Shadowboxing with Terry Jones

“Don’t cheer the Koran-burning idiot,” Bill Walsh (presumably no relation to the late coach of the 49ers) writes at Ricochet:

I find it depressing and vaguely ominous—if people want to make a hero out of a jackass burning a book they don’t like, we’re slouching towards Gomorrah faster than I thought. I guess I’ll have to look forward to our political parties eventually descending into Nika Riots—I guess they’ll be Red & Blue instead of Green & Blue, though the SEIU do have those sharp purple numbers… (I’ll have to grab a t-shirt-and-Molotov-cocktail concession.)

So what do y’all think? Is the defense of this guy a little disturbing? (And, yeah, I know, it’s the d[euc]ed internet. You can find lunatic, full-throated apologia for anything.) Or are Jonah and I being prissy little [felidae] for shying away from this brave, defiant gesture in a civilizational clash that can only be applauded by free thinkers and free peoples?

But is anybody cheering Jones? Most of what I’ve read on the right has boiled down to the notion that freedom is also the freedom to do really stupid things, not to mention, “The Right to Offend,” as Mark Steyn writes. “I’ll take my chances with blowhard pastors, drearily ‘transgressive’ artists and flag-burning provocateurs. I’m far more worried about a blundering clod like Graham presuming to protect us from them.”

Bookworm adds:

Everyone I know thinks that that Pastor Terry Jones is an insensitive, ill-mannered, publicity-seeking lout for having burned the Koran.  That he did so is un-American, not because it is illegal, but because it runs counter to deep American values that find repugnant the thought of book-burning, especially burning religious books, and that embrace a pluralism that shows respect for different religions.  Ordinary Americans, not crude attention seekers such as Jones, understand that America is blessed with a huge population of peace-loving, law-abiding Muslims, and that it’s a rude, mean-spirited slap in the face to treat their holy book so badly.  Can I make it any plainer that I am disgusted with what Jones did?

Sadly, however, significant numbers of Americans, all (almost all?) liberal (including Lindsay Graham, who is RINO through and through) think that what Jones did requires government intervention, in the form of federal laws banning Koran burning, or religious book burning, or all book burning, or Islam insulting, or whatever the liberal thinks will work to placate the Muslims so that they don’t riot and murder innocent UN workers.  (And while, God knows, I hold no brief for the UN, to invade a UN compound and murder workers in cold blood is the slaughter of the innocents.)

Those who are willing to pass such laws fail to understand two things.  First, one of the things that makes America uniquely American is the reverence we hold for free speech, even ugly free speech.  While we draw the line at two types of free speech — pedophilia and direct incitement to violence, a la “go out and lynch the person right now” — we otherwise believe that free speech can only benefit us.  Ugly, mean speech should be countered by smart speech, compelling speech, apologetic speech (if necessary), persuasive speech, etc.

If we allow the government to ban ugly speech, we suddenly find ourselves in a situation that sees the government determining what’s ugly.  I can tell you with certainty that, during the first two years of the Obama administration, he and Congress, working together, would happily have banned all anti-Obama speech on the ground that it was racist hate speech.  It’s a slippery slope and a censoring government will always slide you down to the midden at the bottom of the hill as quickly as possible.

Besides, CNN quietly noted that “President Karzai’s brother denied that the Kandahar protests were a result of the Quran burning:”

“The protests in the last two days in Kandahar have no link to the Quran burning in U.S. at all, but were all organized by some people to loot public and government properties,” Ahmad Wali Karzai told CNN, adding that he condemned the desecration of Islam’s holy book.

If that’s true, pretty much this whole story has been nothing but shadowboxing.