Last Friday, at least seven U.N. workers were killed, including two who were beheaded, and several injured after officials said a protest in Afghanistan against a Florida pastor's burning of the Koran turned violent.
On Saturday, the deadly attacks extended to Kandahar. Nine have been killed and several were also injured.
Violent reaction over such perceptions has occurred on several other occasions, such as the publishing of cartoons of Prophet Muhammad by a Danish newspaper and the comments of one of the participants in a beauty queen competition about Prophet Muhammad in Nigeria.
Preventing Islamist reaction in the future won't be accomplished by preventing people from insulting Islam, which is both unconstitutional and impossible.
Reaction to the Koran burning demonstrates basic facts:
- Zero toleration. In some parts of the Muslim world the use of violence when it empowers religious values gives justification to many Muslims and prepares some of them psychologically to use violence or resort to its use to express their religious views and opinions.
- Undervalue of life. Non-Muslims are simply not valued. Shariah books teach that the compensation money for killing a non-Muslim is half of that of a Muslim — a root cause for disrespecting human life and justifying attacks on non-Muslims.
- Failure to educate. There are Koranic values that can prevent such violent reaction. These include not punishing someone for the mistakes of others(Koran 35:18} and respecting human life (Koran 5:32).
- Failure to encourage individual thinking. In violent reactions, the mob rules.
- Failure of legal systems to make the Mullahs who incite hatred and violence responsible for the outcome of their teaching.
- Failure of the Islamic scholars to denounce terrorists. Using expressions to describe these acts as being “un-Islamic” or “no religion will justify such acts” are too weak to deter Muslims who are driven by religious zeal to participate in such violent acts.
Islamic scholars MUST issue a fatwa to call those Muslims who contributed to the violent attacks that result in killing as “apostates” and “killers” who will end in hell — if they did not repent.
Unfortunately, such expressions are needed to decrease participation of Muslims in such violent acts in the future.
Negative reinforcement psychological tactics MUST be used to decrease the possibility of similar barbaric attacks in the future. These tactics include clarifying to radical Muslims that such an attack on the U.N. is likely to create more hatred to Islam and thus can cause more Korans to be burned.
The Koranic verse 6:108 ("Revile not ye those whom they call upon besides Allah, lest they out of spite revile Allah in their ignorance") can be used as a model to teach Muslims that merely insulting others is a major sin as these acts can bring more insults to the religion.
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