Two things come to mind. One, is that the old world of Muslims and Christians, largely separate, have collapsed under modern technology and either non-Muslims will destroy Muslims, or Muslims will effectively rule the world under semi-official Sharia. The other, is that threatening to burn the Koran, publicly, in the US, is a good way to earn a million dollars, Doctor Evil-style.
Obviously, if you want media attention, threatening to burn the Koran is an excellent way to get it. Even better, you can ask say, the President or Secretary of State, to pay you a million dollars! from your "Dr. Evil Headquarters" (complete with Starbucks inside) to make you not burn the Koran. I'm surprised no one has thought of this before. Announce publicly a Koran burning. With extensive video on your website. Then say you'll be happy to sign a contract not to burn it, if you're paid. Yes its blackmail, but blackmail based on the desire of Muslims to use violence to enforce Sharia world-wide.
Americans don't threaten to kill Muslims if the flag is burned, or the Bible, or copies of the Constitution. Muslims, and Muslims alone, world-wide, threaten to kill people if they get offended by cartoons, or episodes of South Park, or Korans being burned. While constantly killing (in particular) Christians and Jews, as well as their fellow Muslims, and burning plenty of Korans themselves in attacks on rival Mosques and the like.
A media storm and terrorist frenzy would not have been possible in 1850. Or 1950, for that matter. It has only been with the advent of the internet, cheap cell phones capable of browsing the internet (and available to the Muslim masses), and the collapse of the separate worlds, that Muslims have made a concerted effort to enforce Sharia through violence.
Karl Rove has argued on Fox News that the Ground Zero Mosque must be built, to allow Muslims to celebrate 9/11, or Muslims will kill people. Andrew McCarthy says that Muslims go from "moderate" to nasty in a hurry, rejecting Trump's offer to moot the whole issue.
As McCarthy further notes on "the Corner" at National Review, Rauf has implied violence if the Ground Zero Mosque is not built. McCarthy further notes:
According to Obama, Jones's "stunt" (a fair description) is already "a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda." That's absurd. No sensible person joins a terrorist organization dedicated to mass murder simply because somebody torches a Koran.
If the president, who is principally responsible for American national security, actually believes what he says, what is his excuse for not confronting Islamist regimes? These are not Looney Tunes pastors with followings smaller than the First Lady's traveling caravan; they are governments that confiscate and destroy Bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, and other articles of profound religious substance and symbolism to non-Muslims. That goes on, systematically, every single day - although still not as often as you'd imagine, because Islamic societies are so innately intolerant that there aren't a lot of non-Muslim religious items to be found in, say, Saudi Arabia.
Jones is going to burn a Koran; sharia calls for killing human beings who renounce Islam. Does the president have an explanation for why Christians and Jews are not forming terror cells with the bonanza of recruits that must come forward on a daily basis given the "stunts" that, in Saudi Arabia, are known as law enforcement?
Terry Jones is a jackass. I wish Americans would trip over themselves with a fraction of the zeal on display here to condemn the torching of the American flag - a symbol of freedom and sacrifice. But that's beside the point. Burning a book sacred to Muslims is a stupid, provocative thing to do. Yet it is conscious avoidance - okay, willful blindness - to claim that Jones is causing the threat to our troops, in addition to the threat of other attacks and riots by Muslims (of the sort we've seen with the Danish cartoons, the false claims of Koran-flushing at Gitmo, the school teacher who named a teddy bear Mohammed, etc.).
Those are all pretexts. The cause is Islamist ideology, which is dehumanizing of non-Muslims (or, in the case of the Ahmadi, even of Muslims who reject parts of mainstream Islamic doctrine). It is the ideology that puts the world's Muslims on a hair trigger.
What Jones is doing is a desecration, not a national-security threat. It merits derision, as any desecration does. And it may indeed provoke a spike in violence that will go on, spike or no spike. But the security problem is not Koran-burning. It is a civilization indoctrinated by an ideology ever on the prowl for any excuse, real or imagined, to make mayhem. Wouldn't it be nice if, while they publicly chide an American citizen for striking the match, our public officials took the occasion to chide the ideology that turns cultures into dynamite?
McCarthy, a former US Attorney who convicted the "Blind Sheik" Abdul Rahman of attempting to blow up with others, various New York landmarks, subways, and of course New Yorkers, has been excellent in commenting on the situation. And McCarthy is correct. The real issue is that Islam demands submission to Sharia, everywhere, all the time.
