Florida Quran burning: Hamid Karzai encourages a mob mentality in Afghanistan. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine
Cynicism by the Book
Hamid Karzai's despicable response to the Quran burning in Florida.
Posted Monday, April 4, 2011Heinrich Heine's famous observation about book burning—that where books are burned, people also will be—was actually first made about the torching of the Quran. The Spanish Inquisition used to delight in putting heretical works "on trial," and zealously convicted the Muslim holy book before feeding it to the flames in what is one of Christianity's oldest traditions. (After all, it extends to the burning of unauthorized translations of the Holy Bible, too.) Heine's 1821 play Almansor contains a character who observes that humans will next be burned, and the later incineration of Heine's own writings by the Nazis, with its prefiguration of the Holocaust, has made the quotation an imperishable one.The connection, however, is not always so neat. The moronic pastor who burned the Quran after a mock trial would probably refrain from setting fire to human beings. While in Afghanistan, where Islam already makes huge numbers of books unavailable and The Satanic Verses and the Danish flag must be in short supply, the news of book burning somewhere else is enough in itself to cause the random incineration of people.[read more at http://www.slate.com/id/2290306/]Then there is also our prominent stupidity:
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