The Quran at Fahrenheit 451
By the end of this week, the air was so thick with pieties about the need for tolerance and respect for all creeds that one yearned for the Rev. Terry Jones, mutton chop whiskers akimbo, to toss those Qurans in the burn barrels outside his Gainesville church in Florida and torch them on this year's anniversary of 9/11.
The entire world court of enlightened opinion has borne down on this former hotel manager, now senior pastor at the Dove World Outreach Center and its modest congregation, which does—on the evidence of videos of the church's proceedings—boast of some young female members of whom many a beleaguered Anglican parish would be only too proud to have raising their arms in ecstasy next to the altar.
Take Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state. "It's regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Fla., with a church of no more than 50 people can make this outrageous and distressful, disgraceful plan and get, you know, the world's attention," Clinton said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, a folk moot for the elites debating homicidal policies around the world. Clinton concluded, "It doesn't in any way represent America or Americans, or American government, or American religious or political leadership."
This is the same Hillary Clinton who has spent much of her term as helmswoman of the nation's foreign affairs demonizing Iran and threatening it with nuclear obliteration, during which uncounted millions of Qurans and the people clutching them would turn to cinders.
And here's U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman imploring Jones to reconsider: "I appeal to people who are planning to burn the Quran to reconsider and drop their plans because they are inconsistent with American values and, as Gen.Petraeus has warned, threatening to America's military."
This is the same Lieberman who is the most sedulous U.S. lobbyist for the interests of Israel in Washington, D.C. Has Lieberman warned Israel that its planned law to force every Palestinian to swear explicit allegiance to the Jewish state, hence the tenets of Zionism, is inconsistent with American values, and thus prompts him to reconsider his approval of America's annual disbursement of $3 billion to Israel's collection plate?
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has called Jones' plan "idiotic and dangerous." Would Holder call the action of his Democratic predecessor as attorney general, Janet Reno, in ordering the federal onslaught that led to the incineration in 1993 of the Branch Davidian church in Waco "idiotic and dangerous"? The Justice Department has always defended Reno's action, even though it prompted the blowing up of the Murrah center in Oklahoma City—until the 9/11 attacks, the most deadly act of terror perpetrated on American soil.
And here's Petraeus making what is described as an unusual—for a member of the military—intervention: "Images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan—and around the world—to inflame public opinion and incite violence." Petraeus can only advise the Rev. Jones, who has the constitutional freedom to dispose of the Quran as he thinks fit, consonant with local laws pertaining to public bonfires. He can, however, suspend by a simple order the lethal Predator onslaughts that regularly blow to pieces civilian groups in Afghanistan and the Pakistan border region, inflaming public opinion and leading invariably to escalation in violence.
For their part, Afghans are already demonstrating in Kabul in anticipatory protest at Jones' plan. They denounce disrespect for the Quran. But we also learn from earnest proponents of religious tolerance and interconfessional amity that the Quran promotes respect for the Bible, (though not, of course, the Christian claim of the divinity of Christ—a view also held by followers of Judaism, whose Talmud locates Christ in hell for all eternity, boiling in excrement).
What did the indignant Afghans say when, in early August of this year 10 members of a Christian medical team—six Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton, three women among them—were gunned down by the Taliban, who claimed they were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity? The gunmen spared an Afghan driver, who screamed he was a Muslim and babbled some verses from the Quran. The group were members of the International Assistance Mission, one of the longest-serving nongovernmental organizations operating in Afghanistan, registered as a nonprofit Christian organization, apparently not proselytizing. So, what if they were?
Jones is animated by religious principle, salted by the opportunism that every effective evangelist for a faith is endowed with as a part of the armory of conversion. He's aroused the fury of the American establishment, which has, as a matter of regular imperial maintenance, promoted the murder of millions across the world in the name of "American values." Modern Christians, fusionists of the all-get-along school deplore him, too. Many Evangelicals think Jones is on track, though they mostly won't say so publicly. As a Southern Baptist said to me last week, "Alex, they say that Christianity is tolerant. But Christ drove the moneychangers from the Temple. He didn't tolerate them. A line has to be drawn, just like Jones is doing."
What better symbol than Jones of what should have been America's overall resilience in the aftermath of the Muslim attacks of 9/11: an assertion of one of the greatest of American values, as embodied in constitutional provisions for free speech. These freedoms matter most when they are under duress. Amid the duress after 9/11, the Constitution was trashed by the same leaders the leaders who now decry Jones.
My hope has been that on the other side of the road from Jones' burn barrels, or on some piece of property volunteered by the mayor of Gainesville, a gay man, there will be other barrels, into which could be tossed by their opponents the Bible, and kindred sacred texts such as the Talmud, plus Bacon's "Advancement of Learning," Feuerbach's "Essence of Christianity" and "Das Kapital." Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature of the crucible, in which ideas and principles survive or die.
