U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking last week at an Iftar dinner to celebrate breaking the Ramadan fast, condemned a plan by the Reverend Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center of Gainesville, Florida, to burn the Koran. Secretary Clinton was just one member of the Obama Administration who has come out against this action by a pastor with a flock of fifty.
First, one must question why the U.S. government is hosting Iftar dinners. According to the PEW Forum on Religious and Public Life, followers of the Prophet make up just 0.6% of the population of the United States, less than adherents of Buddhism (0.7%) and a fraction above Hinduism (0.4%). To my knowledge there are no similar celebrations for Buddhists and Hindus. For that matter, the category Other Faiths ranks substantially higher at 1.7% with at least 1.2 million adherents to neo-paganism, suggesting that the Obama Administration should host Samhain, Beltaine , Lughnassad, or some other such pagan bacchanal. Perhaps he can celebrate Halloween with a black mass, complete with nude women on the altar (oh, sorry, that was Bill Clinton) and inverted cross? Satanism is a religion, too! At any rate, it is an odd thing to be doing, and an even odder thing to be trashing private citizens in front of potentially riotous Muslims.
I’M not the one saying that; it is the administration. Many in the Administration are claiming that the actions of Rev. Jones could endanger American lives abroad (and, unspoken, here) and that Mr. Jones should reconsider. But who is bringing attention to the actions of someone largely unknown outside of his Florida church? The danger has risen considerably precisely because of Administration efforts advertising the planned conflagration. IF Muslims are so easily excitable shouldn’t the Administration have tried a more diplomatic approach? “Soft Power” is the byword in the Obama lexicon, and his efforts at rapprochement with Islam is hardly advanced by creating a huge clambake out of so small a fish (but then, a man with a Messiah complex would logically believe he could multiply loves and fishes…) It seems to me the Administration is yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theatre.
We must also ask why anyone should care. There is no right to not be offended, and Americans have been told repeatedly that they must endure burning flags and whatnot. According to the PEW statistics people who are unaffiliated with any organized religion make up a whopping 16.1% of the American population; to many of these Americans the flag IS a religious symbol, a symbol of their nation. We have not seen riots by patriotic secularists. Yet America is expected to cower at the threat of riots and terrorism. If that is so, the Jihadists have already won.
But one must ask about the balance here; if burning the Koran is such an inflammatory act, why are acts perpetrated by Muslims not equally inflammatory?
Consider the desecration of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem back in 2002 by Palestinian militants. Fleeing the Israeli Defense Force, terrorists invaded this most holy of Christian shrines, the spot Christians believe to be the birthplace of Jesus. Refusing to come out, they stood weeks of siege by the IDF, knowing the Israelis would not dare destroy the church. The matter was settled when Israel voluntarily allowed the militant leaders to not only leave the church but to fly to friendly nations, to reorganize and make war on Israel again. Inside the squatters left a terrible mess; urine, feces, dirty clothes, used toilet paper, dirty eating utensils and food packaging. Oh, and bombs; they were going to meet their seventy two virgins and a mule by taking the sacred structure out, along with any IDF troops who dared invade their sanctuary. Militants slept on the very spot where Jesus was believed to have been born!
The reaction in Christendom was swift and sure; Christians rioted worldwide, burning Mosques in a fit of rage and raped and beheaded any poor Muslim who was caught in the open. No, wait, that didn’t happen; there was some complaint, but life returned to normal, except for the priests and nuns who had been held hostage and who now had months of work to restore the holy spot.
It should be pointed out that the Rev. Jones is not suggesting to burn the Koran; he is planning to burn a COPY of the Koran. That copy started as a tree or perhaps cotton. It was milled, pulped, pressed. It went from a factory to a print shop where ink was applied to paper in the letters that make up the translated version of an ancient text. From there it went to a warehouse, and from there to a bookstore or was sent via parcel post to the good Reverend. The physical object has little of the sacred about it.
Now, that is not to say that the words have little of the sacred, and Muslims should rightly be angry at this act. Is it grounds to kill and maim? Do we kill or maim when someone says something derogatory about our mothers, say? Sticks and stones may break my bones, oh, wait, stop throwing those sticks and stones!
Islam seems to engender the throwing of sticks and stones rather than believing words will never hurt.
What is important here? The actual words of the Prophet, or the translated pages? Christians do not like the desecration of the Bible, but do not riot when it occurs. Nobody rioted when a particularly nasty biology professor and atheist desecrated the Eucharist, and Catholics believe that is the real body of Jesus Christ. (He also desecrated the Koran, and there weren’t any riots, either.)
The point is, why should the threat of violence change the behavior of non-Muslims? It’s THEIR temper tantrum. Parents learn early to not give in to misbehaving children, because that will only re-enforce the behavior. America must understand that the threat of violence is a tool, one designed to coerce the Infidel into compliance with Sharia. If successful in small things, that threat will be used again and again to demand Dhimmi status from non-Muslims. Granted, there is no reason to go out of the way to provoke, but must we tiptoe on eggshells?
Actually, the Muslims have no such compulsion; consider the Ground Zero Mosque aka Cordoba House.
Building a mosque at the site where Muslim extremists murdered close to three thousand people is beyond chutzpah; it would trigger unprecedented riots and murder were it done in the Islamic world. Did the British build an Anglican church at Omdurman in the Sudan where they defeated the army of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad? No, because the British understood the provocative nature of such an action. Yet a victory mosque is planned for New York, and the naïve mayor Michael Bloomberg has been pressuring to fast track it, believing it will somehow foster better relations between the Islamic world and the U.S. Fat chance; what appears to be a gesture of good will to Bloomberg and the Obama Administration is seen clearly as a victory lap to the Muslims. There can be little doubt that they view America’s “rapprochement” as cowardice and stupidity.
Again, this is a tool, a tool to advance the submission of all nations to Islam. Every concession leads to new demands, new challenges. Muslims learned well from the communists; the dialectic, whereby a thesis is put forward, an antithesis counters, and a synthesis winds up giving half a loaf to the Marxist revolutionaries is being employed now by Islam. Firmness is needed. Unfortunately, the man who occupies the highest office in the United States has at minimum strong sympathies for Islam, and is completely lacking in intestinal fortitude.
Multiculturalism, relativism, and other leftist concepts have left the United States impotent, unwilling to fight when needed. That is not to say the armed forces are weak or cowardly, but the leadership, and a sizable portion of the general public, are indeed knock kneed and pacifist. The idea that “diversity is our strength” and that American values require submission to enemies or outsiders in general will produce a death spiral. What healthy nation ever allowed outsiders to determine it’s culture and character? America is a nation torn asunder by intellectual masochism. It is that masochism, that fear of her own power and will, that will destroy the United States.
The hysterical reaction of Hillary and the Obama Administration to the threat to burn copies of the Koran illustrates this mindset perfectly. The United States is a sheep being led to the slaughter.
