Let’s put it this way — Terry Jone’ burning the Koran was stupid, irresponsible, and repugnant, but it IS NOT his fault that there are a significant number of Muslim men who are not only ready but eager to riot and kill in response to insults to Islam.
The majority of Muslims don’t do this, so why do these heartless Afghanis kill people who have absolutely nothing to do with what Jones did? Is it because they are like hornets in a hive?
If we deny that the muslim killings are not Jones’ fault, then we are basically denying the humanity of Muslims. We take it as a given in this country that not only are all men created equal, but that each individual is responsible for his own actions. Each man and woman is a captain of his or her own self.
To say that Muslims have no choice in the matter, that they must act like animals, is to say that they are animals (or in your example, insects).
If you tease a bear and he kills you, your stupidity is to blame. If you tease a man and he kills you, THE MURDERER IS TO BLAME. The Muslim is neither a bear nor a bee. He is HUMAN.
So, I repeat, burning the Koran is reprehensible. And I could live with a local law that banned Koran-burning (and flag-burning, Bible-burning, Torah-burning, etc.) because I think communities should be able to set standards of decency. But that hardly settles things. It’s easy to condemn Koran-burning. What about those Danish cartoons of Mohammed (that Yale University won’t even reproduce in a book on the controversy)? What about highbrow novels like The Satanic Verses? When Pope Benedict XVI delivered his Regensburg address in 2006, he suggested that Islam had a link to violence. In response, many Muslims rioted. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
When Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer was asked in an interview about Koran-burning, he brought up former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous comment that the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”
There are a number of grave problems with the crowded-theater cliché.
First, you can — even must — yell “fire” in a crowded theater. It just has to be the truth.
But more to the point, fires are not human beings. Fire has no choice but to burn because that is what fire does. Humans have choices. Yet in this formulation (from which Breyer has somewhat retreated), Muslims are akin to soulless, unthinking flames.
Taken seriously, this comparison suggests rational people have every reason to fear Muslims in much the same way they fear fire!
There are complex issues here. But the simple truth is the Islamist extremists who behead and riot DO HAVE A CHOICE.
They WANT to murder. What they want, what they are itching to have is AN EXCUSE, and they’ll find one no matter what.
Wow.Guess I really did poke a bees nest.lol.It really doesn’t take much to whip them in a frenzy.Would be funny if they weren’t slaughtering innocent people people while politicians cower instead of bombing them back to the stone age every time they pull this like we ought to be doing instead.