Cynicism by the Book

Cynicism by the Book
Hamid Karzai's despicable response to the Quran burning in Florida.By 
Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, April 4, 2011, at 10:44 AM ET

Heinrich Heine's famous observation about book burning—that  where books are 
burned, people also will be—was actually first made  about the torching of the 
Quran. The Spanish Inquisition used to delight  in putting heretical works "on 
trial," and zealously convicted the  Muslim holy book before feeding it to the 
flames in what is one of  Christianity's oldest traditions. (After all, it 
extends to the burning  of unauthorized translations of the Holy Bible, too.) 
Heine's 1821 play Almansor contains a character who observes that humans will 
next be burned, and  the later incineration of Heine's own writings by the 
Nazis, with its  prefiguration of the Holocaust, has made the quotation an 
imperishable  one.

The connection, however, is not always so neat. The moronic pastor who burned 
the Quran after a mock trial would probably refrain from setting fire to human 
beings. While in  Afghanistan, where Islam already makes huge numbers of books 
unavailable  and The Satanic Verses and the Danish flag must be in short supply, 
the news of book burning  somewhere else is enough in itself to cause the random 
incineration of  people.

How dispiriting to see, once again, the footage of  theocratic rage in Kandahar 
and Mazar-i-Sharif. The same old dreary  formula: self-righteous frenzy married 
to a neurotic need to take  offense; the easy resort to indiscriminate violence 
and cruelty; the  promulgation of makeshift fatwas by mullahs on the make; those  
writhing mustaches framing crude slogans of piety and hatred, and  yelling for 
death as if on first-name terms with the Almighty. The  spilling of blood and 
the spoliation of property—all for nothing, and  ostensibly "provoked" by the 
corny, brainless antics of a devout  American nonentity, notice of whose mere 
existence is beneath the  dignity of any thinking person.

The wonderful thing about the last two months had been precisely the absence of 
such sanguinary and theatrical nonsense. Large, orderly, humorous  crowds formed 
in major Egyptian cities, all of them demanding the  acceptance of civic 
responsibility not just by the organs of state, but  by themselves. Immense care 
was taken to avoid breakage or  looting or even littering, let alone bloodshed. 
All the emphasis was on  dialogue and the civilized exchange of ideas, and 
though the word martyr was indeed used to describe those who laid down their 
lives in the  struggle, the cult of human sacrifice for its own sake was not in  
evidence. In order to hear crowds chanting hypnotically about their  willingness 
to sacrifice their blood (or indeed other people's), one had  to turn to the 
zombified groups of frightened loyalist "demonstrators"  mobilized yet again by 
the regimes of Qaddafi and Assad. 


But the  ambitions of the Islamic fundamentalists are ultimately unappeasable.  
Already in Egypt they have launched vicious physical attacks on people  
suspected of harboring prostitutes or selling beer, as if either of  these 
considerations had any bearing on the radical overhaul of a  near-failed state. 
I don't believe that in the long run the Salafists can quite negate the work of 
the Tahrir movement, but the terrible  thing about indiscriminate violence and 
religious hysteria is how much  damage a little of it can do. One determined 
sectarian can, in a night's  work, undo decades of coexistence between 
Christians and Muslims, or  between Sunni and Shia, as the deadly work of the 
Bin Ladenists in  several countries has recently confirmed. 


As someone who advances  the quaint belief that the removal of two of the worst 
regimes in the  region—the Taliban and the Iraqi Baath Party—did not have 
nothing to do with the subsequent democracy "wave," I also find it discouraging 
that  some of the loudest expressions of sectarian emotion have come from  
Afghanistan and Iraq. Muqtada Sadr's supporters have chosen to make  Bahrain 
into an issue of pure Shiite self-pity, as if the local  ambitions of Iran were 
to be discounted entirely. And Prime Minister  Nouri al-Maliki's ruling group, 
fresh from a clumsy attempt to ban the  Iraqi Communist Party for its role in 
street protests, also seems to  view the Gulf crisis through a single 
confessional optic. 


But  this narrowness pales beside the truly awful opportunism and cynicism of  
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. In previous cases of irrational  violence, 
such as the bloody riots that occurred on the mere rumor of a  Quran being 
desecrated in Guantanamo, he had taken quite a responsible line (pointing out, 
for example, that one library destroyed by the  incendiaries had contained 
several fine old Qurans). Unlike some  provincial mullahs, Karzai also knows 
perfectly well that the U.S.  government is constitutionally prohibited from 
policing religious speech  among its citizens. Yet, when faced with the doings 
of the  aforementioned moronic cleric from Gainesville, he went out of his way 
to intensify mob feeling. 



This caps a long period where his behavior has come to seem like a  conscious 
collusion with warlordism, organized crime, and even with  elements of the 
Taliban. Already under constant pressure to make  consistent comments about 
Syria and Libya, the Obama administration  might want to express itself more 
directly about a man for whose  fast-decomposing regime we are shedding our best 
blood.

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