Afghan deaths are not Terry Jones' Fault

Three United Nations workers and four Nepalese guards were killed in Afghanistan recently during the route of a protest aimed at revenge for a Florida pastor's having burned copies of the Quran. Revenge, mind you, being the very operative term here. Staffan de Mistura, the top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the pastor. "The demonstration was meant to protest against the insane and totally despicable gesture by one person who burned the holy Quran," he said.

Granting that this is true, and there is little reason to doubt that in the direct and immediate sense it is, it still seems as though a further, and worse, quite frankly, 'insane and totally despicable gesture' has occurred. That gesture is precisely what was perpetrated by the protesters in Afghanistan.

We are told, almost incessantly, that Islam is the 'religion of peace'. Yet the actions of those purporting to practice the Muslim faith appear to say exactly the opposite: mock us and we will kill you. With any provocation, we will not turn the other cheek, but, rather, hunt you down and extract vengeance for your crimes. Even if those we choose to exact our revenge upon are not particularly close to the source.

What the Reverend Terry Jones did is indeed reprehensible and indefensible. There is no case in its favor. Yet in the same manner, what he did cannot ever be seen as a defense of what that Afghan crowd did either. Blaming him for the deaths of those UN workers and guards, even tangentally, lets the mob off the hook. They murdered seven innocents. That is not and never will be fully on the soul of Terry Jones. It will be primarily on the hands of the murderers themselves, and nothing less.

To say it any other way is to ignore the real cause of this most heinous act. The real sin lay with those who committed willful murder. The blood of the victims is not on the hands of a peripheral American minister. It stains only the religion it claims to believe in and live.