Hunka hunka burnin' book

So some offended Muslims (that's almost a redundancy) in Afghanistan rioted and murdered a dozen human beings because they found out belatedly when their President told them that a group of Christians in Florida burned the Koran.

I have mixed feelings about this.

First, of course, is that Western condemnation will fall on the Christians who burned a book, not on the Muslims who shot and beheaded a group of people who had nothing to do with it. That is because too many Westerners have neither balls nor a moral sense grounded in reality and many Muslims are barbarians and worse.

Is there a contemporary religion that can remotely compete with Islam for the number of dead bodies?

I will join with a lot of other Righties and point out that when Andres Serrano's PissChrist, picturing a crucifix in a jar of pee, was exhibited as art in the Brooklyn Museum, with government funding, no one rioted and no one was killed.

Now here's my mixed feeling. I am not so sure that the Muslims haven't got it right.

I understand better than most that the Koran is more sacred to them than the Bible is to Christians. It is rather more like the consecrated host of the Catholic Mass than the text that Reformed preachers pound on in pulpits. The book is a sacred object containing the exact uncreated and eternal Arabic words of Allah, the closest they can get to him in this life.

But then, given the current Islamic mood, all offenses and any offense can provoke murder, be it a Salman Rushdie book or a picture of Mohammed or a speech by the Pope which quotes a Byzantine Emperor, or a Koran in the toilet or the furnace. People in France have been beaten up for eating lunch in front of Muslims during Ramadan. Hey, if the resistance killed German soldiers in WWII, how often did the Germans then take out ten civilians for each of them? Should the resistance then be blamed and stop fighting?

But Mohammedans do have this going for them. They do not politely roll over when their identity is insulted.

No one in the West will now turn to our local Muslims and demand that they condemn the riots and the killings. They get to sit on the sidelines, unaccountable. And if they do make a pro forma statement of regret, it will be followed by a much stronger plea and or outrage about the bad-behaving Christians. Coddled and protected, no one will call them on it. **

Islam is a highly concrete and extraverted faith: dominance performances of its rites and the presence of its symbols in public places is crucial to its identity. It is a territorial religion indistinguishable from politics and ownership of space and resources. Ask a Copt. Read the life of Muhammad. It's all there.

Barbarians and savages though they be*, they cow a lot of Westerners into adapting to their sensibilities out of fear. Or, disguised as highminded multicultural politness, out of unacknowledged admiration as well. Despite the public Western liberal liturgy of disavowing and abhoring violence, humans admire strong men. Especially leftists, who have, in their barely one century history, produced some of the most tyrannical mass murders in all of history. They still worship thugs like Castro, Guevara and Chavez.

No slight against The Religion of Peace © goes unpunished. It is like living in a house with a rage-a-holic or a borderline or a nasty drunk; when the eruption happens, someone in the family gets blamed for the provocation, not the perpetrator.

So my final very politically incorrect thought is wondering if it would have been better for us in the West after 9/11 if there had indeed been massive outbreaks of violence against mosques. Weepy Muslim apologists act as if there had been, when what is most astounding is the almost total lack of violence in the wake of that jihadi crime. We were so civilized.

But I suspect our civility comes not from principle but from fear or, as Yeats would say, the lack of all conviction.


* I will say again that your nice Muslim neighbor or coworker is insignificant in this regard. I know some. Lovely people. But Muslims in groups are what count.

I once had a Russian Orthodox professor who ran up against the cool leftism of Columbia University in the 60's. He made this point: "A Marxist in a university classroom is an entirely different animal from Marxists in power. Lectures by Marcuse turn into gulags by Stalin."


** Peter King's House hearings became Muslim political theatre. Hostile groups intermittent with weepy victims.