Sunday, September 12, 2010
[The following, by Daniel Greenfield, is crossposted from Sultan Knish.]
The media's coverage of the 9th anniversary of the Muslim murder of 3,000 people was overshadowed by their panicked coverage of the possibility that Terry Jones, the pastor of a tiny Florida church, might actually burn the Koran. Last week Newsweek ran Fareed Zakaria's piece insisting that Americans overreacted to 9/11. So instead the media showed us where their priorities lie, by shortchanging the dead, ignoring their killers and instead turning the pastor of a small Florida church into a villain for even talking about the possibility of torching a book, whose contents helped inspire 9/11. It's as if on Holocaust Memorial Day, the key topic of discussion was not the murder of 6,000,000 Jews, but a protester who wanted to get his Bic lighter close to Mein Kampf.
In the weeks leading up to the anniversary, the media had been sanctimoniously lecturing Americans that their sensitivities regarding Ground Zero were irrelevant in the face of a Muslim desire to put up a massive and completely unnecessary Islamic complex in the area. Constitutional freedoms, real or imagined, trumped any sensitivities. But when a Gainesville pastor proposed returning a couple of copies of the Koran back to the environment by way of lighter fluid, suddenly freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and all that other stuff created by dead white men before the age of Walter Kronkite and CNN, were irrelevant in face of Muslim sensitivities.
Time Magazine and USA Today both ran polls asking whether burning the Koran should be criminalized as a hate crime. CNN gave a forum to a Dr. Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri to argue that burning a Koran would have been worse than 9/11 and warned that such actions "should be stopped by the U.S. government at any cost". Now Dr. Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri shows in his article that while he may not know the difference between "principal" and "principle", or "ensure" and "insure", he understands exactly how to push for the imposition of the horrifying barbarity of Islamic Sharia law in America.
In Dr. Qadri's own words: "any act of an individual or group which... hurts the feelings of 1.5 billion Muslim should be stopped at any cost." There are no details of just what "any cost" would imply, but certainly Dr. Qadri argues that Freedom of Speech cannot be used to protect anything that offends Muslims. And since just about everything from eating on Ramadan to liquor in taxi cabs to ice cream cones that look like Allah, has been known to offend Muslims, that means for September 11 you can kiss freedom goodbye. Or risk offending 1.5 billion Muslims. And we know what happens every time you offend the peaceful worshipers of the Religion of Peace. Riots, murder, terrorism and of course burning the American flag.
The same media which has consistently opposed a Constitutional amendment that bans flag burning (generally because they tend to agree with the flag burners), has now decided that burning the Koran should be a crime. Because burning the flag or killing thousands of Americans is no big deal-- but burning a Koran, someone should make a law about that.
Given a choice between burning the US Constitution or burning the Koran-- the media happily raises a lighter to the First Amendment. To them nothing American is sacred, but everything Islamic is.
Their defense of the Ground Zero Mosque was never about the Constitution. It was about kowtowing to the morally superior victims of American imperialism, starving in Dubai or Islamabad. If it helps them make their case to the people they think of as "The Great Unwashed", still clinging to their guns and religion, they will invoke the Constitution or the Magna Carta or an instruction manual from IKEA. From Obama on down, centuries of ideas about self-government are nothing but toys that they keep in the attic and bring out whenever particularly dull company comes over. They don't believe in self-government themselves. That is something they have in common with their brethren ruling with an iron fist beneath the sickle and hammer, or the crescent and star. Ideas, not the referendum or a national legacy of rights and responsibilities, are their source of political power. What the people and the law have to say about it, doesn't matter.
And so we come down to the ugly choice. Burning the Koran or burning the Constitution. The left has already made its choice. You can walk down the streets of Europe's greatest cities and see what remains of centuries of national struggle, republican ambitions and millions dying so that their language and their culture might have the shelter of a nation of their own. Now America is being presented with the same option. Touch your head to the floor or risk offending 1.5 billion Muslims. And what is the value of freedom compared to the feelings of a bunch of followers of Mohammed, with a long string of zeroes trailing after them around the globe.
It isn't about whether burning someone else's sacred book is right or wrong. To appease Muslim sensitivities, the US military burned a large number of Christian bibles last year. The same media which is panting breathlessly at the notion that anybody would dare use a holy book for kindling, smiled approvingly then. Because the issue isn't about burning anyone's holy books, but offending Muslims. That is the one law we are left with, after all the others have been tossed into the fire. Thou Shalt Not Enrage the Mohammedan.
