Burn the Bible, But Not the Koran?

RUSH: The protests in Afghanistan about the burning of the Koran in Florida... These protests are now entering their fourth day. Never mind that nobody even knew about the burning of the Koran -- it happened more than two weeks ago -- until these devout Muslims brought it up. And never mind that the Koran gets burned all the time when Muslims blow each other up in their mosques. And never mind that the US burned Bibles in Afghanistan back in 2009. Do you remember that, Dawn? Well, you should, because we talked about it on this program. The US burned Bibles in Afghanistan in 2009 so as not to offend the locals.

Now, our buddies over at Mediaite have an analysis piece. Apparently, Chris Matthews on his Sunday syndicated show, there was a discussion -- I think it was his Sunday syndicated show, I forget which, but one of his shows -- and some guest (or maybe it's the writer of this piece) says, "Well, you know, there's a difference. There's a difference in burning the Koran and burning the Bible."

"Well, Muslims believe the Koran is the direct Word of God from Allah to Mohammed to the page. The Bible isn't. The Bible is just put together by a bunch of people. But the Koran is the direct word of God."

Now, whoever wrote this obviously hasn't ever gone to Sunday school. Like, the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament are the Word of God. And somehow this guy: "Eh, the Bible, just a bunch of different people wrote the Bible. It's not the Word of God. The Koran is. So when you start burning the Koran, it's a far greater insult than when you burned the Bible." And, of course, then the Mediaite people take this up as though it's a legitimate intellectual question that must be analyzed in the most profound and deep manner possible. A glittering example of the sophistry that you find in the pseudo-intellectual class/ruling class people.

RUSH: No, we did, we burned Bibles in Afghanistan in 2009, and we did this so as not to offend the locals. You know, our soldiers brought Bibles with them, and okay, we don't want to offend the local Muslims. We're not here to conquer, we're here to liberate, so we burned Bibles. Nobody had any problem. It was cool. And never mind if that wasn't the excuse, it would be some other excuse, cartoon or whatever, these protests in Afghanistan about the burning of the Koran in Florida entering their fourth day. I want you to listen to this because this is the exchange that happened on the Chris Matthews, Chuck Todd piece I was just talking about, and it's a TIME Magazine reporter named Ghosh or Ghosh. His name is spelled G-h-o-s-h. I'm guessing he's pronouncing it Ghosh because gauche means extremely bad taste or what have you.

But here's what he said, "The thing to keep in mind that's very important here is that the Koran to Muslims, it is not -- it is not the same as the Bible to Christians. The Bible is a book written by men. It is acknowledged by Christians that it is written by men. It's the story of Jesus." F. Chuck Todd said, "Yes," Oh, yeah, yeah, it's exactly right. The Bible is the story of Jesus, TIME Magazine reporter, F. Chuck Todd, "Yes." Ghosh: "But the Koran, if you are a believer, if you're a Muslim, the Koran is directly the word of God, not written by man. It is transcribed, is directly the word of God. That makes it sacred in a way that it's hard to understand if you're not Muslim. So the act of burning a Koran is much more -- potentially much, much more inflammatory than --" And F. Chuck Todd reverentially saying: "Directly attacking -- directly attacking God." As though a revelation has occurred, F. Chuck has never thought of that before. He is in awed breathless silence, practically, over his realization.

Now, Ghosh, just so you know, is the reporter from TIME Magazine who invented the Haditha massacre story, made it up. The Marines at Haditha, the rapes, made it up. John Murtha picked up on the story as did many other Democrats picked up on the story, ran with it about what a bunch of rotten creeps US soldiers were. It was made up. This is the guy, Bobby Ghosh is his name, who invented the Haditha massacre story. That story was hoped by TIME Magazine to stir up the populace and cause murder and mayhem. It turned out to be a lie but it was one of the many efforts that the press engaged in to get us out of Iraq in defeat. And Ghosh is from India. Burning a Koran is terrible, don't misunderstand, but making up an atrocity at the same time? So here's Obama. Remember Obama and the put-down of Christians, this whole bitter clinger business. Do you think Obama would ever say of Muslims who are now in their fourth day of protests in Afghanistan over this, over this preacher up in Florida burning the Koran, do you think Obama would ever say, "Well, you know, it's not surprising these Muslims, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Do you think he would ever say that? Would we ever hear that from Obama about Muslims? Well, it flowed from his oral cavity with ease at a fundraiser in San Francisco talking about Christians.