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Where in the Talmud did you find this reference locating Christ in Gehenna boiling in excrement?
The garden is littered with the fetid chaos of guile, cowardice, and shame. Eventually it must burn, to prepare the ground for new growth.
I decided to look up on the matter of Talmud and Christ online immediately after reading this article.
The Talmud says absolutely nothing of any man from Galilea who came to preach in Judea and then was crucified in place of a murderer.
It does mention various people, all of whom had a bare similarity to Christ, and they are presumed to be Christ, but under a very broad stretch of imagination. It does mention an influential government official Yeshu from Nazareth with five disciples who was stoned and hung after being in custody for forty days, in case any witness could come to his defense, concerning his enticement of apostasy and sorcery. Unfortunately, Yeshuah was a passing common name in those areas, and the other inconsistencies are not easily explained.
Re: #1 Apparently Peter Schafer mentions this in his book, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton University Press).
I have not read Shaefer's book but it does appear that the rabbis safely tucked away in Babylonia, and far from the Roman empire where Christianity spread like wild-fire, did indeed let 'er rip with regard to Jesus and the christian claims as to his immaculate conception and resurrection from the dead. But to say that these passages are part of the Talmud is the same as saying that some recently discovered dead sea scroll is part of the New Testament. Every religion gets to decide which documents constitute the official, received version and which do not. There is plenty of room for anti-semitism and anti-christianity in the official bible, i.e. God's stern advice to the Hebrews to commit genocide against the Caananites, without having to resort to noncanonical literature. Let's move on to more fascinating speculation--like the etymology of Alexander's surname.
Clinton who has spent much of her term as helmswoman of the nation’s foreign affairs demonizing Iran and threatening it with nuclear obliteration, during which uncounted millions of Qurans and the people clutching them would turn to cinders
That's not only funny, but also true. But this is all the same Hillary who won't recall when under oath. And I'm certain the poor cuckold is held in scorn by mohammedan leaders.
Pastor Jones has suffered quite a bit of "tolerance" from the organized anti-hate front. I'll pray for him every now and then.
#1 My guess would be that Alexander Cockburn got his idea about the Talmudic teaching about Jesus from Israel Shahak. On pages 20-21 of his book, “Jewish History, Jewish Religion,” Shahak says, “in addition to a series of scurrilous sexual allegations against Jesus, the Talmud states that his punishment in hell is to be immersed in boiling excrement.” Shahak didn’t say where in the Talmud one can find this.
Cockburn admired Shahak, and eulogized him in an antiwar.com aricle after Shahak died (http://www.antiwar.com/cockburn/c071301.html)
While I don't really care about a Jew's opinion of my Saviour, I wonder what Dr. Wilson would say about the following Shahakian opinion from the Cockburn eulogy at Mr. Porreca's link:
"It would be a good thing, I think, for Americans to ask themselves once a year whether the USA was a democracy before 1865; that is, before the constitutional abolition of slavery. The situation of the state of Israel and of the territories occupied by it is quite analogous. Just as the situation of the occupied territories resembles that of the pre-1865 South, so the situation inside the state of Israel resembles that of many states of the USA some 50 or 60 years ago when racism was popular, and when the really influential Ku Klux Klan made and unmade politicians, just as Gush Emunim now does in Israel."
It seems to me the "quirky, cantankerous professor of organic chemistry" should have kept his beak in his beakers rather than trying to compare the peaceful, old republican democracy of the antebellum South with the conquered territories of the West Bank and the hostage population therein.
I feel disgusted reading statements like that.
It's so arrogant and presumptuous on that man Shahak's part, to suggest what Americans should think, and what a terrible people he thinks their ancestors are. It reminds me of that time when an Israeli prime minister attempted to lecture Konrad Adenauer on how "civilized peoples behave", which led Adenauer to quietly tell him that the German state visit was over immediately.
Of course, Cockburn himself lives in some fantasy island where the world was a dark gloomy place in the days before Social Security, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act, and briefly became a paradise afterwards, before "reactionaries" and "neoliberals" ruined it again.
This is the best take on the Koran burning I've read. Wish I had read it prior to Saturday.
RJRafferty: You wrote: "There is plenty of room for anti-semitism and anti-christianity in the official bible, i.e. God’s stern advice to the Hebrews to commit genocide against the Caananites, without having to resort to noncanonical literature." Please point to the anti-Semitic passages in the Christian BIBLE. Thank you. What does God's advice to the Israelites slaughtering Caananites have to do with either anti-Semitism or anti-Christian views?
The first paragraph hit it square on for me. I too was so sick of the pious elites moaning about the burning of korans that I too hoped that the Rev Jones would start up the fires.
So was I.