Book burning makes a comeback

It’s rare commentators reach a consensus on anything, but if there’s one thing they can agree on this week, it’s this: burning the Qur’an is not a good idea.

Despite condemnations from Barack Obama, the Vatican, and even a profession of faith from Stephen Harper, Florida pastor Terry Jones says he’ll forge ahead with plans to burn copies of the Qur’an on September 11.

Many fear the event will be used to incite violence against Western troops, but that’s “beside the point,” according to Lorne Gunter in the National Post. “In the absence of the Koran-burning, the Taliban and other assorted Muslim extremists will find other insults -- real or imagined -- to fan their propaganda flames and fuel their anti-Western hatred,” he writes, “It is foolhardy to think we are dealing with a rational foe.”

While Jones is clearly a minority in America, “in parts of the Muslim world, the counterparts to Terry Jones are not fringe figures but occupy positions of huge political and religious leadership,” says the Ottawa Citizen’s Leonard Stern, “while the reformist voices are the ones relegated to the margins. There will not be peace in the Arab and Muslim worlds until the roles are reversed.”

The Post’s Tasha Kheriddin warns, “hold on to your TV screens, people – they will be filled with images of death-to-America rallies … The world will have seen nothing like this since the publication of anti-Islamic cartoons by a Danish newspaper several years ago.” Muslim reaction to the event is likely to be disproportional, she writes, but Jones’s “medieval attitude” is out of place in the 21st century.

Yet the Toronto Star sees Terry Jones as a thoroughly modern, not medieval, figure. “Pre-Facebook, and pre-9/11, Jones might have singed his incendiary fingers in obscurity, ignored by the world,” says an editorial today. “Not in today’s wired, fraught, polarized atmosphere.”

Never ones for nuance, the Toronto Sun’s editors get directly to the point about their feelings for Jones: “Here's hoping he stands too close to Saturday's flames, and makes it to hell before the Devil knows he's there.”

Yes, a mainstream Western newspaper just wished a man would die and go to hell. Imagine how Muslims around the world feel about him.