The Religious Time Bomb

The book burning of the Quran organized by the fundamentalist Pastor Terry Jones of Florida not only provoked the disapproval of both Western political and military authorities, but also a spiral of violence that ended in a bloodbath. It reminds us of the fragility of world peace when violence is fueled by the threat of religious extremism.

On April 1, seven United Nations employees were killed when angry demonstrators stormed their compound in Mazar-e-Sharif in northwestern Afghanistan. Other demonstrations took place over the weekend, some in the Kandahar region. On Saturday, Afghan rebels hidden under burqas and equipped with grenade launchers and firearms attacked an international forces base to the east of Kabul.

This was not Pastor Jones’ first stunt. It was he who invited Americans to burn copies of the Quran to mark the attacks of Sept 11. It took the intervention of the Pope, President George W. Bush and several governments to change his mind. This time, he delivered. On March 20, an act took place that he called “International Judge the Quran Day.” A copy of the holy book was destroyed by a fire after being “found guilty” following a “trial” conducted by Pastor Jones’ congregation.

The pastor then invited his fans to protest outside a cultural center in Michigan that he described as a “kind of Mecca” in America.

These events should not leave us indifferent, as there exist in our society the same seeds of intolerance and misunderstanding whose consequences can erupt across our entire planet in just a few days. The “global village” predicted by the Canadian communications theorist, Marshall McLuhan, has never been so real, so small. The corner of the street is in Kandahar… where Canadian soldiers on the firing line must pay the price for the provocation of a fanatic pastor 12,000 kilometers away.

Just yesterday [April 4], U.S. President Barack Obama could not hide his impatience and embarrassment at seeing “an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry” unleash the excesses of another fanaticism and further aggravate situations of extreme fragility.

Today, religious fanatics feed on their own extremes and respond to one another in a bloody deaf dialogue. Thus, it is increasingly difficult to silence both sides of those who, at the corner of the “global village”, isolate themselves to better hate and train us in their culture of death.