Reply #64: If anyone tells me I can't burn the Origin of Species, I'll burn that too.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

So far as I am aware, no-one is telling me I can't burn the Bible.

Offending Muslims is not the goal of burning the Koran, it's a regrettable side effect. The goal is to preserve the right to do so; if there were a way to preserve that right without offending people that would be preferable, but at present there isn't. No-one is telling anyone in the US they can't burn the Bible (in South Africa a judge just ruled precisely that, which I think makes Bible-burning their necessary).




As to "the easy way out", I don't know about in America, but I'm reasonably confident that here in the UK burning a Koran would be significantly more likely (or rather, less unlikely) to be met with a violent response than burning the Bible*. But even if it were safer to burn the Koran than the bible, that would be irrelevant. The point is that the Koran is the book the right to burn is being threatened, and so that's the one it's currently necessary to burn.




*Two reasons for this. a) the fraction of Muslims willing to resort to harrassement or violence in these matters, while small, is larger than the corresponding fraction of Christians (that's not just a blind prejudice; as evidence for it I cite the response to the Jyllands-Postan Mohammed cartoons), and b) the physical Koran is much more important to Muslims than the physical bible is to Christians (the Torah has a similar status in Judaism, but apart from a few superstitions involving using it to repel demons most Christians don't regard paper on which their scriptures are printed as holy in the same way that many Muslims and Jews do), and so burning a Bible is much less offensive to Christians than burning a Koran is to Muslims. If you want to achieve a similar offence to a large number of Americans, I'd recommend burning an American flag, which has the added benefit that it's a right that was recently threatened. I think that a few years ago it was probably right to burn American flags due to the threat of the flag-burning ammendment, but that that threat has probably wained to the point where it's not currently necessary.