Until Islam Feels Fully Avenged

There's some stinging irony in the fact that both the United States and Afghanistan represent centres of extreme fundamentalist religious ideologies. Let it be said that there the similarities in the two countries, tenuous though they are, come to a slamming halt. The United States is, and always has been, a civilized country. Afghanistan never has been mistaken for one throughout its long history. The United States is a relatively "new" country, while Afghanistan represents one with a hoary old past.

And while the United States has never really been 'occupied', never had foreign troops stationed on its soil, Afghanistan has had that profound experience, repeatedly. The United States is a technologically modern country, with an independent judiciary, and a Republican-style Democracy where citizenship is taken seriously and justice, fairness are liberty are top-of-mind for all its citizens. Afghanistan represents a stone-age throwback, rife with political and social corruption, where the concept of citizenship is an unknown.

There are political rivalries in each of these countries, but in the United States those rivalries are settled at the ballot box, or if otherwise done, handled in a court of law. In Afghanistan the rivalries are ethnic and tribal and clan-based, and there is nothing gentle or civil in the manner in which disagreements are solved. Murder and assassinations settle outstandingly irksome problems with one's neighbours, and never, ever are purported insults to Islam, the Koran or the Prophet countenanced outside of casually-committed capital punishment.

Murder is not officially condoned, but there are times when it is overlooked because a far more serious crime has been encountered. That of profaning the Koran, for example. The public outcry that results from insulting Islam can be heard in Outer Space where Allah doubtless covers his ears in disgust, while witnessing his creatures imbued with free will running amok, determined to slaughter those who dare defy the strictures against profaning his name.

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, whose longevity in his political post owes entirely to the presence of American and other NATO-member troops in his country as they do his battle against the viciously bloody ravages of the fanatical Taliban, calls upon the United States Congress to censure a fundamentalist American citizen/cleric for destroying a Koran. A little-noticed non-event until Mr. Karzai transformed it into a national outrage.

When fanatical clerics preached enmity from their mosques, all over the country, inciting the ever-volatile response from the faithful to go out and demonstrate their incendiary anger with the hateful foreign invaders whose like burns Korans, the results were predictable. Hatred, looting, pillage, beatings, slaughter, and wholesale destruction seem to come naturally to the Koranic faithful.

In the United States it is lawful for any citizen to publicly behave in a manner that will be seen by some as insulting. It is their right in a free society to express themselves to that degree. In the world of Islam there are no rights, much less those of free speech. In the Islamic world there is fear and anger and hatred. And that fear and anger and hatred is dispatched whenever the world of Islam feels insulted.

The threat of violent reprisal is usually sufficient to still foreign criticism. No one willingly awakens the restless slumber of that massive beast.

In Kandahar, following an earlier riot of hatred and anger unleashed against the foreign presence of humanitarian aid workers working for the United Nations in Mazar-i-Sharif, another furious crowd of offended Muslims attacked in Kandahar, slaughtering another eight people to avenge themselves against the act of a Florida pastor torching a Koran in memory of the 9-11 attacks.

Anger: Afghan protesters burn an effigy of U.S. President Barack Obama during a demonstration in Jalalabad

The United Nations representative for Afghanistan is forgiving. He does not 'blame' Afghans for reacting to the atrocious insult to Islam. He does blame an ignorant fundamentalist preacher for inciting Afghans to display their hurt feelings. Standards of acceptable behaviour are obviously held to a different yardstick; the burning of a Koran is more reprehensible than the slaughter of innocent people who wished no harm to Afghans.

We know this must be so, since even the President of the United States speaks in measured tones of profound regret that a Koran was destroyed, and seems to equate in a most generously egalitarian manner the comparison between that atrocity and the viciously rampaging mobs that hunted down humanitarian aid workers and their guards to demonstrate unequivocally that what one Westerner wreaks in offence to Islam will be paid for many times over by other Westerners until Islam feels fully avenged.