Interpol has issued a global terror alert warning of an increased risk of terror attacks if the Koran burning in Florida goes ahead as planned.
This whole situation is obviously devolving, pretty rapidly, in a really bad direction. I can see many people of good will thinking, “Wait, if we don’t upend and own constitution and prevent this idiot from burning Korans, we’re going to be attacked by terrorists?” And it’s not an unreasonable sentiment. But then you fall back and think, how’d we get here exactly?
Yes, this guy’s a complete loon and his church actually seems to operate like a cult. But then again, maybe a nationwide campaign of anti-Muslim hate speech by some of the country’s most prominent political leaders wasn’t such a great idea in the first place? This isn’t about this fool in Florida. The cretins from the Westboro church — the ones who made their name disrupting soldiers’ funerals with anti-gay rants — came forward today and said they’ve been burning Korans for a while now. And they’re bummed they’re not getting the credit. So it’s not new that some religious extremists in the US are burning Korans. What’s new is the climate, in which hate speech against a minority religious group in the US has gone mainstream.
There’s a fine line here — one that may have a hard time not getting scrambled up in the rock-em, sock’em of public debate. We don’t change our own norms and values in the USA based on what some Muslim hotheads may do in Pakistan. But we live in a big world. And some level of prudence, some considered delegitimization of hate speech by prominent public figures, can be an important thing. And in any case, rancid campaigns of demonization against religious minorities in our country doesn’t really square with our norms and values either, does it?
