To the Editor:
Re “Violence Continues in Afghanistan Over Koran Burning in Florida” (news article, April 4):
An important element for understanding the outrage in Afghanistan in reaction to the burning of a Koran by a Florida pastor is that few people in the Muslim world understand the strong protections for free speech and religion that govern political life in the United States. To people who have never lived in a full-fledged democracy, it is ludicrous to imagine that President Obama could not have stopped this outrage if he had really wanted to, and could not now arrest the pastor, Terry Jones.
I taught as a Fulbright scholar in Indonesia a few years ago. Even in that moderate semidemocracy, I guarantee that none of my graduate students could have gotten their minds around this concept, no matter how hard I tried to explain it to them. To them, if a man gives plenty of warning that he is going to commit an outrage, and is not stopped, then the regime in power must be tacitly supporting him.
DENA S. DAVIS
Cleveland, April 4, 2011
The writer is a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University.
Note from KBJ: This is as close as you're going to get, in the legal academy, to a defense of freedom of expression, at least when the expression in question concerns Islam. Political correctness trumps individual rights. Muslims are the newest protected group, following women, blacks, and homosexuals.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 