The media has put on a show of being concerned about US troops as outraged murderous members of the Religion of Peace might try to kill US soldiers in the full fury of their peacefulness, but if the media hadn't focused attention on the story, how would all those peaceful bearded types in Pakistan have even known about the Koran burning? In 2005, Newsweek falsely reported that American personnel in Gitmo had flushed a Koran. There was no actual truth to the report, but still 15 people died in the rioting. Yet the smug blond talking head on CNN who berated Terry Jones for "having blood on his hands", did not accuse Newsweek of having blood on their hands, even though they actually did. Just as there are no "blood on their hands" accusations for the media outlets who broadcast the heavily edited Wikileaks tape, or any of the Bin Laden videos, or leaked sensitive information about US military operation.
Dead US soldiers, like the Constitution, are only of interest when they're a handy talking point. If dead US soldiers were of interest to the media or General Petraeus, perhaps there might be some interest in just how many US soldiers have died in Afghanistan because they were denied proper aerial support or the right to fire on their assailants under McChrystal and Petraeus's Rules of Engagement, which put the focus on appeasing Muslims, over the lives of American boys on the front line.
But like the Constitution, the bodies of American soldiers must burn, in the name of Muslim sensitivities.
In 1987, the National Endowment for the Arts partially funded Piss Christ, an image of a crucifix in urine. Two decades later in 2007, a Koran in a Pace University toilet triggered a 10 month investigation (in New York City, few murder cases are investigated half that long) and finally led to the arrest of one Stanislav Shmulevich on Hate Crime charges. Piss Christ, you see is a work of art. But Piss Koran is a hate crime. Similarly burning the Christian Bible soothes Muslim sensitivities. Burning the Koran inflames them. Killing US soldiers makes Muslims feel good. Killing Muslim terrorists inflames their sensitivities.
The Pace University case, in which a Muslim NYPD detective was assigned to pursue a student for a violation of Muslim law, served as a warning that the media chatter at Time, USA Today and CNN about making burning the Koran into a hate crime should not be taken lightly. Under the Constitution, burning the Koran is completely legal. But the Islamists and their Leftist allies have no regard for the Constitution. No more than they do for the lives of US soldiers or the dead at Ground Zero. They prefer Islamic law, with all its concomitant tyranny and brutality, over the freedoms and values of Americans.
Why do the hate the Constitution of ours so much? Because it is premised on legal equality and self-government, two sets of values anathema to the left and Islam. Under Islamic law, Christians, Jews, Hindus and all others are inferior to Muslims. Women are inferior to men. Koranic experts are superior to ordinary Muslims. First wives are superior to second wives. And so on it goes, a pyramid of discrimination and segregation, sanctioned and approved by Allah, Mohammed and Islam.
Under Islamic law, the sensitivities of Muslims trump the rights of non-Muslims. That is why in the Muslim world, no church or synagogue was allowed to be taller than a mosque. The Twin Towers which dared to be one of the world's tallest buildings, had to be knocked down to make way for Muslim skyscrapers in Dubai and Malaysia. Such is the arrogance and brutality of the Islamic worldview. And such are the horrors that it gives birth to.
Today at Ground Zero, a man did burn the Koran. He gave no interviews, only to say; "Americans should never be afraid to give their opinion". Such a view is not favored by Islam and the Liberal media, which is very determined that people should be afraid to give their opinions. And this last week has been a tremendous exercise in just that. In intimidating Americans. In intimidating America itself, with the threat of 1.5 billion Muslim sensitivities inflamed into a killing rage. Yet again.
But these handful of pages from the Koran were not the first thing burned at Ground Zero. Nine years ago, thousands of human beings were burned alive in the name of the Koran at this place. Pages from their books, their Rolodexes, their memos and their family photographs flew burning into the air, taking wing over the city and drifting down to the place where Imam Rauf and his gang of grinning henchmen would like to erect their symbol of contempt for the dead. The Muslim world did not tremble at the sensitivities of 300 million Americans when they burned 3,000 people at this spot. Like Fareed Zakaria, they either did not care, or they grinned in triumph, and danced in the streets.
Now when the moderate Muslims crawl out of their sewers to warn us that burning the Koran will lead to murder-- all they manage to do is show off their sick and hateful values. A value system that places a higher priority on printed pages than on the lives of non-Muslims. Such a value system cannot and must not be allowed to impose its will on the people of a free nation. Not on this sacred day, and not on any day. Ever.
