The Problem with Burning the Koran, Part II

Pastor Terry Jones is being told that burning Korans is offensive by the likes of Sarah Palin.  Everyone from military officials to President Obama are telling him, and us, that burning Korans represents a threat to national security.

I think we've already established that Muslims will find the book burning in Florida very, very, offensive.  But would we normally assume that a group of people will act with violence just because someone decided to hurt their feelings?  Or are we being told to assume that one particular religious, or in the eyes of the ignorant, racial group, can't handle being insulted?  

The implication by almost everyone in the establishment is that one particular group of people, Muslims, are fundamentally different than everyone else.  One particular group has an anger management problem.  If you offend us our feelings are hurt, but if you offend them you die.

It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is racist.  If some other group assumed that they had better not offend Christians because they will react with violence, shouldn't Christians be offended?  Of course, to make this an equivalent analogy, when these people said "Christians, they would mean all Americans, including those who are not Christian or even White Anglo Saxon Protestant.  How should we feel about that?

You might object that those who believe that the burning of the Koran will lead to violence are only talking about extremists.  This ignores the fact that a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda that views itself as being "at war" with the United States isn't going to act or not act depending on what a pastor in Florida does.  Such a statement also ignores the fact that insurgents are not going to stop opposing the U.S. occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan just because a pastor in Florida decides to not burn Korans.  To the extent that we're talking about the security threat to troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, the real threat to their security is the fact that they are occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and the people in those countries don't want them there.

The problem is that the establishment as a whole, both the Democrats and the Republicans, the generals and the politicians, want us to believe that Islam is a violent religion.  For 9 years, this has set the grounds for the second perpetual war, since the Cold War did what perpetual wars are not supposed to do, it came to an end.  Back then, the supposed enemy that made people in the U.S. become patriotic and forget about what the government was doing to them, was Communism.  Today, it is terrorism, which the government has decided stems from Islam, despite the fact that there are many non Muslim terrorists, and that the state shouldn't have any more of a right to kill people than non-state actors.  The establishment has learned that if it wants to justify curtailing civil liberties forever or create a permanent imaginary enemy than it had better take something more permanent than the Soviet Union.  Unfortunately, Islam, with over a billion followers around the world, fits this bill perfectly.  If we don't want to become a nation driven by racism, we had better reject this propaganda, whether it comes from Bush, Palin, or Obama.