Totally Unauthorized

I hate, despise, loathe, anathematize, deprecate, shun, spurn, spit upon and disdain having to defend, in even the tiniest possible way, the abominable clown Terry Jones.  He is the pastor of some meaningless fundamentalist Christian church in Gainesville Florida who  got his 15 minutes of fame last summer by threatening to burn a copy of the Koran.  Eventually he got enough publicity, and phone calls from the White House and Gen. Petraeus,and agreed to not be a jerk.

He couldn’t stand it though, and last week he found it necessary to “put the Koran” on trial.  Astonishingly, the book was found guilty, (of something), and sentenced to be burned.  All of this was of course streamed live on satellite TV as well as recorded and uploaded to You Tube.  No point in being an ignorant, bigoted jerk if you can’t tell the world just how big an ignorant bigot you are.

Now comes the bad part of this saga–fundamentalist, extremist Muslims in Afghanistan, upon hearing of the desecration of their holy book, went nuts.  Riots ensued.  Many UN workers were killed.

Here’s where I am forced to defend the execrable Terry Jones–people are saying the deaths were his fault.  A UN worker posted a blog commenting about the massacre and the comments have a disturbing number of people blaming the pastor for the deaths.  Here are a some tweets, the first from an NBC reporter:

There is no moral equivalency here.  The fact that he is a jerk is no excuse for riots and murder.  It is more than safe to say that if some Islamic fanatic burned a busload of bibles, there would be no riots and murders, even in Gainesville.

Jones, naturally, is smug and unapologetic, convinced that he is doing God’s work.  If he is so certain of an omnipotent God, why doesn’t Jones think He could do the job Himself?

The whole affair is sickening.  Intolerance, hatred and bigotry on both sides are inexcusable.  But bad manners don’t justify beheadings, ever.