Saturday, September 11, 2010

The Christofascist/media whore/nonentity has gone viral. Will he? Won't he? The media, the national government, and assorted clerics dance attendance on him, hanging on his every utterance. What an enthralling piece of theatre.
Will book-burning make a comeback as a political or cultural statement? Jon Henley, in yesterday's 'Guardian', quotes the great Heinrich Heine on the subject, "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people." (Over in Texas they already do, judicially). Heine could point to a precedent, Old Savonarola. His bonfire of the vanities led to his own funeral pyre.
What can Muslims do in retaliation? If they hold true to their Prophet's teachings they can't burn the Bible. The Old Testament (at-tawrat) and the New (al-anjil) are holy books containing messages from the deity. Still they can always have another pop at the 'Satanic Verses' I suppose.
In fact the Prophet, an illiterate, had a great reverence for the written word. The faithful were enjoined to treat all text with care, and that would include the kafir Rushdie's partly good, mostly bad, fairy tale.

Addenda: i) Muslims might consider burning Blair's book in praise of Blair. Surely nobody would object to that. Even Blair would content if he knew they'd bought and paid for it.

ii. A comment from the Angry Arab -
"I like when the notion of freedom of speech is invoked against haters of Islam. I am aware of the First Amendment, but can you imagine the government and public reactions if a public festival of anti-Semitism was planned anywhere in the US? I mean, freedom of speech did not prevent the US from banning Arabic TV stations and from banning the publication of the memoirs of Abu Dawud. It seems that freedoms of speech are abundantly available for those who wish to spread hate against Islam."

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