This was not a problem, in the 1950's, or 1960's, or even up through the 1980's. Because Muslims were mostly a separate people. Not only were there not many in the West, but the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world were not intimately connected by the current web of decentralized, sound-video-text, internet available to anyone with the money to rent a computer at an internet caf'e or browse the web on a cheap web-enabled smartphone. Even rural villages in Pakistan or Indonesia possess this technology, and everything and anything the West does gives offense.
Because the West is unwilling, at the moment, to use force to keep Muslims in line. No one respects weakness, least of all Muslims, who idolize strength (see Osama Bin Laden's strong-horse and weak-horse analogies) above all else and make a fetish of despising weakness (not the least of which is that they themselves are weak in everything but jihadist killing).
If the technology of the world had remained that of the 1950's, centralized, and easily controlled, television, radio, all one-way mass communications, the semi-literate at best Muslim population would remain in blissful ignorance of their own culture's massive failing to produce anything like the prosperity in the West, and the West's unwillingness to adopt Sharia in everything. The Muslim masses and elites would both dreamily believe they dominate everything in the world, the flip side to the famous New Yorker cartoon of the Upper East Side of Manhattan occupying 9/10 of the globe.
But decentralized, two-way communications allow an obscure Florida pastor with no more than 50 followers, or even wackier, and more lunatic, Fred Phelps, to seize the attention of the entire Muslim world and US government, the Vatican (which has condemned Koran burning) and the rest. And so showcase that for the American people, Muslims tell them what they can and cannot do.
Muslims dominate, now, through fear and intimidation of reasonable expectations of mass casualty terrorism, the ability of Americans to object to a Ground Zero Victory Mosque celebrating 9/11 as a "great victory" (which is exactly what the Mosque is, all BS aside). Muslims are allowed to burn US flags with impunity, at home and abroad, and Bibles, and Torahs, and every other sacred symbols of other religions (most famously the Afghanistan Buddhist statues blown apart by Muslims). But Americans are not allowed to exercise their free speech, because Muslims will kill them if they burn the Koran.
This whole exercise has shown ordinary Americans (and Westerners) that Muslims are right with them, intertwined through modern communications. The world is not flat, its tiny. With Muslims in Pakistan and Iran and Indonesia right in the living room with ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans, for the most part, resent the hell out of it.
Since Koran burning is only the start. Next up, no more Christmas celebrations. Muslims object. Mandatory celebration of Islamic festivals and holidays. No eating or drinking in public during Ramadan (or Muslims will kill someone). No alcohol allowed at all, in the West. Or Muslims will start killing. No Jews allowed, or Muslims will start killing. No Christianity allowed, anywhere, or Muslims will start killing. Burquas for every woman, robes for every man. Because Muslims demand it, or they'll start killing.
This is the price of modern telecommunications. Nothing, including the Web's many, many benefits, comes for free. This is just one cost.
The only solution, is to either submit to Islam, totally, or deter threats of violence by real, demonstrable, and fairly hair-trigger counter violence. The West, and America in particular, must be feared. For it will never be loved unless it is totally Islamic, to the point of Iran or Afghanistan or Pakistan. And who, really, would want to live in Pakistan? Even Mexico, with its criminal collapse, is preferable to Pakistan. So inevitably, one way or another, America must move towards demonstrating (by nuking a convenient people out of existence) its resolve not to remain Muslim. China, and Japan, must do this too, they also as does Russia face threats from jihad to adopt Sharia or face death. The perceived more harsh response has so far prevented the worst threats and actions, but ominously Jihadists claim that they too are "weak" like America and the West.
Fred Phelps or Rev. Jones may or may not burn the Koran. The FBI may arrest them and show, explicitly, that free speech ends when Muslims get offended (making Islam the official State Religion, which it practically is already). Proving the Constitution is nothing more than a dead, outmoded document devoid of any real meaning, like the Holy Roman Emperor.
But inevitably, someone in the West will offend Muslims. Drinking alcohol, unveiled women, open worship of Christianity or Judaism, petting dogs, indeed keeping dogs as pets, all offend Muslims world-wide. They way eating pork such as bacon, or not observing fasting during Ramadan, even if you are not a Muslim, offends all Muslims worldwide. And when Muslims are offended, they start killing people. That killing will eventually rise to the death of a Western city over a cartoon, or drinking beer in public, or unveiled women.
And to preserve the very way of life, America will have to kill a nation of Muslims. Very visibly showing the limits of what the West will tolerate. Responding to aggression (which is what the Muslim demands in the Ground Zero Mosque and Koran burning are) with appeasement only ups the butchers bill later.
