Screams and Their Echoes

A pastor in the United States burns the Koran; in Afghanistan violence breaks out. People may be said to have gained sufficient civilized maturity when they finally learn that they have to tolerate the unpopular opinions of others.

Pastor Terry Jones is an irresponsible zealot and an anti-Muslim hatemonger. Two weeks ago, the Christian clergyman led the congregation of his tiny church in Florida in a service that ended in the burning of a Koran. That touched off violent demonstrations in Afghanistan the following weekend. A mob attacked a United Nations office in Masar-i-Sharif where twelve people were killed.

Jones knew what he was doing. He had been repeatedly warned of the consequences of such a provocation. Last fall, he announced his intention to publicly burn a Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and was dissuaded from doing so only with great difficulty.

This time, the warnings came too late. Did U.N. employees in Afghanistan have to die because a fanatic in Gainesville, Florida condemned Islam’s holy scripture in a staged trial? Is Jones perhaps guilty of inciting murder?

The chain of causation doesn’t always indicate responsibility. When Christians in Yemen are executed for reading the Bible the executioners have committed a crime, not the Christians. Likewise in Afghanistan: Those who kill Norwegians and Swedes because they think their mere presence in Afghanistan constitutes blasphemy have committed the unpardonable crime of murder that can never be justified. Murder is a thousand times more serious than any possible form of blasphemy. And to consider Terry Jones alone to be a killer runs the risk of pardoning the real murderers.

Such behavior is often characterized by a certain paternalism: Muslims are easily offended; they tend toward uncontrollable fits of rage and violence. They must therefore never be provoked and whoever does so has no right to complain about the consequences. Such an attitude absolves the perpetrators of responsibility and provides them with extenuating circumstances.

On the other hand, those who look strictly at the killers exclude the fact that causal chains are exactly that. They are chains of events; they have beginnings and endings. Whoever does A must also accept B.

It’s not the same as when Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard drew a caricature of the prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb as a turban. At that point in time, Jones had no idea of the potentially deadly ramifications of his Koran burning plan. The hatred he sowed bloomed in the Islamic religious services on Friday, where the pious were incited to action. That’s how the screams and the echoes of those screams became amplified rather than silenced. And Jones unwisely defended his act by citing the violence as proof that his condemnation of Islam was right all along.

The United States Constitution permits Koran burning as it does the burning of crosses and the U.S. flag. It permits protesters to display signs at the funerals of soldiers killed in combat that say “Thank God for dead soldiers!” or “Thank God for 9/11.” The constitutionally protected right of expression extends further in the United States than in any other nation on earth. Americans are proud of that. They believe tolerance of unpopular words, gestures and symbols is a necessary part of a free society. Americans, including the president, opposition party members and religious organizations, have definitively distanced themselves from Jones and his misdeeds. Only the ignorant or the malicious are willing to say Jones speaks for more than just himself.

Democracy was forcibly exported to Iraq and Afghanistan. In Tunisia and Egypt, the people are fighting for democracy from within. Only when societies understand they must tolerate opinions, blasphemies and artistic freedoms with which they basically disagree, only when they recognize that violence can never be justified even in cases of apostasy, only then will those historic upheavals produce the civilizing maturity that result in real courage. Those who despise Terry Jones the most need only pay him the least attention.