Why burn the Koran?

Dedrick L. writes:

Burning the Koran serves what purpose, other than inciting the Muslims to riot?

LA replies:

I’ll assume that you are sincere in your question, and reply to you. If you are not sincere, you will soon make that clear.

My answer is, it’s not my concern that they riot. They are going to riot one way or another. They riot all the time. Anything we do that they dislike, they will riot. They rioted after the Pope gave a lecture in Germany pointing out that Islam is not based on reason but on pure will. And their riots pushed the Pope to surrender to them, and since then he’s had nothing to say on the issue, except to say that he loves Muslims. They rioted at the harmless Muhammad cartoons, and the Western world went into retreat. They threatened the cartoonist at the Seattle Times for posting a Muhammad cartoon, and now she has had to go into hiding and change her identity. Read the linked entry.

Do you want us to live under their power? So that all they have to do is riot or just threaten to riot, and our authorities and the massed power of all the institutions of our society will clamp down on us, as they clamped down on Terry Jones? That is the logic of your argument.

If that is your position, then you believe in surrender to Islam.

As for what I see as the purpose of burning a Koran, I have explained the purpose, over and over, in the two most recent entries and in many entries starting around 9/10 and going on for several days of intensive blogging. May I suggest that read them and think about them.

You could start on the main page, or else go to the archives page, which goes backward from the present.

- end of initial entry -

Paul K. writes:

As a believer in the separationist approach to Islam, I believe koran-burning is a useful act. It may make some prospective Muslim immigrants feel that they would be unwelcome here, and may even make some recent Muslim immigrants decide to return home. Also, as the government overreacts to this non-violent act, it wakes up some of our fellow citizens to the surrender that has already occurred and may motivate them to join the resistance.

One Terry Jones is easily oppressed. Ten million Terry Joneses are not.

Stogie writes:

Paul K. is spot on! I burned a Koran and put it on YouTube [linked at VFR here] and I have zero regrets about it. It makes people think and it also exposes the cowards in our midst. I have great respect for Pastor Terry Jones for his courage and conviction. Most other rightist bloggers can’t say “Terry Jones” without putting “idiotic” in front of his name.

Paul Nachman writes:

A correspondent wrote this to me, before Koran-burning day:

I’m still against the act of burning Korans. Burn what is most holy to them, they’ll return the gesture, not that some of them need any provocation. Our job is to get them out of our sphere and disengage with them with as little damage as possible. Striking at the essence of the religion just radicalizes more of them. Iron law of warfare: Don’t take on more than necessary.

My response:

Since receiving your reply, it’s been in my mind that the primary reason for burning Korans is to awaken other Westerners. That’s different from what I wrote previously, but I’ll go with it.

As you say, Larry, the Muslims don’t need any provocation anyway; if it’s not this, it’s some amazingly trumped up imaginary slight, like having a symbol on some product that looks like “Allah” in the mirror (no joke) and the like.

Michelle Malkin refers to Islam as “The religion of Perpetual Outrage.” Ah, yes, the catalog of amazing provocations comes from this recent column by her.

Seems to me that the clause of mine that I’ve boldfaced, “the primary reason for burning Korans is to awaken other Westerners,” is similar to what you’ve been saying, but I don’t know if you’ve said it in so many words.

LA replies:

Yes, you’re right. I suppose that instead of asking the original commenter to do so much work and read through the previous entries to glean the various purposes I have stated for burning Korans, I could post a succinct list of the purposes, which would take some work. I can’t do that now. But here would be the very first purpose (though not stated succinctly):

For people to state publicly by means of burning a Koran (whether the burning is done in a public place, such as Derek Fenton did at the 9/11 rally in downtown Manhattan, or privately, in one’s back yard, and then distributed publicly by video or photographs) that Islam is the problem, Islam is our dangerous enemy, Islam is evil, is a major step forward that will help awaken other Westerners. Up to this point, anonymous blog commenters have said the same in numerous blog discussions (which have zero effect on public consciousness), and virtually zero bylined writers have said it. But for people to say it by means of burning a Koran makes the message more personal, more concrete, and more real, because it is being conveyed through a physical act. And that message is exactly what needs to be conveyed to the people of the West by their fellow Westerners.

