Harvest of Anger
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
LONDON — A cover of The Economist right after 9/11 declared: “The Day the World Changed.” It has, and not just at airports where several billion shoes have been removed. Nine years later a harvest of anger is in.
Burning books is a lousy idea. Heinrich Heine, the German poet, foresaw the worst early in the 19th century: “Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.” Less than a decade separated the Nazi book burning of 1933 from the crematoria of the Final Solution.
Terry Jones, the pastor of a small church in Florida, did well to heed history’s warnings — as well as the warnings of America’s top military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus — and cancel his planned Koran burning to mark the ninth anniversary Saturday of Al Qaeda’s attack.
Images of Islam’s Holy Book in flames in northwest Gainesville would have enraged Muslims and become a powerful recruitment tool for the very jihadists who attempt to sanctify indiscriminate violence through selective references to the Koran.
(More here.)
NYT
LONDON — A cover of The Economist right after 9/11 declared: “The Day the World Changed.” It has, and not just at airports where several billion shoes have been removed. Nine years later a harvest of anger is in.
Burning books is a lousy idea. Heinrich Heine, the German poet, foresaw the worst early in the 19th century: “Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.” Less than a decade separated the Nazi book burning of 1933 from the crematoria of the Final Solution.
Terry Jones, the pastor of a small church in Florida, did well to heed history’s warnings — as well as the warnings of America’s top military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus — and cancel his planned Koran burning to mark the ninth anniversary Saturday of Al Qaeda’s attack.
Images of Islam’s Holy Book in flames in northwest Gainesville would have enraged Muslims and become a powerful recruitment tool for the very jihadists who attempt to sanctify indiscriminate violence through selective references to the Koran.
(More here.)
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