RUSH: Okay, I got a question here, because this Mr. Ghosh fellow tells us that the Koran is the direct Word of God, right? And yet we're told that Islam is in the midst of reformation. There's a number of reformers out there. Well, who's gonna tell God that they're reforming Islam? I mean how can they do that?

RUSH: I want you to listen, however, before we get to all the rest of today's program, the sound bite that I quoted in the last hour of the program. It was a Hardball episode, Chris Matthews. The fill-in host was F. Chuck Todd and he was speaking with TIME Magazine Deputy International Editor Bobby Ghosh about a Florida pastor burning the Koran and Afghan Muslim protests and killings as a result. F. Chuck Todd said, "Basically, we have two sets of extremists here. We got this extremist in Florida and a couple of extremists that took advantage of the moment to stir people up in Afghanistan. How much has this spread around the Muslim world?"

GHOSH: The thing to keep in mind that's very important here is that the Koran for Muslims, it's not -- it's not the same as -- as the Bible to Christians. The Bible is a book written by men. It's acknowledged by Christians that it is written by men. It's the story of -- of Jesus. But the Koran, if you're a believer, if you're -- if you're Muslim, the Koran is directly the word of God, not written by man, it's transcribed directly the Word of God. That makes it sacred in a way that is hard to understand if you're not Muslim. So the act of burning a Koran is -- is much more potentially --

RUSH: Directly attacking God. And the Bible, Jesus, written by men and so forth. Well, you can do your own analysis and fill in the blanks yourself. My own observation is that we keep hearing that Islam is reforming. Well, you sit in there, Snerdley, and you laugh, but you know we keep hearing about this. We need to be patient, understand that there's a reform movement within that understands that killing people because of cartoons is a little bit over the top. There is a reform movement in Islam. Well, I would just ask Mr. Ghosh, who, as a reminder wrote the phony story on the Haditha massacre. The guy you just heard made up that story about Marines raping women and children in Iraq, that's the source authority for this Chuck Todd sitting in for Chris Matthews. So if the Koran is the direct Word of God transcribed, and yet there's a reform movement within it, who's gonna tell God that they're messing around here with it?

There are a lot of apologists that tell us Islam will reform, and that it will start embracing freedom of conscience, equality, the reform movement, there will be no more jihad. Well, how's it gonna do that, if their scriptures are not like ours, but written by Allah himself, what are the reformers gonna say? That God got things wrong? Uh, God, Allah, got a couple things in here we're gonna fix. Is that how they're gonna do this? Somebody's gonna have to tell God they're gonna reform it.

CALLER: I was thinking about this reverend down in Florida and his burning of the Koran, and we kind of get a little bit offended by that even though we still protect his right to do it with our First Amendment, but we don't recognize the attack by our own media and by the rioters in other parts of the world as an attack on our values, a direct attack on our values. Ask Daniel Pearl about that, you know, what do they do? They cut off heads. But we try to have the discussion, and we defend our values, and our values are worth defending and that's what they're trying to do is to disarm us from that intellectual response to this insanity of Islamofascism that's going on in the world.

RUSH: Yeah. I know. It's a good point. Well, about the burning of the Koran, nobody knew about it for a week after it happened.

RUSH: The minister burned it up there and it wasn't 'til somebody got wind of it and started making a big stink about it, but the act in and of itself didn't spread much beyond the flock.

CALLER: Yeah. Well, you could tell they were prepared for that because a couple months ago when he announced he was gonna do it they made a big flap over it and then they seemed to forget about it, and then when he did it, they didn't pay much attention for a couple weeks, so it looks like a concerted effort, as you call it, posturing.

