Charge Him With Incitement to Murder, incited Ben Burd

On April 4, (http://burdreport.ca/?p=1680) Ben Burd wrote: “When UN workers are slaughtered by Muslems offended by a video that shows a redneck preacher in the USA burning a Koran who do we blame? The preacher – Terry Jones – has said the deaths are not his fault, blithely skimming over the fact that if he hadn't burnt the book nobody would have died, has not even faced the suggestion that he committed a crime – inciting murder. Why is that? Are the authorities in the USA afraid to talk about it. Where is the International Criminal Court, which has a cross-border jurisdiction on this?”

Terry Jones “committed a crime – inciting murder,” declared Mr Burd. It reminded me of those old westerns in which the lynch leader shouts to the mob, ‘When we get him, we’ll give him a fair trial, then we’ll hang him.’ It’s a forgone conclusion. It appears that Mr Burd has no respect for the fundamental tenet of justice that presumes innocence until found guilty.

Terry Jones incited “murder” declared Mr Burd. There was no incitement in the pastor’s mock trial of the “hate-filled holy book”, as renown comedian Bill Maher described it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGUB5TZD29M), nor during its subsequent burning. There was no incitement except in Mr Burd’s mind, which permits him to publish an accusation of criminality against an individual without a shred of evidence of such criminality.

Incitement to violence? Recall that another great comedian, George Carlin, in an interview said, “You see I’m talkin’ about entertainment and I really mean that. I think it’s funny and fun and I love watching it. When they said the Gulf war was going to be on tv I didn’t know it was going to be all graphs. I thought we were going to see some stuff. Graphs and maps and shit, noooo, get in there, show me some stuff. I can’t wait until the Middle East really explodes – ancient hatreds and modern weapons, my kinda show man, my kinda show.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABxIJ8ONGeQ

The act of burning a book, held to be sacred or otherwise, is insufficient to establish incitement to violence. If I declare that Mr Christ is not the son of god and a Christian beats me up, Mr Burd’s sense of justice would have me charged with incitement to violence.

For Mr Christ’s sake, incitement to violence cannot apply to a statement or image that prompts irrational reactions by others who hear or see it. If an author is to be blamed for the irrational actions of others who view his work, then free speech is dead because the subjective whims of anyone can trump free speech on every occasion. Mr Burd’s ‘reasoning’ would have Salman Rushdie charged with incitement to violence for having written The Satanic Verses.

Mr Burd’s ludicrous suggestion that the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction on this incident has absolutely no merit whatsoever. If it did have jurisdiction, it would go after the real inciters.

On March 20, Terry Jones made a video of a mock trial of a ‘sacred’ book, pronounced it guilty, then burned it. The MSM didn’t bother to make an appearance, so Terry Jones uploaded it to the net. There it lay, day after day after day after day, alongside countless other videos of other individuals burning Korans.

A well-coordinated propaganda conference four days later was described by National Post’s Terry Glavin: “On March 24, the Iranian foreign ministry, Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, and Karzai’s office issued simultaneous alarms about Jones’ Koran-burning. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast said the incident was part of American “hegemonic plots.” Karzai called for Jones’ arrest and prosecution.”

Karzai’s statement was widely reported in Iran’s government-controlled press but got limited play even in the Afghan news media. Then the Netherlands-based BNO News got involved. After making its mark in 2007 when it sold Reuters a videotaped speech by Osama Bin Laden, BNO went on to become a popular Twitter feed and is now a low budget social-media hybrid, part press-release clearinghouse and part amateur-journalism vector. When BNO began circulating a report headlined “Afghanistan, Iran condemn Koran burning in U.S.,” the story went viral.”

Terry Glavin's full piece can be read here in his article for DISSENT. http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=467

Ehsanullah Ehsan, teacher and principal at the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre in Kandahar, Afghanistan wrote of her near death experience in the Toronto Star; http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/968978--i-can-tell-you-that-we-are-bleeding-in-our-hearts.

She wrote, “The opportunists who committed the murders in Mazar-i-Sharif do not represent the wider public of Afghanistan. The American pastor Terry Jones burned one copy of the Qur’an, but the perpetrators of violence who claim to be the defenders of the Qur’an have burned tens of copies and hundreds of Qur’anic verses here in Kandahar during their three days of violent demonstrations, looting and burning.”

Concerning the inciter Karzai, she had this to say, “As long as the Karzai administration and the Afghanistan upper and lower houses are a network of notorious warlords, tribal lords and drug lords, the people of Afghanistan will continue to express their grievances by any means available to them. They will attack, hijack and loot, and all the extremists, including the far-right Iranian regime and the far-right Afghan Sunnis and the Pakistan ISI, will continue to take advantage of us.”

Finally, another voice of common sense in this matter is Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2290306/ “). “Unlike some provincial mullahs, Karzai also knows perfectly well that the U.S. government is constitutionally prohibited from policing religious speech among its citizens. Yet, when faced with the doings of the aforementioned moronic cleric from Gainesville, he went out of his way to intensify mob feeling.”

Westerners once again are being played as useful idiots, dupes. The entire “outrage” about the Danish cartoons was fabricated from beginning to end. The only true fact was that the newspaper published them. Everything after that was a set-up and the Western world swallowed it all and fell prostate to the platitudes of multiculturalism, sensitivity and tolerance. Gullibility prevailed. These are acts of extortion on Western ignorance and the price paid, is the gagging of free speech by human rights commissions no less.

Once again the islamists played the correct cards and useful idiots throughout the West, especially progressives aka regressives performed like little conformists to the message. Ben Burd was so fooled by his own extravagant ignorance that he stepped forward to make a public accusation of criminality against an innocent individual, but more than that, he betrayed Free Speech, just what the islamaniacs wanted. What a dupe! What a fool!