Will he; won’t he ? That dumb American pastor who has promised to burn the Koran. I’m guessing he probably will after all it’s not every day that a piece of white trash like Terry Jones attracts this much attention. He’s the pastor of a third-rate church with at most 50 in his congregation showing that he isn’t even a particularly good frothing extremist like others in the US. In other words, he needs the publicity to keep going – why else would he announce this foolish escapade this year and not in previous years after 2001?
Of course it is probably offensive to Muslims everywhere; hell it’s even offensive to me, and I don’t like any organised religion – to me this is the burning of one of the great works of literature. It is also offensive that a knuckle-dragging white trash pastor cannot distinguish between the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims and the fanatical fringe. Perhaps he can’t count over 10 without taking his socks off – after all there are in excess of 1.7 billion Muslims in the world today and if they were all inclined to violence, we would have a lot more terrorist attacks than we do.
Perhaps people are fooled by the rhetoric; the wild protests and threats of violence that we sometimes see take place in the Islamic world. Well, there is a big difference between what you say you will do, and what you are actually prepared to carry out. Who hasn’t said “I’ll kill him” in a moment of stress and anger ? And yet the overwhelming majority of us will never conceive of actually carrying out a killing such as that – the outburst is a way of releasing stress. Perhaps not quite the same, but bear in mind that what we say is not the same as what we do.
According to this article on terrorist attacks in the US, no more than 6% of all terrorist incidents in the US since 1980. 6% ? Unbelievable isn’t it ? Well the figures came from a report by the FBI which is available here (although you will have to do your own number crunching). It seems that Jewish terrorists are (just) more likely to commit terrorist acts in the US as Islamic terrorists. To bring in another source, the Europol report on the terrorist situation in 2009 (published in 2010) shows that of 294 terrorist incidents (including foiled attacks), just 1 was committed by an Islamic terrorist – an even lower percentage of 0.3%
Strikes me that those 1.7 billion Muslims are either exceptionally lazy, or are just not that interested in being terrorists. Undoubtedly people will point to Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as examples of just how active Islamic terrorists can be – fair point, but in all cases those are exceptional circumstances. And besides the overwhelming majority of the victims are Muslims themselves – if anything one might say that the “Islamic” terrorists are actually enemies of Islam as they seem to prefer killing their co-religionists to non-Muslims.
Back to our white trash pastor. Despite showing every intention of burning the Koran, it would have been nice if the world could have ignored him – that is what he deserves. Perhaps understandably, the Islamic world doesn’t feel this way and is undoubtedly working up to widespread protests on September 11th, and undoubtedly the tiny minority of Muslims who are actually terrorists will be planning their own form of reaction against this.
It is worth pointing out (no matter how little good it will do) that the reaction to our white trash pastor is almost universally negative in the western world.