He displays an astonishing lack of understanding of the issue and like all liberals reverts to standard to form idiocy about non existent "book burning" christians. Disgraceful.
It would be nice if Friedman actually had a clue as to what some Christians and Jews are upset about in this issue. It is not that they are upset that students are assigned to read the Koran (though that would be flakey enough after 9/11) but that the text they are being required to read is not a true representation of the Koran. All the parts about slaughtering Christians and Jews and Jihad are not included in the UNC text. It is not a true picture of the Koran. It is not the Koran that Muhammed Atta read and that billions of Arabs read. For UNC to require students to read a watered down Koran that is not read by Muslems around the world is a disgrace. Tht Friedman seems totally unaware of this- just typical for him.
It would be nice if Friedman actually had a clue as to what some Christians and Jews are upset about in this issue. It is not that they are upset that students are assigned to read the Koran (though that would be flakey enough after 9/11) but that the text they are being required to read is not a true representation of the Koran. All the parts about slaughtering Christians and Jews and Jihad are not included in the UNC text. It is not a true picture of the Koran. It is not the Koran that Muhammed Atta read and that billions of Arabs read. For UNC to require students to read a watered down Koran that is not read by Muslems around the world is a disgrace. Tht Friedman seems totally unaware of this- just typical for him.
Bingo. My homeschooled son and I have read the Koran and Hadith. We studied Islam more than a year before 9/11. We also studied other world religions. At the time, we were shocked by the Islamic beliefs, but never believed that the majority of Muslims would take them literally. Islam's end-game is to conquer, via violent holy jihad, and then subjugate the entire world under a freedom-denying, barbaric 7th-Century Sharia or Islamic law.
The UNC's required-reading book (which I have recently read out of curiosity) does not deal with the consequences of Sharia, along with a lot of the other negative, violents aspects of the religion. It focuses on the earlier teachings of Mohammad...the quasi-peaceful ones that were thrown out the window by the Koran's end when an angry, vengeful Mohammad realized that the local Christians and Jews weren't buying into his prophetic gig.