Burn Baby, Burn

Posted on 10. Sep, 2010 by Theodore Roe in Current Events

September 11th this year marks the ninth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center towers. One would think the news would be more centered on a somber reflection on that fateful day that the United States finally recognized that our newest enemy did not wear a uniform or fly a single flag. It would bring us to far reaches of the globe to fight multiple guerilla wars, and these wars will not end anytime soon. Indeed, I expect there to be more of them in the near future.

Why? The world does not seem to be experiencing a shortage of uneducated, dirt-poor peasants who from the cradle have been taught to value a bunch of paper over human lives. They are goaded on by irresponsible tyrants that are more than willing to dump their sons into a meat grinder for no reason other than their own power trips. These so-called imams and clerics pervert and twist whatever they encounter into a reason to do holy war in the name of God. The fact that these people exist in our modern era seems like some gross anachronism, yet they appear to be thriving in places like Indonesia, Pakistan and Iran.

So, instead of reflection on the 9/11 event, there is instead talk of a book burning in Gainesville. Yes, I know it is a Koran burning, but I say book because that is exactly what the Korean is – a book. It isn’t a magical thing. It is in fact a very plain thing. Books are mundane creations, once unique because of the time and effort it took to hand-write and illuminate an entire volume, but now a product of a massive industry that can crank out untold copies of any drivel. Any modern book you have in your possession most likely has thousands of brothers and sisters throughout the world. In short, while the content of a book might be unique, the book itself is a replaceable and disposable thing.

Everyone from the president of the United States to the pope has come out with their opinion on this book burning, so I suppose it is time for Teddy Roe to put in his two cents.

Fire, which, according to the Poetic Edda, will engulf the earth in the final phase of Ragnarok. Oddly, it is not proscribed as a punishment for burning the Poetic Edda...

I say burn baby, burn.

Tell Muslims, particularly the monsters that use Islam to incite fear and gain control of the weak, to grow up. Burn it, and teach those monsters that to threaten us with violence that we have no fear of them. None at all. For every life of ours you take, we’ll visit it upon you tenfold. This will continue until you grow up and join the rest of civilized society.

I thought we had proved this in Iraq and Afghanistan, but apparently some have not gotten the message.

When all you see is the book, you’re missing the whole point. What is written on those pages is what is important, not the pulp and ink. If setting a book on fire will incite someone to commit murder, then that murderer is a monster. No piece of paper is worth killing over. The rest of the world knows this, and it is time for the Muslim world to learn it as well.

Where do all these rules end? If I have a copy of the Koran on a disc and I throw the disc away (or, heaven forbid, stack it under another disc!) am I guilty of desecrating that somehow ‘holier-than-thou’ text? What if I keep it on my computer and format my hard drive? We better know all the goddamn obscure rules for how we should be treating this utterly normal, entirely run-of-the-mill document or we might incite more riots across the globe.

So while I might not agree with the reasons given by that nut in Florida for burning the Koran, I think he should go ahead with the barbecue anyway. It is time we stopped molly-coddling these people. We are more than tolerant of them defiling our national symbols.

I am not the biggest fan of Christianity, but I must say they are light-years ahead of Islam when it comes to freedom of expression. I didn’t see any Catholics carrying out holy killings when Marc Grizzard burnt copies of the New Jerusalem Bible last Halloween.

Never heard of Marc Grizzard? About a year ago this wonderful nutjob decided to have a book burning at his church in Canton, North Carolina. He wanted to burn all the versions of the Bible he did not agree with, and apparently his flock thought it was a wonderful idea. They also threw in works from Christian writers they found objectionable, just for kicks.

So how many people do you think died because of this book-burning?

Would you be shocked to find the answer is zero?

I didn’t think so.

So why didn’t Rick Warren (some of his books made the burning pile) show up that fateful day in North Carolina with a mob to behead Grizzard? Because, despite the popular opinion in Jakarta, we are not savages. The pope and Rick Warren might not agree that burning versions of books that you don’t agree with is a good thing – hell, they might even find it blasphemous – but they won’t resort to violence to make their point. And we don’t expect them to. It doesn’t even enter into our minds that they might send out their followers on a kill crazy rampage.

If we burned copies of Mao’s Red Book should we expect an imminent attack from China? No. If we burn a copy of Dianetics should we get ready for John Travolta to raise an army of Scientologists to raze Los Angeles? No. If we burn the Torah should we get in our bomb shelters in anticipation of an Israeli nuclear attack? Of course not.

So why should we expect anything less from Muslims? Why do they get to act like children when we all expect the rest of the world to act like adults? I would truly like an answer to this question, aside from the obvious retort that we are trying to avoid an international incident. That isn’t going to cut it. All we are doing now is indulging a petulant child, and that is part of the reason we are having trouble with them in the first place.