Careful, Christionists, Payback Can Be a Bitch

Floridian Pastor Wants to Stage International Burn a Quran Day an Affront to Religious Freedom

Michael Yaki

(How bout atheists and Muslims join hands and have a Burn a Bible Day.. hell, let's one up them and do it for a whole month! Let's even have a picnic and cook 'dove' for dinner!)

So a church in Florida wants to stage a book-burning party of the Quran. Big deal, right? After all, anti-American zealots in foreign countries are always staging flag burnings and toasting various effigies of our presidents, so whats wrong with a little tit-for-tat?

Everything.

The First Amendment is a wonderful thing. It allows us to express our opinions without fear of government reprisal. The press can publish absent Big Brother on the editorial page. We march on Washington, worship where and what we like, and petition our government for change. We can even burn the American flag, as odious as that is. So a church barbecue featuring the Quran as main course is protected speech. But, like the KKK marching in Skokie, just because we can doesn't mean we should. Nor should we sit silently by as it happens.

Allegedly, the motivation for the ill-named International Burn a Quran Day by the oxymoronically-titled Dove World Outreach Center is to remember the victims of 9/11 and protest Islam as a religion of the devil. Its founder, Terry Jones, also targets gays and lesbians as godless, but his special brand of venom is reserved for Islam. Hes written a book, goes on YouTube, and is undoubtedly reveling in all the attention he is receiving for his event. And all the protests, the resolutions of condemnation from national church groups, even anti-Quran burning pages on Facebook will do little to deter the ravings of a bigoted gloryseeker.


The fact is, we know that the suicidal brainwashing of terrorists by Al Qaeda is a far cry from the true nature of Islam. Members of the Islamic community lived in the United States well before 9/11 and continue to do so today. To tar all Americans of the Islamic faith with the terrorists of 9/11 is as ridiculous as saying that Pastor Terry Jones is representative of all Christians in the United States.

So the best thing we can do is ignore him. Isolate him. We will have to explain to the international media that Jones is a nut, a one-off, and we will have to explain how our Constitution defends his right to be an obnoxious idiot who may be endangering American lives overseas. We can tell the media to cover something else of equal or more import, like a library opening or a new birth at the zoo. Or perhaps people of good will can gather outside his so-called church and stage readings of William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation, which described how a band of people nearly four centuries ago, whose idea of God did not fit into the established Church of England theocracy, fled searching for a place where they could worship God as they saw fit, and settled on the craggy shores of a country that became the United States, and how un-American, how unpatriotic it is to demonize the religious beliefs of others on this, our hallowed ground of religious freedom, our America.

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