Burn a Bible, We Don't Care

On the West's relative moral superiority to murderous Afghan mobs.

In the wake of deadly Afghan protests sparked by the burning of a Qur’an by U.S. pastor Terry Jones, the National Post’s Charles Lewis writes that the only way to deal with a man so odious is to ignore him. “Shun him,” Lewis writes. “No longer record a single word he says. Let us will him to disappear into obscurity.” Anonymity surely would be hell for an attention-seeking zealot like Jones – and to the media’s credit, his inflammatory stunt wasn’t widely reported until protests erupted. But Lewis is optimistic if he thinks not reporting on Jones will make him disappear; the pastor reportedly contacted Muslim media groups directly, and these days mainstream media hardly controls the flow of information.

As Roger Cohen points out in the New York Times, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was not nearly so judicious as the mainstream media, and made the incredibly ill-advised decision to publicly denounce the Qur’an burning before the murders occurred. “He was a fool to allude to Jones’s stunt, performed before a few dozen acolytes. Why elevate this vile little deed and so foster mayhem?” Cohen asks. The answer, of course, is that slamming Americans makes Karzai’s constituents forget that their president is in Washington’s pocket. “Karzai is a man who will stop at nothing to disguise his weakness,” says Cohen.

Also in the Post, Lorne Gunter writes that while Jones may be a vile idiot, sole responsibility for the murders rests with those who committed them. “The deaths say as much about the state of Islam in the developing world … as they do about Jones,” he writes. “[W]e in the West got over such purely symbolic provocations around five centuries ago.” But Gunter’s self-congratulatory tone conceals the fact that the West has hardly renounced violence; we just practise it in more sophisticated forms, with drones and tanks instead of riots. To excuse the mob’s actions would be foolish, but so too would be any analysis that dismisses NATO’s 10-year offensive in Afghanistan as irrelevant. Surely that deadly war had some role to play in the anger on display last week.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.