RUSH: Yeah. There's so much posing going on that sometimes you don't know where it ends and reality begins.

RUSH: The president does not attack people burning Bibles. People are making excuses. It's fun to read the pseudointellectuals.

RUSH: The pseudointellectuals are saying no, the proof of our decency, the proof of our goodness, the proof of our great system is that we'll applaud people who burn our flag, for example, and we will gladly sit by and we'll applaud people who burn the Bible, but we don't think people ought to be burning the Koran because the Koran's a direct Word of God. We get some of the most convoluted gobbledygook that's supposed to pass for superior intelligence.

CALLER: Yeah. Well, part of that is when faith collides with faith, there's no recourse to reason. The only thing you can resort to is force. And that's what they're doing.

CALLER: That was the first attack on the World Trade Center back in '93, and they weren't successful, but they managed to knock the buildings down at a later date. And we don't believe that they really intend to destroy our culture, and that is stupid of us.

CALLER: Yeah. Exactly. Theirs isn't based on reason at all. Look at this guy that made the cartoons, you know, pillorying Mahmoud and pointing out some of his foibles. God, they had riots all over the world in response to that, but that was orchestrated. That's not just an emotional response of the people who were doing the demonstration --

RUSH: Anyway, well, I'm glad you called out there. Thanks much, Bill. I appreciate it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the good people at Mediaite, you know, I mentioned them in the early portions of the program, and I might have made an improper association between the TIME Magazine guy named Ghosh and the Mediaite reporter, Tommy Christopher, because they've got a post there at Mediaite saying, "Limbaugh Slams Mediaite After Misreading Story About Burning Of Koran And Bible." Here's what they say. Tommy Christopher here is the poster:

"On Sunday, Mediaite published an article in which I was critical of Time Magazine World Editor Bobby Ghosh for statements that he made on Friday’s edition of Hardball. Ghosh explained why burning the Qu’ran was 'much more inflammatory' than burning a Bible. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh took issue with Ghosh’s remarks on his Monday morning show --" it's in the afternoon, by the way "-- then slammed Mediaite by pointing out… exactly the same thing we pointed out in our commentary. Limbaugh seems to have barely skimmed the article he's referencing, as he attributes Ghosh's sentiment to Mediaite's writer (me). To catch you up, here's what Ghosh said … and then here's what Mediaite's writer said … and somehow Rush got it all confused and thought he was disagreeing with me. I know, I never expected it to happen either, but I can still comprehend english, be it spoken or written. For example, he says 'Whoever wrote this obviously hasn't ever gone to Sunday school.'"

Well, I did say that because I did skim the story and it did appear that whoever wrote it happened to agree with Ghosh, that it was an interesting intellectual point that we needed to examine here. A TIME Magazine reporter who wrote the phony Haditha murder story, I mean the guy, Ghosh, who fabricates a story with TIME Magazine about the Marines and raping and killing in Haditha, and that story picked up by John Murtha and others, all the Democrats in Congress at the time, to slam Bush, the war in Iraq, and the US military, so this guy's now on Hardball, he's out there saying, well, the Koran, you know, that's the direct Word of God. The Bible is written by men. Whoever wrote it at Mediaite said, well, this is an interesting debate that we're having here. And I don't know. I kind of do find it amusing what people who think they are in the upper 10% of the intelligence group in the world think is smart. I mean obviously this whole notion that the Bible was written by men, the Koran's the direct word -- how silly. Whoever said it didn't go to Sunday school. But if, I say "if" I misinterpreted Mr. Christopher here with Mediaite, I will make the correction here and state that I didn't intend to do that.

Now, if I were like those guys -- now, remember, back during the ill-fated effort on my part to become a part-owner of the St. Louis Rams, the National Football League, absolutely false, totally made-up quotes were happily attributed to me by members of the august mainstream media and ran for weeks, and when it was finally pointed out to them that they were made up, the consensus response was, "Well, okay, he didn't say it, but he probably believes it anyway." So, Mr. Christopher, if you were to get the treatment I get, I would say, "Okay, okay, you didn't say it, but you probably agree with the guy anyway."

