In Condemnation of Flaming Korans

Nothing quite so incendiary as the faithful having their faith flung back in their faces. Which is how Muslims interpret the casual, philistine attitude of the West toward their incomparable religion. Of course most Muslims don't reach that conclusion on their own initiative. They feel stung, believing that Islam is being mocked, satirized, made little of. For Islam is the single most important aspect of their lives.

Good, faithful Muslims completely surrender to Islamic precepts, which absorb every facet of their lives, every minute of the day. Everything revolves around Islam, all social interaction, all cultural attachments, all political awareness; justice is what Islam decrees it to be and a life well lived cannot be realized without utter surrender to the reality that cleaving to Islam is first and foremost.

How then is it possible for Islam to be mocked by ignorant, insulting boors? And because that is so, it is clear that the world outside Islam is unworthy of respect. Yet it cannot be ignored because it is there and because from within that world emanates from irritating time to frustrating event, assaults against the pious belief of the faithful.

From the mosques Islamist clerics preach not tolerance but revenge. Go out, leave Friday prayers and collect yourselves in a raging group to make certain that the world outside knows that their insulting degrading of Islam is not to be tolerated. Make the kuffar fearful of the strength of your undying commitment to Islam, make certain that he knows he will suffer.

So, in Afghanistan, where foreign, non-Muslim countries have invested treasury, have suffered the loss of their soldiers' lives in the larger aim of protecting Afghanistan and its population from the predations of fanatical Islamists, the Afghan population listens to the words of their mullahs, and they stream out of the mosques and rage through the streets.

It is not merely the unschooled, the unlettered, the ignorant, for at Kabul University, on the fifth day of raging against the insult of the burning of a Koran by a fundamentalist preacher in Florida, in that Great Satanic United States of America, the protest continues. In a country like Afghanistan a marauding mob intent on mayhem and revenge-killing represents a protest.

Officials in Afghanistan have issued figures: 19 people have died, while one hundred have been wounded since the inception of the 'demonstrations'. Of those who died were seven foreign United Nations staff members, slaughtered in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, during the mob attack of the United Nations compound there.

All is not lost; U.S. president Barack Obama and General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, have condemned the burning of the Koran. Not, alas, the murder of innocent people who work in the country to alleviate the plight of the unfortunate; Christians engaged in humanitarian work on behalf of Muslims.