The Koran at Fahrenheit 451

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch

"....Take Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state. “It's regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Fla., with a church of no more than fifty people can make this outrageous and distressful, disgraceful plan and get, you know, the world's attention,” Clinton said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, a favored venue for the elites debating homicidal policies around the world. Clinton concluded, “It doesn't in any way represent America or Americans, or American government, or American religious or political leadership.”

This is the same Hillary Clinton who has spent much of her term as helmswoman of the nation’s foreign affairs demonizing Iran and threatening it with nuclear obliteration, during which uncounted millions of Korans and the people clutching them would turn to cinders.....

...What better symbol than Jones of what should have been America’s overall resilience in the aftermath of the Muslim attacks of 9/11/2001: an assertion of one of the greatest of American values, as embodied in constitutional provisions for free speech. These freedoms matter most when they are under duress. Amid the duress after 9/11/2001, the Constitution was trashed by the same leaders who now decry Jones. The same President Obama who denounced Pastor Jones for planning an act “completely contrary to our values as Americans” is defending the “extraordinary renditions” of the Bush era with “state secrets” rationales just endorsed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Read the tortures inflicted on those men rendered by US government agents to Egypt and Morocco, and judge for yourself whether Obama has any standing to preach to Jones about “our values as Americans.”

My hope had been that on the other side of the road from Pastor Jones’ burn barrels, or on some piece of property volunteered by the mayor of Gainesville, a gay man, there would have been other barrels, into which could be tossed by their opponents the Bible, and kindred sacred texts such as the Talmud, plus Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and Das Kapital. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature of the crucible, in which ideas and principles survive or die. "