Up to this point, the only widely publicly noted critical statement about Islam has been that “Islamism (or radical Islam) is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.” That ambiguous and untrue message leaves Westerners confused and paralyzed, because, as I have explained many times, it simultaneously tells us that Islam is very dangerous, and that Islam is not dangerous at all but is actually our friend and potential savior whom we must cultivate and win over! But for the message to switch from “Radical Islam is the problem,” to “Islam is the problem,” marks the beginning of real debate on the subject, because it marks the beginning of the truth about Islam being publicly stated and widely noted. Once the right-most position becomes, not “Islamism is the problem,” but “Islam is the problem,” then the West starts to grapple with the reality of Islam seriously for the first time, and more and more people will start to see the truth about Islam. And that is the beginning of people becoming ready to do something to defend ourselves from Islam. And burning the Koran is not only the way to awaken people about Islam, it is also the beginning of people doing something about Islam, and even puttiing their bodies on the line to be arrested.

They also start to awaken to the truth because the way the powers of Western society come crashing down on a single individual burning a Koran or merely planning to burn a Koran, as they crashed down on Pastor Jones, reveals that Islam (not radical Islam, but Islam) already has decisive power over our society, and that this surrender to Islam by the West must be resisted as much as Islam itself.

Dedrick L., the original commenter, replies to LA:

Thank you. I agree with much of what you have written on the subject, but there remains one aspect of the Islam problem on which I don’t quite understand your viewpoint. Are you suggesting that the Islamic presence is set to take over the country the United States? Islamic immigration is certainly a threat in parts of Europe, but I am just not seeing it as an issue in America.

I refer to this part of the entry:

The U.S. is thus the only country in the West where Koran burning has a chance to be widely adopted, which I devoutly hope happens, not as an end in itself, but as the beginning of widespread open resistance to Islam and its presence in our country. Hats off again to the despised Pastor Terry Jones for giving thousands of people a great idea of how to express in the most forceful and vivid, yet legal, manner our opposition to a religion of war that intends our submission and destruction—a religion that, notwithstanding the supposed differences between its bad “extremists” and its good “moderates,” is a single, unbroken continuum.

LA replies:

You write:

“Are you suggesting that the Islamic presence is set to take over the country the United States? Islamic immigration is certainly a threat in parts of Europe, but I am just not seeing it as an issue in America.”

In the entry that I linked and asked you to read, I answered that question directly. Did you read it? Here again is the key part of it:

In fact, with Muslims at only one percent of our population, a Seattle, Washington cartoonist named Molly Norris has had to go into hiding and change her identity in response to death threats over the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” which she started.

America is thus now in the same boat with the Netherlands, where the Muslim percentage of the population is perhaps ten times higher than in the U.S., and where Geert Wilders has had to live under armed guard for the last six years to protect him from murder threats from Muslim extremists.

With Muslims at only one percent of our population, we are already living under Muslim power and intimidation in our own country.

[end of entry excerpt]

Now that’s just one example of how we are already living under Muslim power, not in the sense that sharia has been officially established as the law of the United States, but in the sense that Muslims have decisive power to make us do what they want. I could give many more examples. But that won’t be necessary, at least for the moment, if you understand the essence of the point I’ve just made.

September 24

FL writes:

I think Koran burning should be seen as a form of civil disobedience. To put it more crudely, it may be productive to show the bullies that people are willing to publicly stand up to them.

There has been a lot of talk about so-called moderate Muslims and the risk of alienating them. It seems to me that widespread Koran burning will have the opposite effect on any moderate Muslims by showing them it’s possible to stand up to the extremists.

LA replies:

That’s an interesting angle. But it seems unlikely, since the means by which defiance of the radicals is expressed, burning the Koran, has to be offensive to the moderates as well. The only way your idea could pan out would be if we define moderate Muslims as people who do not believe in Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 23, 2010 08:05 PM | Send