Eat Raw Meat - Blood Drool
There's a report in today's paper of a New York taxi-driver having been knifed after he told his passenger that he was a Muslim. The culprit apparently was a volunteer for a charity and had worked in Afghanistan.He appears to have been drunk at the time he committed the assault. But that cannot excuse his vicious attack.
The New York Times ran a story today about an evangelical pastor who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans. The pastor argues that as an American Christian he has a right to burn Islam’s sacred book because “it’s full of lies.” Last year he posted a sign at his church declaring “Islam is of the devil.” Asked about his knowledge of the Koran, he said: “I have no experience with it whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says.”
Americans are not like this. Many are descended from immigrants who were persecuted in their homelands. Many were from minority groups or sects. It is a great sadness that the city that welcomed so many lost, haunted and hopeless peoples now finds itself the fuel for so much bile, hatred and unrestrained bigotry.
Listen to what some of the good people of Gainesville, Florida say in response to this pastor's madness.
"Some of his neighbors, like Shirley Turner, a retiree who shivered with disgust when Mr. Jones’s name came up in conversation, are already planning to protest with signs calling for unity. More than a dozen houses of worship, of various faiths, also intend to respond collectively on the weekend of Sept. 11 by “affirming the validity of all sacred books,” said Larry Reimer, pastor of the United Church of Christ.
Some pastors even plan to read from the Koran in their services.
For local Muslims like Saeed Khan, who came here in the 1970s to study for a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Florida, the collective rejection of Mr. Jones represents the America they want to believe in. In an interview at an Islamic center that used to be a Brown Derby restaurant, Dr. Khan said that “Mr. Jones is hijacking Christianity” just as “Al Qaeda hijacked Islam.”"
Also in The NY Times is a piece by Timothy Egan. I know nothing about the man, but what he writes makes good sense to me. What he reports is frightening. The two stories above are disturbing, but they're outriders - right.
Not according to Mr Egan. ....."It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush."
Obama has said on many occasions that he is a Christian. “I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”
No comment is required. A few prayers maybe. But no comment.
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