This is Terry Jones, the Christian pastor who wanted to burn the Holy Quran in 2010, as he believed that certain text written in the Quran was responsible for the September 11 2001 tragedy and, therefore, it was justifiable for him to carry out his threat. This started an international outburst with the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and other senior officials in the White House, denouncing this act of lunacy. A global petition, in which I was one of the signatories, received responses from thousands of people, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims, protesting against such a wanton act. Without saying, our Muslim leaders in the government too sounded their utmost displeasure.
To add insult to the injury, one UMNO Baru leader even had the audacity to say that the Bible was incorrectly printed and Ibrahim Ali's move to burn the Bible should be supported.
Let's take a lesson from History. On May 10 1933, the Nazi party in Hitler's Germany ordered all books written by Jewish authors to be burnt. According to them, such books would have a bad influence on the German society as the new order wished to promote a new way of life. They asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature. They considered such books as 'entartet' (degenerate) and should not be read by decent Germans
Among those books burnt were those written by Heinrich Heine who said, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" ["Where they burn books, they will in the end, also burn people."]
 |
| Book burning in Nazi Germany - May 10 1933 |
No comments:
Post a Comment