"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where they burn books, they will also burn people)."– Heinrich Heine
GROTESQUE AND contradictory as it may seem, the right to burn books has become the ultimate expression of freedom of speech. Nazi book burning, or its latter-day equivalent in Gainesville, Florida – Koran burning – are now apparently embodiments of the fundamental values expressed in the US constitution’s First Amendment’s protection of religion and speech. And, difficult and uncomfortable as this may be, that is rightly so – freedom of speech only has real meaning if it is freedom for the obnoxious, the freedom to offend.
That said, the threat by evangelical pastor Terry Jones of the 30-strong Dove World Outreach Centre to carry out his own obnoxious and provocative religious outreach by burning Korans on Saturday, the anniversary of 9/11, has brought down on him a torrent of condemnation. US Christian and Muslim leaders, the Vatican, the UN, politicians, secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and top US commanders in Afghanistan have rightly denounced the proposed bonfire as deeply insulting to Muslims, a form of blasphemy, and a provocation that threatens the lives of US citizens and troops abroad.
Jones says the perpetrators of 9/11 were motivated by the religion “of the devil” and that he wants to “expose Islam” as a “violent and oppressive religion”. As an American Christian, he says, he has a right to burn the Koran “because it is full of lies”, a ludicrous claim and a standard which could be used to justify a veritable inferno of book burning.
The US authorities have no power to stop him. The supreme court has made clear in several landmark rulings that offensive speech cannot be suppressed by the government unless it is clearly directed to intimidate someone or incite violence. In 1989 it struck down laws in Texas and 47 other states that prohibited desecration of the US flag. And in 2003 it invalidated Virginia’s law against cross-burning because it did not include a crucial component: whether the Ku Klux Klan intended to intimidate someone by burning the cross.
In truth, what Jones is planning may not be a direct call to violence in legal terms but, as the most extreme expression of a rising tide of Islamophobia in the US, it is clearly incitement to hatred. Jones has tapped into a deep well of fear that has seen the successful exploitation by demagogues of manufactured confusion over President Obama’s faith and of plans for a Muslim community centre near the New York 9/11 site. Polls suggest the latter is now opposed by a majority.
The US political class must respond by vigorously refuting the pernicious lie that deliberately associates all of Islam with the events of 9/11 and terrorism. That means isolating Jones as an unrepresentative pariah, and completing the Manhattan centre. Otherwise, in the words of its moderate imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, “the paradigm of a clash between the West and the Muslim world will continue, as it has in recent decades at terrible cost. It is a paradigm we must shift”.