I should know better than to read the Have Your Say section of the BBC website, but I got very little sleep last night and more or less clicked on the wrong link.
HYS: Koran protest on hold: Your ReactionsI'm not actually talking about the book-burning itself, which seems like a media gift-horse for a crazy man who should have been ignored. I'm talking about the idiots weighing in on the discussion. Dear ignorant bigots, let's get a few things clear:
1. It's a protest against a mosque being built on Ground Zero.Nobody is building a 'mosque' on Ground Zero. It's an Islamic Cultural Centre, and it will be in Manhattan, and relatively close to Ground Zero, but not ON GRound Zero, which will be a memorial. People remembered that it will be a memorial. The press reported on a mosque being built on GRound Zero. So this became conflated into 'a memorial mosque on Ground Zero'.
What else is in proximity to Ground Zero? Everything up to and including strip clubs and gay clubs.
And yet no one seems to know this. It's the equivalent of the UK protesting the opening of an Islamic bookshop (which has as much in common with a mosque as a cultural centre does) near one of the 7/7 sites (which are in Central London and it is almost impossible to avoid proxity to one of them) with the headline, "Mosque to be built on 7/7 site". Where is the cultural centre going to be built?
Several streets away. You will notice that the map labels the proposed site as that for an Islamic cultural centre, while the rest of the article uses the word 'mosque'. Bad show, BBC.
2. This is free speech, like the Danish cartoons.This is what the artist of the cartoons
had to say about the proposed burning: "Satire is provocation. Provocation should lead to reflection, to enlightenment, to knowledge. In this case, this is really not the case."
Free speech? Well, he was allowed to go ahead with the burning, but apparently some confusion over not recognising different imams led him to think some sort of deal had been struck and to suspend it. You know what would be a violation of free speech? Banning someone planning permission to build a cultural centre based on their religion. Preventing someone from practising their religion peacefully. Preventing people from speaking about Islam and the cultures of the millions of different people around the globe that it embraces.
3. Islam is some other country's religion
Newsflash: while Islam may be the official religion of several countries (not all of which are in the Midle East, shock horror), religion is not bound by official borders. There are Muslims in America, just as there are Christians in Iran.
It makes me think. Putting to one side the reaction outside the US, very little has been heard from American Muslims on this. I wonder why an entire section of society remains silent on an issue that would doubtless cause offense. When groups remain silent, it makes me wonder just how free the free speech really is.
4. Christianity doesn't teach "and eye for an eye any more", whereas death sentences are common in Muslim countries, and this is a protest against that.
Look. Lets look at this logically. There are 58 countries that retained the death penalty in 2009, most of which did not use it. But let's look at these 58, and see whether they are indeed Muslim countries.
( Clicky for a breakdown )So what do these figures show us? Of the 58 countries who still execuse people for ordinary crimes (e.g. murder), 19 have Islam as the official religion, 1 has Christianity, 2 have other or not specified, and the majority - 36 countries - are secular ones, with no official religion.
Of those 58 countries, only 18 actually carried out executions in 2009. 9 of those were Islamic countries, and the rest were secular.
The overwhelming majority of executions were carried out in China, a secular country, with thousands of executions. The next-largest number are in Iran, with 388+ executions.
The USA (population 370m, 2009 census), a secular country, carried out more executions (52) than the Islamic countries of Bangladesh (160m population, 3 executions), Egypt (81.5m population, 5+ executions), Sudan (41m population, 9+ executions), and Yemen (23m population, 30+ executions) put together. Anyone doing the maths, that's 370m vs c. 300m, so if we're looking per capita, the USA executed slightly less people per capita than some of the poorest Islamic countries in the world.
In other words, the correlation between religion and the death penalty is rather weak (caveat: I haven't bothered to run a real correlation analysis on this because I really need to have a shower and breakfast, also, I am busting for the loo). I will bet you real money that the correlation between a dictatorial system of government and widespread poverty and the death penalty (and its use) is much stronger.
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Stepping back from the statistics for a moment, where on earth did you see this guy protesting anything other than the sheer existence of Islam?! Ascribing to him any motives other than wanting his 15 minutes of fame is giving him way too much credit.
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