There’s no discussion with a bigot like this: You can’t be argued out of something you haven’t been argued into in the first place.

Jones is not alone in this Islamophobic campaign in the United States, which is what is most disturbing. But before I get to that, let’s talk about the murderous Afghan mob and its enablers.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, was one such enabler. He was a fool to allude to Jones’s stunt, performed before a few dozen acolytes. Why elevate this vile little deed and so foster mayhem?

Karzai is a man who will stop at nothing to disguise his weakness. His benefactors and underwriters — the West — are those he must scorn to survive.

The foolishness did not stop with Karzai: The imams of Mazar chose to use Friday prayers to stir up the crowd. As for the killing itself — whether by infiltrated Taliban insurgents or not — it was a heinous crime against innocent people and should be denounced throughout the Islamic world, in mosques and beyond. I’m still waiting.

Staffan de Mistura, the top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, did not honor the dead by failing to denounce the perpetrators of the crime in a statement. He was right to call Jones’s Koran burning “insane and totally despicable;” he should have used the same words about the slaughter of his men. Not to do so was craven, a glaring omission.

Predictably, the idiot’s actions pissed off another set of idiots a half a world away, and now twenty innocent people are dead.

Today’s violence came after two or three hours of protests over the Florida Quran burning, which was broadcast online. Demonstrators started throwing stones at the UN compound then attempted to climb its walls and attacked guards. In addition to as many as 20 UN workers being killed, at least four protestors died. The UN’s chief of mission in the city was injured but survived the attack.

Afghanistan saw several protests when Mr. Jones previously planned to burn the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11 last year. The controversial pastor of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., decided not to go through with it at the time, largely due to a phone call from top Afghanistan commander US Gen. David Petraeus, who warned that the defamation of the Quran would likely cost the lives of US service men and women Afghanistan.

Jones decided to go through with the burning on March 20 after serving as judge in a “trial” of the Muslim holy book. He found it “guilty” of “training and promoting terrorist activities … death, rape, torture of people worldwide” and crimes against women and minorities.

Terry Jones knew what the ramifications of this action were going to be.  He had been warned by President Obama, David Petraeus, and most of the reality based world.  He choose not to listen and this led to the deaths of twenty people.  Jones is not a murderer, but he is definitely a conspirator.

Below is the video of his Koran burning.  Two things to watch out for:

1. Notice the mock trial at the beginning.  I’ve thought for awhile that extreme Evangelical Christianity has a certain element of infantilism that isn’t based in any reality or even in the more mainstream versions of Christianity.  I felt like I was watching a bunch of adults taking part in a child’s tea party.  It was surreal.

2.  You can’t tell me that an element of racism wasn;t involved in this “production.”  At 3:25, notice the female voice in the background going “alalalalalalalala” in an imitation of what she must have thought was some sort of Muslim war chant.

So Newt, why do you make me write about you what seems like every other day?  Why do you make the entire premise of you presidential campaign opposing anything that Barack Obama supports even when you had come out in favor of the same policy only a week before?  Why do you do this to me?

I was hoping to stay away from you for at least a week, but then you unleash this gem onto our collective minds:

“I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

Now, I am an atheist so maybe I am not an observer willing to see other atheists without bias.  It is possible that that some are militant and that some go overboard in the pursuit of “tolerance.”  These are actions that we as Athesists should not condone.  What is entirely not possible is that radical Islamists would control any institution—committees, bake sales, or nations—that atheists also control.

That is just the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a while.  Not just the dumbest thing you’ve said in a while, Newt.  The dumbest thing period.  Remember Newt, I spent a week at SXSW in Austin surrounded by drunken hipsters in face paint and skinny jeans.  I heard some pretty dumb shit, but none of it compares to this classic.

The strange thing is that Newt isn’t a dumb guy.  He really isn’t.  However, he is cynical and this is an example of him saying anything to get the Republican nomination in 2012.  ”Secular”, “Atheism”, “Radical”, and “Islamist” are just code words for Newt to reach for some sort of base.  They mean nothing to him other than the possibility of votes.

Herman Cain, contender for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination, shows all the trademarks of this exclusionary political movement in this video.  The appropriation of the First Amendment for Christians only, ignorance of judicial decisions in cases of church/mosque disputes, and, in a broader sense, the use of facts without the context of their factuality.

One blog post on the Eagle Forum Alaska site praised efforts at criminalizing adultery in Michigan, and Paskvan asked Haase if he thought it should be a felony in Alaska.

“I don’t see that that would rise to the level of a felony,” Haase said.

Paskvan: “Do you believe it should be a crime?”

Haase: “Yeah, I think it’s very harmful to have extramarital affairs. It’s harmful to children, it’s harmful to the spouse who entered a legally binding agreement to marry the person that’s cheating on them.”

Paskvan: “What about premarital affairs — should that be a crime?”

Haase: “I think that would be up to the voters certainly. If it came before (the state) as a vote, I probably would vote for it … I can see where it would be a matter for the state to be involved with because of the spread of disease and the likelihood that it would cause violence. I can see legitimate reasons to push that as a crime.”

 

I’m sure glad Bristol Palin didn’t have to do jail time.  I’m betting Don Haase doesn’t feel that way, or, more likely, hasn’t thought his opinion through to the point of actually pitting what he thinks should be illegal to what would happen to individuals under the law.

Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.

 

Well, you are right.  There is no explicitly written protection of Islam in the First Amendment.  That I can’t argue.  However, I don’t see any explicitly written protection of Christianity in the First Amendment either.  Yes,  I know you would argue that Protestant Christianity was the predominant religion at the time of the writing of the Bill of Rights.  However, other religions were not unknown to the Founding Fathers.  There were not an insignificant number of Jews in the United States at that time with about 2,000 in the country.  Why wouldn’t they especially single out Christianity as the sole protected religion?

Because they had no wish to do so.  Thomas Jefferson, strongly supported by James Madison, saw as one of highest accomplishments of his life the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.  The final paragraph reads:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.

 

It seems to me that Thomas Jefferson and his supporters were pretty clear what their view of religious freedom meant and was not only for Protestants, but as Jefferson wrote in his own autobiography, “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”

[hattip: TPM]

[hattip: Civil Commotion]