Allowing al-Qaeda to set our moral standards

IT was on; it was off and in the end the threatened Florida Koran-burning never happened. “Pastor” Jones will now languish in the obscurity where this unstable leader of a nano-cult belongs, and where he would have stayed in the first place had not his Facebook page been spotted by the mainstream media.
Once unearthed, the proposed stunt was rightfully condemned across the political and religious spectrum, but, in the case of President Obama and his aides, for the wrong reasons.

Books are the repository of ideas – the supreme flourishing of the human intellect — and ideas are to be debated and argued, supported or denounced, but never to be burned. Because books represent the abstract personification of the individuals or societies that created them, Heinrich Heine was right to declare prophetically, a century before the Holocaust, that “where they have burned books, they will end by burning men”.

For this reason alone, the intended conflagration in Florida was wrong. It becomes even more reprehensible when the text selected for incineration is one venerated by Muslims as sacred. Although declaring a book to be “religious” should not automatically generate greater respect or less scrutiny for its contents, it does mean that an insult to the book is an insult to the values and beliefs of a community. The closing of the mind that book-burning exemplifies is thus joined with religious intolerance and insensitivity.

Although Obama condemned the plan for all the right reasons, he added some wrong ones as well. “This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters … you don’t play games with that” he told reporters. The same theme was echoed by the US Defence Secretary who declared that the Koran burning “would put the lives of our forces at risk” and by General Petraeus in Afghanistan who extended the danger zone as far as possible, to “not just in Kabul, but everywhere in the world”.

So the event should be stopped because it would endanger the lives of American soldiers; Jones was wrong to burn the Koran because terrorists wouldn’t like it and would go on a murderous spree as a result. To make the point crystal clear, Obama added that he opposed the event because it would be a “recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda”.

This thinking is absurd and dangerous. The presence of American troops in Afghanistan puts those very troops in danger — does that make it wrong? If al-Qaeda threatened terrorist acts if, for example, their members were not freed from American custody, would it become reprehensible not to accede to their demands, given that such a refusal could lead to loss of life?

One could go further. Bin Laden’s ultimate campaign is not for the sake of Palestinians or for the restoration of the Taliban. His allies in Bali, Somalia or Chechnya are not motivated by some short-term political gains. Their desire is for nothing less than the end of Western society and its replacement by the Caliphate. Since they intend to kill to achieve this goal, is it therefore wrong to defend our values and way of life?

But even assuming that Obama and other leaders remain level-headed on these particular questions, the wider implications of his reasoning for future policy is troubling.

The former head of Britain’s MI5, Eliza Mannigham-Buller, said last year that a consequence of the invasion of Iraq was the radicalisation a generation of British Muslims and that therefore the war was a mistake.

The arguments about the Iraq war will no doubt rage for years to come. Some will claim that it was without a UN mandate and hence illegal; others will say that the need to end Saddam’s torture and extermination of both his own people and his neighbours transcends such technicalities. What we must not say, is that the war was wrong because extremists said so.

Not only does such a view give a degree of justification to terrorist acts – if Obama says that Koran-burning will provoke murders then it is a very short logical hop to say that murderers are provoked and hence less culpable — but¬† it also suggests that future initiatives will be subject to an al-Qaeda veto. The West will be constrained from doing what is right and necessary as soon as terrorists say that lives would be endangered as a response. Indeed, the bombings in Madrid led to the dismissal of the Spanish government and her troops’ hasty return from Iraq; since then America’s allies have deserted her one by one in order to remove themselves from the terrorist hit list. But, as Israel knows, the war on terror is won by response, not by surrender.

Burning the Koran is absolutely wrong. But let us be the judge of that, not Bin Laden.