In reflecting on the massive news coverage being given to a small-town, small-minded preacher who is planning to burn copies of the Koran, please remember the free pass the media gives to the daily occurrence of Muslim violence directed at non-Muslims.Yes, radical Muslims burn books too. And American flags. And effigies of the Pope, President Bush and others.
But they also burn people.
And the press is too busy with other matters to care.
For instance, a couple of weeks ago, Sheikh Tobah, a Muslim imam from the Egyptian village of Shimi, used the time of Friday prayers to call for “jihad” against the Coptic Christians living there.
His call was answered and within hours, the attacks began.
As a result, Middle-East journalist, Mary Abdelmassih reported, Christian Copts living in the village were viciously assaulted over the next two days. Eleven Copts were hospitalized.
The police made no arrests.
Of course, earlier this year Coptic Christians in Egypt fared even worse, several being killed as Muslim mobs using swords, butane gas, and Molotov cocktails attacked shops, cars and homes. That destruction and those murders also went virtually unnoticed by the world's press.
A Google search for news of the Sheikh Tobah-incited violence brought up only one instance of a major news organization deigning to mention it: CNN. And, to the network's credit, it also reported on other instances of Muslim terrorism against Christians.
These outrages, I repeat, are happening every day. But the world's press ignores them, preferring instead to repeat a trite (and blatantly untrue) mantra that Islam is a religion of peace, tolerance and high culture.
This doesn't mean that I am sympathetic to the proposed actions of the Florida preacher. I prefer an open forum in which Islam's bloody history of conquest, it's theological absurdities and it's production (everywhere it conquers) of cruel and repressive culture is carefully, thoroughly exposed.
But for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media to behave as if burning pages is more more horrific and insane than burning people? That is a far greater sacrilege than anything this preacher is going to do.