A Gainesville Christian church is going to commemorate 9-11-2001 with a Koran burning. The bad news is that even though this is a small church, it is getting international attention all out of proportion to its size and worrying Gen. Petraeus, who is concerned that U.S. troops in the Middle East might become convenient targets of retaliation.
I guess the good news is that while our extremist Islamic brothers and sisters elsewhere are stoning people to death, our extremist Christian brothers and sisters here are just burning sacred texts. So far, anyway. But it seems misguided to me and to Professor John Esposito as well, to blame the Koran for the nutjobs who carried out 9-11 just as it would be nutty to blame Christianity for Timmy McVeigh's truck-bomb ride to infamy in Oklahoma City.
The First Amendment gives us the right to be nutty as fruitcakes, as long as we don't hit anyone over the head with the fruits of our kitchen labor. Gen. Petraeus, however, is worried about some of his men taking extra potshots over this. He is certainly wondering if the good Pastor Jones is going too far.
Sigh. Hasn't humanity traveled down this road before? The picture above was taken in Berlin in 1933. Acknowledgments to Wikipedia and the NY Times.
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