The following blog entry, which was submitted as an online comment in response to Roger Cohen's op-ed, "Religion Does Its Worst", was censored by The New York Times:
In a New York Times op-ed entitled "Religion Does Its Worst" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/opinion/05iht-edcohen05.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss), Roger Cohen
derides Islamophobia, yet in the same breath recounts the slaughter at the U.N. mission in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.
Roger, you're bitter about religious intolerance? Try this on for size:
Yesterday, Juliano Mer-Khamis, an Israeli actor and political activist, was shot dead by a masked Palestinian terrorist outside the Freedom Theater which he founded in 2006 with Zakariya Zubeidi, a former leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, in the West Bank city of Jenin. Zubeidi is claiming that the assassination was not a simple one-man operation and was ordered by a large militant organization (see: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israeli-actor-s-murder-in-jenin-most-likely-pre-meditated-assassination-1.354081).
Mer-Khamis's mother was a Jewish activist for Palestinian rights, and his father was a Christian Arab.
In the past, arsonists had attacked his theater because it was a place where men and women worked together in violation of the Islamic moral code, and because Mer-Khamis had staged a play based upon the novella "Animal Farm", in which Palestinian actors played the parts of pigs, which are deemed impure by Islam.
To burn the Koran is stupid and obscene, but to deny the existence, prevalence and violence of radical Islam is to bury your head in the sand.
I am still waiting for Roger Cohen or one of his op-ed page colleagues (Tom Friedman? Nicholas Kristof?) to devote a column to the horrifying practice of honor killings directed against women throughout much of the Muslim Middle East. Were Cohen to write such a column, would he still dare to travel freely in Arab countries? Might he face Daniel Pearl's fate or that of Theo van Gogh?
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We talk about religion but the war still is in the first place in the islamic countries. I dont't know how much religion left there.
ReplyDeleteBurning books is environmentally unsound.
ReplyDeleteTo burn a book is an unwarranted and puerile response, more suited to the illiterates of the Reformation who decapitated sculptures in churches and ransacked monasteries
It is not obscene but dull witted and stupid, a cheap attention-grabber. However, parts of the Koran are racist, other parts fanciful, some are dull and poorly written and there are some passages that could correctly be defined as obscene.