Florida 2010 and Grenada 1492

A loony pastor in Florida wants to burn the Koran. That’s an act of arson in a cultural war.

For Pastor Terry Jones, the whole world appears in black and white. He’s a man of God and Islam is Satan. On the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Jones is calling for people to participate in a burning of the Koran to be held at his church, the Dove World Outreach Center.

From Florida 2010 to Granada 1492: Pastor Jones stands solidly in the tradition of the Christian re-conquest when Christian knights under Cardinal Mateo Ximenes de Cisneros burned copies of the Koran after they regained the Alhambra. The Arabs had been defeated and the Spanish queen proclaimed the Alhambra Decree which banished Jews from all territories under the Spanish crown.

Since then, Grenada has stood for Christian intolerance against all the other religions of Abraham. Heinrich Heine’s quotation, “Where they have burned books, they will also end in burning human beings,” stems from the plea for tolerance in his play “Almansor,” which has this historic event as its background. 1492: Something else happened then, didn’t it? An Italian in the service of the Spanish crown first set foot on American soil on October 12 of that year.

From Granada to Cordoba: The name of the city 202 kilometers distant from Grenada in Andalusia turns up again in the New York mosque controversy. This disagreement is all about whether it’s right to build a mosque just a few blocks away from the spot where the World Trade Center stood until September 11, 2001 — the group behind that idea is called the “Cordoba Initiative.”

Why Cordoba? When the Arabs ruled Andalusia, Cordoba was a spiritual center where Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted peacefully. The initiator of the Cordoba Initiative, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is one of the most prominent thinkers in Sufism, a mystical form of Islam that vehemently opposes the sort of violence practiced by al-Qaida.

Rauf wants to extend a hand to non-Muslims in America and he is someone who draws parallels between Islamic and American values in his book “What’s Right With Islam Is What’s Right With America.” The tolerant imam is on al-Qada’s list for assassination. It’s mainly Republicans who oppose the New York mosque, at least at this location. Even Karen Hughes, who during the Bush administration lobbied for improving relations between the U.S. and the Islamic world, says it should be built at a different location. At the same time, more Muslims than Americans have fallen victim to Muslim extremist violence. Most victims of al-Qaida or the Taliban aren’t named John, Susan or George, but Mohammed, Fatima or Hussein.

Oh, America! What has the United States become? Hasn’t it always been the stronghold of religious tolerance, that place where Europeans sought refuge from religious intolerance in the Old World?

In the West, the bogeyman du jour is Islam: Sarrazinism and other over-simplifications in Germany, forbidding minarets as is happening in Austria, Geert Wilders and his abusive attitude toward Islam in The Netherlands. And now even a Koran burning in Florida. Are we on a path toward a new “age of extremes,” as the Viennese historian Eric Hobsbawm called the 20th century with the horrors caused by the great dictators?

The planned Koran burning by a freaked-out pastor in Florida will put America’s national security at risk. That warning was given by no less than the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus. Islamic fundamentalists are just waiting to catch the ball people like Pastor Terry Jones is preparing to serve up to them. In a Pavlovian reaction, his opposite number on the Muslim side will call for jihad and the spiral of hatred will continue merrily on.

That is, unless the debate is no longer left to the arsonists and rabble-rousers, the ignorant and the ideologues, the preachers of hate and those who want to burn the Koran.

Enough is enough. A policy of fear leads to destruction. It’s high time to take a stand against the agitators and extremists.