[A-List] Fwd: [R-G] The Koran at Fahrenheit 451

[Suzanne de Kuyper]

To be fused together or incinerated?  S.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Romi Elnagar <bluesapphire48 at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 10:12 AM
Subject: [R-G] The Koran at Fahrenheit 451
To: Suzanne  de Kuyper <suzannedk at gmail.com>


The Koran at Fahrenheit 451
  By ALEXANDER COCKBURN


  By the end of
the week, the air was so thick with pieties about the need for tolerance
 and respect for all creeds that one yearned for the Rev. Terry Jones,
mutton chop whiskers akimbo, to rescind his last minute cave-in, stiffen
 his spine, then toss those Korans into the burn barrels outside his
Gainesville church in Florida and torch them on this year’s anniversary
of 9/11.


  Jones announced  on Thursday that he was canceling
his Koran burning plan after getting a pledge  that the scheduled Muslim
 center near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan would be moved. When it
turned out there was no such pledge Jones hinted he might just reach for
 the kerosene can after all.


  It’s not surprising Jones blinked. The entire world
 court of enlightened opinion had borne down on this former hotel
manager, now senior pastor at the Dove World Outreach Center and its
modest congregation, which does – on the evidence of videos of the
church’s proceedings – boast of some young female members of whom many a
 beleaguered Anglican parish would be only too proud to have raising
their arms in ecstasy next to the altar.

  Take Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state.
“It's regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Fla., with a church of
no more than fifty people can make this outrageous and distressful,
disgraceful plan and get, you know, the world's attention,” Clinton said
 in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, a favored venue for
the elites debating homicidal policies around the world. Clinton
concluded, “It doesn't in any way represent America or Americans, or
American government, or American religious or political leadership.”

  This is the same Hillary Clinton who has spent much
 of her term as helmswoman of the nation’s foreign affairs demonizing
Iran and threatening it with nuclear obliteration, during which
uncounted millions of Korans and the people clutching them would turn to
 cinders.


  And here was U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman imploring
Jones to reconsider: “I appeal to people who are planning to burn the
Koran to reconsider and drop their plans because they are inconsistent
with American values and, as General Petraeus has warned, threatening to
 America's military.”

  This is the same Lieberman who is the most sedulous
 U.S. lobbyist for the interests of Israel in Washington, D.C. Has
Lieberman warned Israel that its planned law to force every Palestinian
to swear explicit allegiance to the Jewish state, hence the tenets of
Zionism, is inconsistent with American values, and thus might prompt him
 to reconsider his approval of America’s annual disbursement of $3
billion to Israel’s collection plate?

  U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called Jones’
plan “idiotic and dangerous.” Would Holder call the action of his
Democratic predecessor as  attorney general, Janet Reno, in ordering
the  federal onslaught that led to the incineration in 1993 of the
Branch Davidian church in Waco “idiotic and dangerous”? The Justice
Department has always defended Reno’s action, even though it prompted
the blowing up of the Murrah Center in Oklahoma City – until the
9/11/2001 attacks, the most deadly act of terror perpetrated on American
 soil.

  And here was Gen. Petraeus making what is described
 as an unusual – for a member of the military – intervention: “Images of
 the burning of a Koran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in
Afghanistan – and around the world – to inflame public opinion and
incite violence.” Petraeus can only advise Pastor Jones, who has the
constitutional freedom to dispose of the Koran as he thinks fit,
consonant with local laws pertaining to public bonfires. He can,
however, suspend by a simple order the lethal Predator onslaughts that
regularly blow to pieces civilian groups in Afghanistan and the Pakistan
 border region, inflaming public opinion and leading invariably to
escalation in violence.


  For their part, Afghans demonstrated in Kabul in
anticipatory protest at Pastor Jones’ plan. They denounced disrespect
for the Koran. But we also learn from earnest proponents of religious
tolerance and interconfessonal amity that the Koran promotes respect for
 the Bible, (though not, of course, the Christian claim of the divinity
of Christ – a view also held by followers of Judaism, whose Talmud
locates Christ in hell for all eternity, boiling in excrement). What did
 the indignant Afghans say when, in early August of this year ten
members of a Christian medical team – six Americans, two Afghans, one
German and a Briton, three women among them – were gunned down by the
Taliban who claimed they were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.
 The gunmen spared an Afghan driver, who screamed he was a Muslim and
babbled some verses from the Koran. The group were members of the
International Assistance Mission, one of the longest serving
nongovernmental organizations operating in Afghanistan, registered as a
nonprofit Christian organization, apparently not proselytizing. So, what
 if they were?


  Pastor Jones, a good old boy with a nose for a
headline, aroused the fury of the American establishment, which has, as a
 matter of regular imperial maintenance, promoted the murder of millions
 across the world in the name of “American values.” Modern Christians,
fusionists of the all-get-along school deplored Jones and started
reading the Koran in church to show their broad-mindedness. But many
Evangelicals thought Jones was on track, though they mostly won’t say so
 publicly. As a Southern Baptist said to me last week, “Alex, they say
that Christianity is tolerant. But Christ drove the moneychangers from
the Temple. He didn’t tolerate them. A line has to be drawn, just like
Jones is doing.”
  And if the line isn’t drawn by Pastor Jones,
Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka, Kan., the church that pickets
funerals of American soldiers to spread its message that God is
punishing the country for being tolerant of homosexuals, has promised it
 will pick up the Zippo if it falls from Jones’ nerveless hand.

  What better symbol than Jones of what should have
been America’s overall resilience in the aftermath of the Muslim attacks
 of 9/11/2001: an assertion of one of the greatest of American values,
as embodied in constitutional provisions for free speech. These freedoms
 matter most when they are under duress. Amid the duress after
9/11/2001, the Constitution was trashed by the same leaders who now
decry Jones. The same President Obama who  denounced Pastor Jones for
planning an act “completely contrary to our values as Americans”  is
defending the “extraordinary renditions” of the Bush era with “state
secrets” rationales just endorsed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
 Read the tortures inflicted on those men rendered by US government
agents to  Egypt and Morocco, and judge for yourself whether Obama has
any standing to preach to Jones about “our values as Americans.”

  My hope had been that on the other side of the
road from Pastor Jones’ burn barrels, or on some piece of property
volunteered by the mayor of Gainesville, a gay man, there would have
been other barrels, into which could be tossed by their opponents the
Bible, and kindred sacred texts such as the Talmud, plus Bacon’s
Advancement of Learning, Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and Das
Kapital. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature of the crucible, in which
ideas and principles survive or die.

http://www.counterpunch.org/




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