Let's Burn a Bible For Ramadan

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"The thing that awoke me to the fact was when I saw the president and the Pentagon and all these world leaders coming out against Terry Jones' [plan] to burn the Koran. I realized that all these murders of Christians go on a daily basis and you don't hear an international outcry. But one guy in Florida — a nobody — says he's going to burn a Koran... and I thought, 'Something is really wrong with that scenario.' To me, it was the biggest, eye-opening thing to see the whole world has sided, apparently, with the enemies of America." - JoBeth Gerrard, unemployed Marietta, GA accountant

We're the most regressive country since Kenya and its anti-gay laws that execute gay people. We're destroying unions, trying to undermine child labor laws, stuffing oligarchs with more money while further impoverishing the poor. Now we're burning books. Welcome back to the early 20th century.

So, in the spirit of book burning and intolerance, here's an idea: Let's burn a Bible for every day of Ramadan that starts for a month on August 1st. And let's make sure that at least one of them is duct-taped to the gnarled hands of Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center, an ambitiously-named organization that caters to a few dozen Bible-humping zealots in Gainesville, Florida.

You may remember Jones from late summer last year when he vowed to burn 200 Qurans on September 11th before backing down. Somehow, this pastor of a little dogshit ministry in north Florida became a focal point and a poster child for every inbred, post-literate, Muslim-hating lunatic. President Obama and the Pentagon lowered themselves to get directly involved, pleading with Jones to stop his madness. His bigotry had spread to Great Britain, where a 15 year-old girl was arrested for burning a Koran and posting it on her Facebook page. Earlier last year, several British men were arrested for doing the same thing. And, just a few days after the 9th anniversary of 9/11, a burned Quran was found in a mosque in San Francisco.

Well, last Match 20th (I refuse to link to or show any of the videos on Youtube of the "trial" or burning, for obvious reasons), Jones just couldn't resist the call of the wild-eyed Islamophobia and held a kangaroo court to judge whether or not the Quran could be found guilty of rape, murder, torture, etc. The "trial" was held in the Dove World Outreach church, with Jones channeling Flip Wilson and playing "Here Comes the Judge" while wearing a black judge robe. He sat on a high platform with an open iron pit positioned on the floor to the right of his judge's throne. Yeah, the outcome wasn't predetermined at all any more than are American military tribunals (that is, if we actually held American military tribunals).

The "defense" was supposedly presided over by Sheik Imam Mohammed elHassan, supposedly president of an Islamic center in "Texas, USA". Mr. elHassan was described by JoBeth Gerrard, who blogged about the event on Dove Outreach's blog, as " a devout Muslim" who ran for President of Sudan last year. There was indeed a man named Muhammed elHassan who ran for the presidency of Sudan last year but there doesn't seem to be any mention of him on the internet as the head of an Islamic Center in "Texas, USA" or anywhere else outside of this "trial." Photos of him in English judicial regalia on the International Judge a Koran Day Facebook page and this video shot by the Imam last year show a superficial resemblance until you look at biometeric differences (pay particular attention to the height of the ears and you'll observe some inconsistency). But whether this "defense attorney" was an imposter or not, one thing remains:

This mock trial resulted in Afghan rebels invading a UN compound and killing 12 aid workers and guards in revenge for what Jones and his inbred lunatics had done a week and a half ago. Now, in spite of JoBeth Gerrard's assertion that the slaying in Afghanistan and the Quran burning were not connected, Pastor Jones seems to think there is a correlation and is calling for retribution, according the New York Times.

In other words, an escalation in hostilities, since the aid workers and four Nepalese guards who were killed were such close friends of Pastor Jones and all.

As I said, I will not link to the video but you can find it easily enough on Youtube and elsewhere. Toward the end of the 8+ minute-long video, you can hear a teenage boy say, "We should tell her to put some marshmallows and hamburgers on it", referring to the burning Quran in the fake courtroom that conjures up memories of that other fake courtroom in Pennsylvania last November.

Now they're shocked, shocked, that some Muslims would take offense at having their holy book burned after a joke of a trial. Without showing any evidence, some church members claimed they'd received "a stack of death threats" and have taken to carrying guns. Here's a direct quote from a parishioner in the NY Times article:

“We have a huge stack of death threats,” Ms. Ingram said. “We take precautions. I have a handgun. A lot of us have concealed weapons permits. We’re a small church, and we don’t have money to hire security.”

This is a typical reaction from evangelical, knuckle-dragging, post-apocalyptic yahoos who have delusions of speaking for all Christianity (the Youtube video of the Quran's burning earned a whopping 1500 views and the attitude of other parishes in Florida was to ignore it).

But we can't afford to ignore or laugh off the End of Days dickheads on account of one thing: The mainstream media.

The MSM had, starting with Sean Hannity and Fox "News", and continuing with the NY Times, the LA Times and a whole host of major media outlets, turned this smalltime asshole whose congregation makes Fred Phelps' at Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas look like the Roman Catholic Church in comparison, into a rock star for every mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Islamophobe in Sarah Palin's "Real America."

The actual trial and "execution" of the Quran may have been largely ignored by the other parishes in north Florida but it was quickly picked up on by the MSM that is ever ready to sow the seeds of post-911 bigotry as long as post-911 bigotry is a sexy lead story.

We should've relegated this lunatic to the dustbin of history and denied him even his 15 minutes. After all, this congregation that can be counted in the dozens does not speak for all Christianity any more than Sunnis, Shi'ites or Sufis speak for all Muslims.

This man is the hideous side of the Butterfly effect, someone who burns a single Quran as an empty, symbolic gesture and eventually got a dozen people, UN air workers, killed half a world away.

So when the month-long Ramadan fast begins on August 1st of this year, let's burn a Bible every day in August. If the nine major Crusades proved anything, the Bible and adherents like Jones are even more responsible for the slaughter of countless millions of innocents. For good measure, let's throw in all of Sean Hannity's or Anne Coulter's NY Times bestsellers.

And let's make sure Jones is holding one of those Bibles as we burn it.