The plan by a cracked reactionary to burn the Quran, however you may choose to spell it, on September 11, 2010, only serves to escalate tensions between Christians and Muslims. He does not speak for me.
Former motel manager turned pastor Terry Jones, the man behind “Burn a Koran Day,” has attracted worldwide attention on his promise to burn big stacks of the Quran — a book that Muslims are said to believe is “the book” of divine guidance for the planet.
Muslims consider the text of the Quran (AP’s spelling I follow at the newspaper) in its original Arabic to be literally the word of God. Where do you think this is headed, the burning of books, sacred containers of the history, heart and soul of humanity?
I’m of like mind with German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who in 1820 wrote: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen,” that is, “Where books are burned in the end people will burn.”
Don’t you think Bin Laden saw these reactionaries like Jones in his crystal ball? He could count on them to drive people over to his side, the other side of the extremist coin opposite the “burn a Koran” people.
On May 10, 1933, Nazis, some call them students, burned 25,000 books that didn’t correspond to the German spirit as they saw it.
We all know what happened later on, in the Holocaust. We know not all of the tragedy of the genocidal state happened precisely in gas chambers, but that it happened gradually — first in laws that marginalized Jews even before the WWII began, then in Kristallnacht (1938), in the ghettos (1940 on), after that in mass shootings (1941 on), then in the extermination camps and on and on. These things unfold slowly, by bits and pieces.
Where do you think we — you and I — are headed, especially in today’s divisive political atmosphere, if we take a cue from people like Terry Jones? Where are we headed, when the Democrats say the sky is blue, the Republicans would say, “No”? Are we going to ride the tidal wave of political BSers out there, headwinds of the Ron Pauls, Glenn Becks and the rest? What happened to critical thinking, “purposeful reflective judgment concerning what to believe or what to do”? I plan to think for myself.
I think about the authors whose books the Nazis burned, a list that included authors I have actually read: Isaak Babel, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Helen Keller, Jack London, Marcel Proust, Upton Sinclair, H.G. Wells and Émile Zola. I am without a doubt of the “don’t burn books” persuasion. What about you?
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Well said! My heart is sick at the thought of this. When did we become the nation of intolerance? Wasn’t one of tenets on which our country was founded “I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it?”