Another day and more Muslim protests, deaths and injuries over the burning of copies of the Quran.
According to Reuters news agency and other media, at least four people were killed and 26 wounded during protests in Afghanistan today ("Four killed, many wounded in Afghan Quran protests"). As I write, other reports put the number of dead at seven.
US sources say the Qurans were "inadvertently" put in an incinerator at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan after officials believed Taliban prisoners were using the books to pass messages to each other.
This is not the first time that Muslims have protested, killed and got killed over Quran burning. In April last year seven foreign UN workers were killed during protests that raged across Afghanistan for three days after an American cretin, pastor Terry Jones, burned a Quran in Florida. At the time, I wrote a blog post ("God, Muslims and a moronic pastor from Florida"), in which I said:
Sadly, the anger of Muslims at the prospect of a half-wit burning copies of the Quran is a manifestation of the intellectual depths to which they have sunk, thanks to their primitive educational systems and authoritarian regimes that discourage any form of debate or curiosity beyond that of the most basic type. To many Muslims, Islam now boils down to a set of rituals, which they perform without actually knowing why, and dress restrictions that have no basis in religion. As for fundamentals such as justice, equality and the quest for knowledge, forget it.
Consequently, it is perhaps not all that surprising that my Muslim brothers and sisters are expending so much hot air because a second-class twerp has threatened to burn copies of the Quran. For it seems to me that along with justice, equality and the quest for knowledge, Muslims have also forgotten who exactly they worship: God or paper? If it is God that they worship, then why get so exercised by an ignoramus burning paper on which the Quran happens to be written? After all, don't Muslims also burn – no, blow up – copies of the Quran, destroy God's holy places of worship and kill fellow Muslims when they attack Sunni and Shi'i mosques in Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere? Well, in case some of my readers have been on Mars for the past few years, the answer is yes, in the thousands.
If, on the other hand, my Muslim brothers and sisters have abandoned God and in fact worship the paper on which the Quran is written, then I fully understand their anger. But I won't be joining them.
In fact, I am now very tempted to fetch whatever copies of the Quran I still have and burn them myself, as an expression of disgust at the rank hypocrisy of Muslims all over the world. For in the time that has passed since the moron Jones's stunt, many hundreds of Muslims have been killed, thousands of Qurans burned and dozens of mosques blown to smithereens as Sunnis and Shi'is from Iraq to Pakistan and beyond set about deliberately slaughtering their Muslim brothers and sisters and desecrating Muslim holy places for no reason other than the fact that the victims were from a different branch of Islam.
Amid the blood and the hot air Muslims would do well to pause and think about what they are doing and what they hope to achieve. Those who can read should spend some time looking back over the past decade to see how many Muslims have been slaughtered by other Muslim bigots and hotheads and compare that with the number of Muslims that have been killed by non-Muslims.
