Fundie To Burn

 

 Last year, Gainesville preacher announced on CNN his plans to burn a Qu'ran on September 11th as a type of revenge intended to inspire his flock into similar actions. Terry Jones, who has published books about the supposed evils of Islam, has garnered a bizarre fame from the lunatic fringe who believe that their god is superior to all others.

  After acquiring the publicity he craved and admonishment from moderates as well as General Petreaus, Terry Jones went back to making his living selling anti-Islamic chotchkes instead of burning the holy book of another religion. Well, that was until Sunday, when he decided to hold the Qu'ran on trial at his church. Found guilty of not being Christian, a kerosene-soaked Qu'ran that was sentenced to death by burning was ignited with a barbecue lighter. While the crowd was small, the fundamentalists cheered and then spouted anti-Islamic vitriol to the press.

  Naturally, some Imams heard of Pastor Jones' blasphemous deed and used it as an excuse to call for revenge. You see, in the Islamic world, there are people just as fundamentally wrong as Terry Jones- folks filled with anger who are always looking for an excuse to attack innocent folks. In the deeply observant nation there were protests and politicians have called for Mr. Jones' arrest.  And this morning 3 Muslim Terry Joneses told their flocks to make someone pay. And 12 people paid the ultimate price for someone else's wrongs.

  Terry Jones, for his part, is absolutely basking in the glory of this tragedy. For him it's a gotcha moment, proving once and for all that Islam is not peaceful and that all Muslims are subhuman barbarians. Terry Jones is not for one second sorry that 12 human beings didn't get to go home to dinner tonight. He was warned about  the ramifications of his cultural insensitivity and the fact that he was potentially endangering the lives of UN troops and aid workers and still decided to burn a Qu'ran because his 15 minutes were almost up. Not only is Terry Jones a narrow-minded, famewhoring bigot, but he's also criminally negligent.

  But what of the Imams? Well, they're just as bad as Terry Jones. They could have said that Mr. Jones is an exception to the rule; that he's just an attention-hungry hillbilly who has no real influence in the western world. They could've preached tolerance or burned a Bible as revenge, but they didn't. They could have mentioned that only 1 in 10 million Americans even attended Terry Jones' famewhoring exposition, and they didn't do that either. While other religious men did tell their followers not to engage, 3 angry men incited a riot that left at least a dozen people dead. Some of the deceased were even Muslims.

  If there is ever a world-ending war like some think, it will most certainly be caused by religious inflexibility. The commonality amongst the Abrahamic faiths is that they all mandate that you maintain the faith of your parents, stay away from those who are different from you, and kill apostates or those who make too much noise. Fundamentalist Islam is not a religion of peace, nor is fundamentalist Christianity. One hateful American idiot intentionally inspired some hateful Afghani idiots to kill in order to prove a point about a religion he disliked. And 12 people are dead because a few Imams couldn't let one insult fly. Imagine the world if all people were as rigid as the religious.