{"id":1608,"date":"2009-10-26T00:30:32","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T07:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=1608"},"modified":"2009-10-26T20:50:07","modified_gmt":"2009-10-27T03:50:07","slug":"us-nato-deny-burning-koran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/26\/us-nato-deny-burning-koran\/","title":{"rendered":"US, NATO Deny Burning Koran"},"content":{"rendered":"

Afghans recently protested an alleged incident in which ‘foreign soldiers’ burned a Quran during a raid<\/a>.\u00a0 NATO and US force representatives denied that any such incident occurred, instead calling\u00a0it a Taliban rumor.<\/p>\n

Perhaps more interesting were the actions the protestors took.\u00a0 While a few Americans claim that US actions are convincing the Muslim world that Americans are on a Christian ‘crusade,’ the protestors repeated the more common accusation:\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“Death to America. Down with Israel,” chanted one man at the rally, which was organised mainly by university students.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously, neither Israel nor the Palestinian situation has anything to do with foreign forces in Afghanistan, nor with any treatment of the Koran.\u00a0 But when such protests occur, Islamic protestors\u00a0do not protest the ‘American Christian crusade;’ instead, they take the opportunity to connect\u00a0the US\u00a0with\u00a0the Jewish state of Israel.\u00a0\u00a0As is frequently shown on the mainstream news, Islamic protests are far more likely to accuse America as a nation of Zionism than of\u00a0crusade.<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the US should take actions to restrict the freedoms of its Jewish citizens or soldiers of the Jewish faith.\u00a0 There is\u00a0a frequently quoted cliche that<\/p>\n

your freedom to swing\u00a0your fist ends where\u00a0my nose begins.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The human liberty of belief, however, does not stop where another person’s\u00a0offense begins.\u00a0 The sensitivities of another do not dictate an individual’s natural rights.<\/p>\n

Are there times where discretion–even officially mandated discretion–may be a military necessity?\u00a0 Certainly.\u00a0 But those situations should be necessarily rare.<\/p>\n

The US, both as a nation and as a military, can do\u00a0much for future prosperity if it encourages and protects the human liberty of religious freedom.\u00a0 Regrettably, the focus is often more on not offending local religious sentiment, rather than encouraging religious freedom.\u00a0 While potentially effective, the technique is strategically short-sighted.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the result is that even some\u00a0nations that\u00a0US military\u00a0troops are\u00a0defending with their lives fail to grant their citizens even the most basic of religious freedoms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Also reported at the Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/em> and the British Telegraph<\/a><\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Afghans recently protested an alleged incident in which ‘foreign soldiers’ burned a Quran during a raid.\u00a0 NATO and US force representatives denied that any such incident occurred, instead calling\u00a0it a Taliban rumor. Perhaps more interesting were the actions the protestors took.\u00a0 While a few Americans claim that US actions are convincing the Muslim world that Americans are on a Christian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[58,64,4,70,44,39,2,17,10],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-and-religion","tag-afghanistan","tag-al-jazeera","tag-churchandstate","tag-evangelism","tag-islam","tag-jewish","tag-military","tag-religious-expression","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}