Burning Issues

I have a friend who just can’t sit still. In the past year, he’s been to Afghanistan several times and stayed for a good period of time in South Sudan, living in conditions that even he thought were a bit too austere. A few months ago he contacted me from Kabul at a time that hostilities had increased, including the blowing up of his favorite store to buy his Diet Coke. He’d missed the bombing by about an hour, but seemed more miffed by the loss of his Diet Coke supplier than he was unnerved by the violence. (I’ve always told him his Diet Coke addiction will kill him). In fact, during a chat that day, he admitted to being bored.

He arrived back in Kabul the very day the Afghan “street” was in full mob mode because a goofy pastor had burned a Quran a week or so earlier. The first message he received upon his arrival was from the American security mission in Kabul that read:

Currently ongoing incident:

Shooting - Massoud Cirle/Abdul Haq Circle 0925hrs

Shooting currently ongoing believed to be involving ISAF and Insurgents.

Shooting ongoing. I’m not sure you want to be in a city with that message, but he just laughed it off. So I wrote him asking if we should find more pastors to burn more Qurans so he could have a bit more excitement in his life. He responded with an interesting viewpoint. He suggested the pastor come to Kabul to burn a Quran and become an instant martyr. He made a good point. It’s easy to tweak a religion from a distance and not worry about the consequences for the actions.

However there are two conflicting thoughts, despite the fact that Pastor Jones really had no need to burn anything and if he wanted to do something productive, he should shave that silly mustache! But by burning the Quran, two things come to mind: 1. He claimed Islam is not a religion of peace and, coincidently, they proved the pastor right by killing 20 people in brutal ways, and 2., If a group of Muslims were to come to the most Southern Baptist town and burn a box full of bibles, it’s highly doubtful anyone would have been beheaded and probably the worst that would have occurred would have been a strong letter to the local newspaper and a lot of noise on talk radio.

We seem to be in a war of jingoism coupled with politically correct responses to the obvious: we’re engaged in a clash of cultures, and all it takes to whip up a mob in the Middle East are a few good community organizers and CNN journalists for the mob to mug for the cameras. My opinion is we need to shut down the entire operation, leave the region and leave them stumped to find reasons to join a mob instead of working on creating a country that isn’t among the world’s biggest basket cases.