The multiculturalist true believers are out in force again. Since angry Afghans responded to the the crackpot Florida pastor Terry Jones’s ceremonial burning of a Koran by murdering 12 United Nations workers, some American multiculturalists have been drawing a moral, if not a legal, equation between Jones’s book-burning and the killing of human beings.
Demonstrators battled police in southern Afghanistan's main city on Sunday and took to the streets in the turbulent east for the first time as Western pleas failed to halt a third day of rage over a Florida pastor's burning of the Koran. (April 3)

“The problem is religious zealots on both sides,” writes one commenter on The Daily Beast Web site in a declaration that exemplifies the most distorted brand of mutliculturalist illogic. “I wish we could put all of them in a room together to go after each other. The world would be a more peaceful place.” Wrong. There is no legitimate equation between the hateful act of burning a book—including a book sacred to millions—and murder. Offending people’s feelings and mocking their beliefs is not a hanging offense—except to radical Islamists.

It is tedious to repeat, once again, that—as an atheist and a thinking human being—I disapprove of ignorant religious bigots like Jones, and of politicians, like New York’s Republican Rep. Peter King, who, to promote themselves and their right-wing agendas, engage in activities that question the loyalty of American Muslims as a group. But the idea that Jones is responsible for the savagery of those who murdered the first westerners they could get their hands on in Afghanistan represents multiculturalism run amuck.

I’ll tell you who is responsible, in addition to those who actually carried out the murders. The three prominent Afghan mullahs who demanded that Jones be arrested by U.S. authorities for what is a perfectly legal act here, and who urged people to take to the streets to express their outrage, bear a huge share of the responsibility. One well-known Afghan mullah, Qymaudin Kashaf, told the New York Times that “We expressed our deep concerns about this act, and we were expecting the violence that we are witnessing now. Unless they try him (Jones) and give him the highest possible punishment, we will witness violence and protests not not only in Afghanistan but in the entire world.” Are we supposed to abandon our laws and traditions guaranteeing freedom of speech when it comes to Islam because otherwise, some Muslims will seek violent vengeance somewhere in the world? This is blackmail.
FILE - In this Sept. 8, 2010 file photo, Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center speaks to reporters prior to a service at his church in Gainesville, Fla. (John Raoux - AP)

There is nothing new about this behavior. In 2006, when Danish cartoonists satirized the prophet Muhammad, four westerners were killed within a few days in Afghanistan. The multiculturalists were also in full-throated voice then, condemning the cartoons for being offensive to Muslims. American academic multiculturalists led the craven chorus. At the University of Illinois, two student editors were suspended by cowardly university officials for publishing the cartoons in their student newspaper. (They were afraid of offending Muslim students on campus.) What a glorious demonstration of academic freedom in a university community!

Some members of the rampaging crowd that filled the streets before the murders of the U.N. workers were carrying sings proclaiming “Down with America” and “Death to Obama.” Such acts only underscore the futility of our continuing war in Afghanistan. We are sending young Americans to their deaths, and endangering our own economic welfare, on behalf of people who do not have the slightest respect for or understanding of our most basic institutions and civic values, as expressed in the Bill of Rights. I’m sorry for the women who will be returned to near-slavery if the Taliban regain control after U.S. troops leave Afghanistan and I’m sorry for everyone who helped us, but it’s time to go.

I was particularly disgusted when our feckless so-called ally, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karazai, called on the United States to punish those responsible for burning the Koran.

Isn’t it telling that we’ve heard nothing from Afghan government officials or clerics about punishing the people who killed the innocent U.N. workers? You can bet that no one will ever try to bring them to justice.

Terry Jones is, as he ought to be, a pariah among mainstream American religious believers and among secular Americans. He ought to be a pariah not because he insulted someone else’s religion but because he is an ignorant representative of hate. But let us recall that all he did—and of course, he broadcast his video over the Internet—was place the Koran “on trial” before his online viewers chose the “punishment” of burning.

This is pretty much the equivalent of what the city-state of classical Athens did to inanimate objects that caused the death of a human being. If a piece of marble fell off a column and killed someone, it was placed on “trial” before a special court and exiled from the borders of the city if found guilty. And the Athenian populace didn’t go out and kill people who worked in quarries.

Respect for religion—any religion—is not required under American law, despite the wrongheaded idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. You can burn copies of the Torah, the New Testament, or the Koran. You can depict the Virgin Mary covered with dung or sculpt a statue of Buddha wearing a Hitler mustache. What you cannot do is burn down publishing houses that print copies of the Bible and the Koran or threaten the lives of those who publish words or images that offend you (as Islamic radicals have done repeatedly). You cannot kill irreverent artists who mock saints and deities. You cannot kill Terry Jones or put him in prison for overseeing the destruction of one copy, out of millions around the world, of a book.

There is absolutely no moral equivalency between the symbolic act of one demented pastor—who apparently commands a congregation of only 30 warped souls—and revenge killings abetted by the voices of so-called religious leaders in Afghanistan.