The Great Islamic Reformation

Rarely has an important newspaper displayed such fearfulness—or artificial “balance”—as did The Times of London last Saturday (April 2). And this, in a way, was echoed more widely in the press treatment this weekend of the Afghan riots, triggered by the burning of the Koran in Florida, that resulted in some two dozen deaths. The target of the ire of various newspapermen and spokesmen was not the murderous mobs in Mazar e-Sharif and Kandahar who did to death relief-bestowing UN representatives, but the American pastor Terry Jones who had burned a copy of the Muslims' sacred text. Yet the burning of Bibles around the Islamic world—in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iraq—is an almost daily occurrence and goes unremarked, and in these parts it is often accompanied by the arson of churches and the murder of parishioners. And these acts never trigger murderous responses by Christians thousands of miles away. And few will publicly and explicitly utter in this connection that awful phrase and truth, “clash of civilizations.”