As I wrote last September, when Jones threatened to burn a Koran, the "violence stems from Islamic law, the Sharia, which insists that Islam, and the Koran in particular, enjoy a privileged status." That insistence, which has been asserted in the West since 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini put an edict on Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses, must not be indulged. Islam is one religion among others, with no claim to superior status. Indeed closing down the claim to Islamic supremacism may be the single greatest challenge to modernizing Islam.
However distasteful, Jones' act is both legal and non-violent. He is not responsible for the 43 deaths; the repugnant, barbaric ideology of Islamism is to blame. When will U.S. politicians realize this basic fact and stand up robustly for the civil liberties of American citizens? Critiquing Islam, tastefully or distastefully done, is a Constitutional right. Indeed, done intelligently it is a civilizational imperative. |