Thou Shalt Kill

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In trying to find answers to some of the questions surrounding the over-reaction to the burning of a Koran by a Muslim-bashing and gay-hating Florida pastor with a handful of followers, I came up short.  Not because of yesterday’s guest who spent time in Afghanistan as a U.N. political officer and knew the foreign workers who were butchered by the mob, but because such zeal and fury associated with the desecration of religious text is so alien and incomprehensible to me. How could pages in a holy book be worth more than human life?  How could a political cartoon be worthy of a death sentence?

Last night I had dinner with a friend who has spent decades in Afghanistan and Pakistan going back to the war against the Soviets.  He is close to many Pakistani generals and former Taliban officials and has a genuine affection for the people in these countries at war since the 1980’s.  I mentioned my dismay at the disproportion between the actions of an attention-seeking nobody in Florida and the reactions of murderous mobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  He had his usual reaction to questions about Af/Pak; what a dumb-ass question stupid!

Then he told me how he once met an old friend in New York for dinner, a senior Pakistani general who was visiting the U.N. to discuss measures to avoid a nuclear confrontation with India. The point being this was a very educated member of the governing elite in a place often described as not a country with an army but an army with a country. 

While enjoying the meal at an upscale restaurant, my friend brought up the sticky subject of Salman Rushdie who was under various death threats from Mullah’s and happened to be teaching across town at Columbia University.  “What if Salman Rushdie walked into this restaurant?” my friend asked the general.  The man turned red and picked up the butter knife with a trembling hand, and seething with genuine rage blurted out, “I would cut his throat”.

Years later my friend ran into the general in Islamabad who by now had an even more senior position, and as they were catching up about friends and family, the general remarked, as if finishing a conversation they’d had yesterday, “by the way when I said I would slit Salman Rushdie’s throat in the restaurant, I should have said I would have taken him outside first before slitting his throat”.

The point of the story was not lost; if this is the sincere belief and determined action of a highly placed educated official, imagine how the uneducated member of the mob feels about some foreign infidel burning the Koran? 

But of course I am still at a loss to understand the emotional intensity from a stupid but symbolic act that would countenance the slaughter of a fellow human being.  Not to mention the theological justification or the cultural acceptance of such barbarity in response to such inanity.  Recently a Pakistani Governor was murdered because of his support for overturning a Draconian blasphemy law that targets the Christian minority.  His murderer was treated as a national hero and mobbed by fans as he proudly strutted past the cameras on his perp walk.

Just yesterday in Pakistan a Sufi ceremony was blown up by fundamentalist Wahabbi terrorists financed by our friends the Saudis, who have done more than anyone else on the planet to fuel religious extremism and intolerance.  These al Qaeda affiliated bombers previously struck the most sacred Sufi shrine, and it is routine in Pakistan for Sunni mobs to burn Shia Mosques and burn countless Korans.  

In contrast there is no constituency in the United States that supports the redneck pastor in Florida, and rather than expose him to punishment, our laws protect him. As incomprehensible as it may be to some Muslims, this is why we allow symbolic speech such as flag-burning.  But of course our right wing religious conservatives would outlaw that too if they had a majority, but still there is still no comparison.

We can point the finger however at far more influential anti-Muslim demagogues who have prominent positions in Washington and powerful soap boxes in the mainstream media. Unlike the pistol-packing pastor in Florida, Glenn Beck does not have to pull a shabby stunt to get on TV, Rupert Murdoch gives him hours of primetime to fulminate and prognosticate.  Arguably everything this self-described “rodeo clown” does is a stunt, but watching him and Daniel Pipes postulate that Sharia law is about to take over the United States, is far more dangerous and divisive than anything the Koran-burning media whore could conjure up.

The deranged Beck and demonic Pipes give not just a wider voice to racist nonsense; they dignify the very intolerance they purport to decry. And they are joined in inflaming religious bigotry and xenophobia by our friend Karzai, our man in Kabul, the embezzling buffoon and Bhutto’s widower in Pakistan, the bagman of a kleptocratic state, otherwise known as Mr. Ten Percent. Both the Afghan and Pakistan heads of state have stirred up the Koran-burning controversy that was hardly noticed here, into hysterical headlines over there, leading to death and destruction.

I thought religious conviction was supposed to imbue the faithful with strength and purpose so that the downtrodden could endure the hardships of secular injustice and life’s often unfair outcomes.  But so much of the world’s religious expression seems trapped in sectarian paranoia and righteous indignation that it is difficult not to dismiss the devoted as deluded and the clergy as hypocrites.  

But along with the dark side of faith there is the side that sees the light and was responsible for mobilizing the critical mass that ended slavery and brought about civil rights and helped end the nuclear arms race. So while we must expose these deadly heretics backed up by billions of Saudi petro-dollars, oh ye of little faith, despair not…