It's hit the fan. Newsweek published a claim that interrogators at Guantanamo were flushing pages from the Koran down the toilet to rattle prisoners. Now, the story turns out to be unsubstantiated, and has been retracted.
In the mean time, Muslims around the world rioted, and at least 15 people have died.
I'm now pondering various standards of what is considered "acceptable".
Dennis Prager pointed out that Buddhists didn't riot when the statues in Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban. Likewise, Jews didn't riot after Jordanian Muslims used Jewish tombstones in Old Jerusalem as latrines, or when Palestinians destroyed Joseph's Tomb (twice!)
And provokations ranging from the "artistic" piece, "Piss Christ", The Last Temptation of Christ, all the way up to bans on Christian worship in the Middle East and the murder of Christians at prayer in Pakistan.
No riots.
Nike pulled a line of shoes off the market because the cursive form of the word "air" on the shoe looked too much like the Arabic word "Allah". A line of shoes with Crucifixes on the soles would probably sell like crazy. (I claim priority on that idea – if you decide to run with that idea, I want a cut of the gross. I'm not proud.) I'd bet any amount of money, there'd be no riots.
For all the rhetoric about extremist right-wing Christian fundamentalists, it seems people fear the most extremist Christians far less – orders of magnitude less – than they fear the Islamic street.
Might I suggest that we stop referring to Christians as extremist? Either that, or we have to come up with another word for the extremist Muslims.
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