Burn the Bible, But Not the Koran?
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Burn our Flag, But Not the Koran?

Why are we catering to these pagan butcher? They’ll kill people anyway even if we don’t. And I’ve always wondered when I see these savages in these mobs, “Don’t they have jobs? Shouldn’t they be somewhere instead of demonstrating?”

And, most importantly, “Why do they all have black hair?” Ain’t there a red head in there somewhere?

LiberalChristians may take a cavalier view of the Bible, but orthodox Christians believe it is the word of God. The Koran even imitates the style of some of the prophets and apocalyptic books such as Daniel and Revelation. Furthermore, Mohammed wrote not a word but dictasted to many different little scribes. Not until after the sudden death were the pieces collected and made into the present. The oldest extant manuscript of the Koran is not nearer in time to his lifetime than the oldest copies of the New Testament.

But Rush made a very good point: IF the Koran is so sacred to Muslims,WHO is going to persuade them to take a different look at it?
Very few scholars are engaged in the “higher Criticism” of the Koran, and they have only a tiny following even among westernized Muslims.
Liberals who expect Muslims to abandon their belief in the Koran and to convert to their “enlightened “ views,are just kidding themselves. Those who ,look for a reformation, forget that the Protestant Reformation sought a return to primitive Christianity. That is exactly what the radical Muslims are trying to do. The Reformation was a reaction to the Renaissance. Muslim fundamentalism, is a reaction to modernism, which they see as a form of fidelity.

From the WSJ:
"Most Afghans learned about the Quran burning in Florida only when Mr. Karzai on March 24 (4 days after!) condemned the act as "a crime against the religion and the entire Muslim nation," called on the U.S. and the U.N. to bring the perpetrators to justice and demanded "a satisfactory response to the resentment and anger of over 1.5 billion Muslims around the world."

So who stirred it up? General Petraeus has certainly won Karzai's heart and mind. /s

You would think that having our female troops wear muslim hijabs instead of K-pots would have been enough to placate them.

“The thing to keep in mind that’s very important here is that the Koran to Muslims, it is not — it is not the same as the Bible to Christians. The Bible is a book written by men. It is acknowledged by Christians that it is written by men. It’s the story of Jesus.” F. Chuck Todd said, “Yes,” Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s exactly right. The Bible is the story of Jesus, TIME Magazine reporter, F. Chuck Todd, “Yes.” Ghosh: “But the Koran, if you are a believer, if you’re a Muslim, the Koran is directly the word of God, not written by man. It is transcribed, is directly the word of God. That makes it sacred in a way that it’s hard to understand if you’re not Muslim.****************************

Absolute stunning, breath taking, mind blowing ignorance on the part of the media. All you have to do is bring up God or guns and they’re more than willing to play the fool.

Absolute stunning, breath taking, mind blowing ignorance on the part of the media. All you have to do is bring up God or guns and they’re more than willing to play the fool.

It's not surprising. They are the product of their culture: anti-western, humanistic, socialistic. Western civilization: bad; other "oppressed" cultures: good.

Then, after they leave college, having spent four years memorizing and regurgitating their professors' rants as truth, they move into professions where they can sit in their echo chamber, never being challenged to think outside their indoctrination.

I posted something here quite some time ago, but I'm going to repeat it.

The news media are liars and cowards. I'll tell you why.

For many years now, the mass media presented the idea that Christianity was something to be afraid of. They will impose their beliefs upon us. All sorts of horrible things will happen.

The ACLU sues, and the mass media batters Christianity relentlessly. Here's the crux of my post.

They were never afraid of us. They wouldn't dare say some of the things about Christians if they were so terrified of us. They lied, and cynically manipulated the masses.

