Paving the Way to Another Holocaust

First they came for the Jews, and no one spoke up for the Jews, at least not in time; consequently millions of Jews suffered torture and the incomprehensible slaughter at the bloodied hands of the criminal Nazi regime. Now they’ve come for the Muslims, with their Quran-burning sessions in Florida, and the anti Ground Zero Mosque rhetoric and propaganda. Anyone with a drop of sense in the ocean of thought that forms their minds would agree that the Ground Zero Mosque that has been proposed to be erected is in fact a community centre for members of the Sufi faith, which is located at least a number of blocks away from Ground Zero.

Reverend Terry Jones has called for a ‘Quran burning day’ in Gainesville, Florida, to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity. Apparently, “no one has been speaking out about Islam...”, and so, the ‘learned’ Reverend feels that by aggressively attacking the belief of millions world-wide by reprehensibly burning their sacred religious Scripture, one would be effectively ‘speaking out about Islam’. Perhaps Jones is exercising his right to freedom of expression; however, when does exercising the right to freedom of expression become an abuse of exercising such a right? If it takes the form of burning scriptures, then such an inherent right has already lost its meaning in blatant abuse, courtesy of Jones’ evil manifest in the form of the fascist intolerance that has hijacked the right to freedom of expression.

Jones presented the flawed fallacy that one “must send a clear message to radical Islam”; one may rightfully agree that ‘radical Islam’ is not a healthy Islam. However, what of Jones’ Quran-burning event – is that not in itself offensively ‘radical’? He further abominates that it is “time for America to be America”. When one last checked the founding definition of America, it was the ‘land of the free’, as sung in the U.S. National Anthem – let’s not forget that America was forcefully built on the blood of the massacred Natives. Where is such freedom, to hold a belief or faith without persecution or fear of repression, as guaranteed by international law (Article 18 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights)?

Human Rights NGO Neda for a Free Iran held that regardless of the pros, cons and criticisms of Islam held by people, when we fail to respect the sanctity of a religious belief simply because we disagree with it, we ultimately lose respect for humanity and fall down the slippery slope to fascism.

What, then, separates Jones’ hateful act of burning Qurans, demonstrating his intolerance for Islam, from the Nazi’s hateful act of grouping Jews and executing them simply because they were Jewish, and not the ‘Aryan German’ Hitler had a fetish for? As Keith Olbermann correctly asserts, such is the warning of the “thousand steps before a holocaust [becomes] inevitable; if we are merely at the first of those steps again today it is one step too close”.

As members of the human family, we all have a non-derogable duty to protect the sanctity of humanity: when someone comes for your neighbour, or their bible, or their Torah, or their Atheist Manifesto, or their Quran, then we honour that duty by speaking up loud and clear.