we are to define ourselves, our culture, and our laws according to the responses of the brute, we might as well give up immediately.
The issue is not whether some obscure cleric should be allowed to enter Canada, but whether Canada is a nation that protects freedom of speech and seeks to curtail the more extreme and unreasonable manifestation of religious fervour.
We’re the f