In this Thursday, Sept. 9, 2010 picture, Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center speaks to the media in Gainesville, Fla. (AP Photo/Phil Sandlin, File)When Terry Jones, the pastor of a tiny evangelical Florida church, announced his intentions last year to burn 200 Korans on Sept. 11 as a public statement against the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he was quickly warned that such an act could provoke a violent backlash in the Muslim world and endanger American soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sadly, the warnings didn't stick. On Mar. 20, the judgmental pastor recklessly carried through with his more recent plan. After a brief self-styled "trial" of the Koran on streaming video and a finding, through online votes, that it promoted "crimes of humanity," a member of his 50-person congregation doused the Muslim holy book in kerosene and burned it.
Aware of the international publicity and threats of retaliatory violence that occurred last fall, the media that knew about the incident at the ironically named Dove World Outreach Center tried to ignore the insulting provocation. So until last weekend, there were just 1,500 hits on the site that showed the burning. But that was enough to stir the resulting retaliation.
After word spread about the burning, three angry mullahs last Friday called for vengeance for the burning of the Koran in America and the arrest of the Florida congregation's pastor. That spurred thousands of Afghans in the relatively peaceful northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif to stage a demonstration that rapidly turned violent. Since then, mob violence has erupted in cities across Afghanistan, leaving 150 people wounded and 21 dead as of Monday afternoon.
The first round of the violence in Mazar-i-Sharif came as a wave 20,000 people, unable to find Americans and searching for representatives of the western world, stormed the United Nations compound in their city. In the ensuing violence, they killed seven foreign U.N. workers - three Europeans and four Nepalese guards - in a riot that left 20 Afghans injured and five dead, in addition to the United Nations victims.
The terrible rising toll - and the fear that more may be added to it - shouldn't come as a surprise. Even if partly motivated by the Taliban, as one Afghan official surmised, it is part of a pattern of volatile retaliation that has been seen before when the Muslim religion is attacked. When a satirical Danish cartoon irreverently depicted the Prophet Muhammad in 2006, for example, riots erupted in Afghanistan within days, killing four. A year earlier, a short paragraph in Newsweek on a report that a Koran had been flushed down a commode at the Guantanamo detention center ignited three days of rioting in Afghanistan, killing 14.
Analysts suggest that some of the Afghans' retaliatory violence is due to an anti-Western and anti-American attitude that has spread in Afghanistan, in part, due to the immense toll of the nine-year U.S. war in that country and the persistent deaths of innocent civilians and children in air raids and rocket attacks around the country.
Jones, the Muslim-offending pastor, said with no hint of irony that the United States and the United Nations should take "immediate action" against Muslim nations to retaliate for the deaths of U.N. foreigners. "The time has come to hold Islam accountable," he said, as if his initial inflammatory action is not at least partly to blame.
It is undoubtedly true, however, that many Afghans - right up to President Hamid Karzai, judging from his either clumsy or deliberate two-faced statement Monday - hold Americans and other western nations to blame for allowing acts of religious and cultural defamation under the premise of freedom of speech.
In fact, so long as the democratic version of free speech is seen in other cultures to allow flagrant provocation, such conflicts are certain to erupt unless advocates of free speech are able to exercise some voluntary self-restraint and human wisdom out of respect for the beliefs and customs of other people and cultures. Representatives and soldiers of western forces now in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries may pay with their lives for Jones' abysmal absence of judgment and self-restraint.
The goal of free speech is to foster debate and understanding, not needless deaths and tragedy due to blindness on both sides. Jones and others of his ilk could spare many the pain of misunderstanding if they would learn to exercise their rights to free speech responsibly. The way Jones has used it is more akin to the liability of sshouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Legally or not, the moral burden of inciting to riot rests in Jones' provocation.