Let me say this to the media, who have great reason to fear Islam. You will reap what you have sown. Trust me, a "liberal press" is not in their design. Extermination is. That is why you rarely, if at all, are critical with respect to Islam. Because you are truly terrified of them....and you should be.

We remember that, “On August 13, 2010, in a speech at the annual White House Iftar dinner celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, President Barack Obama acknowledged the right of Muslims to build the Islamic center. Obama said, “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”[228][229] Obama clarified the next day that he was only speaking of legal rights and “was not commenting... on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.”[230]

Okay Barack Obama, now come out and say, “I’m not going to comment on the wisdom of this preacher burning the Koran even though I know he has the right to do it...”

Actually Orthodox Christians regard the Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments as being, like Our Lord, theanthropic -- simultaneously divine and human. The Word of God is Christ, not the collection of divinely inspired, but humanly written, books that testify to Him, whether prophetically or by report of His earthly ministry.

We Orthodox, unlike protestants, many of whom seem to believe that the canon of Scripture as abridged by Luther is a Christian Qu'ran, are not particularly disturbed by "higher criticism". We regard the editorial and selection process by which the Church arrived at Her books to be divinely inspired as much as the composition of the long-lost ur-text. We object to the RSV and many other new protestant translations precisely because in their enthusiasm for the unrecoverable ur-text (assumed to be directly dictated by God, hence my description of the attitude as making the Bible into a Christian Qu'ran = recitation), the translators depart from the Scriptures received by the Church in favor of minority testimonies from the oldest manuscripts in the New Testament, and in favor of the Masorete (redacted by Christ-denying rabbis) in the Old Testament.

Rush, of course, fails to realize that the most obnoxious features of Islam are not grounded in the text of the Qu'ran per se, but, first, in the Hadiths (the traditional life of Mohammed) and the conceit that Mohammed (a barbarous, pedophile warlord) was the perfect exemplar of human behavior, and second in the hermeneutic principle of "naskh" or abrogation, by which the later-written (warlike) sections of the Qu'ran are held to abrogate the earlier-written (pacific) sections of the Qu'ran. There is a reformist movement, albeit very small, called Qu'ran-Only Islam that does away with the Hadiths. There are also minor schools of Islamic jurisprudence that object to naskh. A Qu'ran-Only Islam which adopted the standard Christian-style hermeneutic principle that "one part of Scripture not be expounded in a way repugnant to another" in place of naskh would be a very different religion, and one much easier to live alongside.

Rush, and those who equate burning Bibles with burning Qu'rans, also overlook the fact that the Mohammedan conception of God imprisons Allah in his own transcendence. Unlike the One True God, the All-Holy Trinity, who in the Incarnation reveals Himself in the Person of the Son, the Mohammedan Allah cannot reveal himself, but can only reveal his will. Thus, for the pious Muslim the Qu'ran is the nearest thing to a sacrament of God's presence he has available to him. The offense caused Muslims by desecrating a Qu'ran is more akin to the offense caused to a traditional Christian, whether Orthodox, Latin, Coptic, . . . by desecrating the consecrated Eucharist than it is to the offense caused by desecrating a Bible. (I suppose it's analogous to the offense caused protestants of the "God-Breathed Bible" variety by burning Bibles, since they uniformly seem to be Zwinglians in their Eucharistic theology -- I'm not sure why "This is my body" gets exempted from their literalist hermeneutic, but I digress.)

well, of course, the “higher criticism” is aimed to discredit the Bible which is the core of the Protestant Faith. No such scholarship exists in the Muslim world that directs the same animus against the Koran. The Great Tradition of the Church, which centers on the Sacraments,is not so dependent on the literal word of the Bible. When Darwin published “Origin of Species, “ evangelicalism was devastated. But John Henry Newman was not, because, as he said, biology deals with secondary things and not First Things. Evangelicalism seemed to stand or fall on the literal truth of Genesis. The Darwinists, of course, claimed far more than they could prove, and turned science into ideology. The radical naturalism that informs their thought has no room for Revelation.

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