International Burn a Religious Text Day

Once again, books are being burned (for good reason this time) and people are killing other people and themselves over it. I give Islam a lot of stick on this blog, but any Muslims can rest assured that I would be equally scathing with any other group that was so violently touchy and intolerant.

There is a lot of bowing and scraping about the "desecration" of the books, but that is NOT against any law in North America to the best of my knowledge. The Bible pre-dates the Koran by a whole lot and is the basis for Islam (whether they'll admit it any more or not) and I can burn as many of those as I want and nobody makes a peep.

Oh, I'm sure you'll find a few Christian nutjobs who'd like to lynch me over it, but they'd be pooh-poohed as cranks. What do you do when there are hundreds of millions of nutjobs? Apparently you panic and kowtow:

Last year, when controversial Florida pastor Terry Jones presided over what he called a trial of the Quran and burned a copy, Afghans took to the streets by the thousands. In the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, demonstrators stormed a U.N. office and killed 12 people. In Kandahar, three people were killed in one demonstration, and nine in another when police and stone-throwing demonstrators clashed.

American officials vociferously condemned the pastor's act.

"It was intolerant and it was extremely disrespectful and again, we condemn it in the strongest manner possible," said Gen. David Petraeus, who headed the U.S.-led international forces in Afghanistan at the time.

"...the strongest manner possible ." Think about that language. This equates burning a mass-produced book to the raping and killing children or other such universally abhorrent acts. I'm sure Director (then General) Petraeus would contest my equivalence here but there is no getting around what he said and what it means. And for Obama to call for "a fair and public trial", I'd like to know what law these American service people broke, even under military law that would call for a trial; they were burning the trash, and the books were in it for good reason.

So, to sum up:

• Burn a Koran, be threatened with arbitrary arrest and/or death at the hands of incensed Muslims the world over, or;
• Riot, burn and kill people about something which has nothing to do with you and you are "proud and noble".

If you want to live under a system where you're executed for this sort of thing, move to, well, any self-identified "Muslim" country. Under the law of MY land, I can have a big Koran/Bible/Torah/Bhagavad Gita/Kangyur BBQ in my backyard (local fire ordinances permitting) and there is nothing illegal about it. Of course, making a ranting Youtube video about it could land me in front of the Human Rights Tribunal, but that becomes a "hate speech" issue and don't get me going on that in a discussion of freedom of expression.

I feel badly for all of the decent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and anywhere else who are condemned to live with the REAL intolerance and bigotry which kills you if you step out of line. Let's haul in front of a Human Rights Tribunal all of the people who would kill me (or them) for saying what a lot of people think about bullshit religions instead of terrorising people into being Sharia compliant dhimmis. If you don't know what those last two terms mean, do yourself a favour and research them, especially "Dhimmitude", 'cause that's where Obama, Petraeus and General John Allen have already placed us.