Oh, boo hoo. A simple Google search will confirm that Muslims have been burning bibles for years.
Admittedly, they’re usually inside a church at the time.
***
So yeah, some “Closing of the Evangelical Mind” “preacher from Footloose” wants to burn the Koran or something.
American Protestant clergy are notoriously tone deaf about these things, usually not quite getting it. They burned Beatles albums too, remember? (Who can forget? The footage has been recycled in hundreds of lefty documentaries for forty years.)
Then when they try to be “cool,” it comes out as The Cross and the Switchblade and Hell Houses and cringe-inducing Christian “rock” “music” of the “Jesus is my boyfriend” variety.
Look: I tend to support deliberate provocation on principle. It’s fun.
(As soon as someone denounces something as “counterproductive,” I immediately want to do it!)
But there has to be a teeny tiny, even accidental particle of sophistication about deliberate provocation, even if the provocateurs are acting purely on instinct and can’t come up with their version of a Situationist manifesto until twenty years later.
The Mohammed cartoons were an act of creation in the name of liberty.
But burning a book — any book — is a fascist and destructive.
Admittedly, this distinction may be too subtle and artsy for Reverend Stereotype to figure out, since he probably thought “WWJD?” was as “deep” as stuff gets.
The only destruction was carried out by Muslims in reaction to the cartoons.
Let Muslims retain their reputation as the ones doing the burning.
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