Are Qur’an-Burnings Helpful?

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The type of Muslim both liberals and counter-jihadists want to encourage.

1,335 words

Rasmus Paludan, the Danish-born leader of the Swedish Stram Kurs (Hard Line) party, burned a copy of the Qur’an ^[2] in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm on January 21. The act, which was permitted and protected by the Swedish police, prompted Turkey to withdraw its support for Sweden’s accession to NATO. While Turkey has been reluctant to grant assent to Sweden for some time now, owing to Sweden’s policy of granting asylum to Kurds and other enemies of the Ankara regime, it is likely that allowing Paludan’s Qur’an-burning to transpire was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The Qur’an-burning script is one we’ve seen many times before. Some self-proclaimed counter-jihad activist or politician declares that free speech is the highest of enlightened liberal values and that burning the Muslim holy book is part and parcel of the freedom of speech our grandfathers paid a heavy price for. He then proclaims that the Qur’an is a vile, illiberal book, comparing it unfavorably to Mein Kampf –which is where the term Islamofascism usually surfaces. He then may declare, seemingly unprompted, his ever-enduring love and loyalty to Israel and the Jewish people, who are the bulwark of democracy and Western values opposing the Islamic menace. He also reassures his audience that they’re not racist for being there, but rather are merely opposing the religion or ideology of Islam or Islamism, and proceed to burn the Qur’an. Thus the “radical Muslims” will be annoyed, in order to show them that free speech is alive and well.

Predictably, the Muslim response to this is unpleasant. In fact, given the typical Muslim in Europe, it’s often violent. But even a non-violent response is presented as Muslims being unable to accept free speech. The Qur’an-burners counsel them to respond as enlightened Christians, such as when they do nothing while so-called artists immerse crucifixes and Bibles in urine.

The Leftist media denounce the act, relativize the violent response (if there was one), and then nothing really changes — but at least everyone had a good time. Then, the Qur’an-burner, the Leftist media, and even the Muslims go back to their followers and claim some form of victory. The Qur’an-burner does so because he succeeded in accomplishing the act and attracted a lot of media attention, the media because they reinforced the Nuremberg moral paradigm ^[3] by condemning the far-Right boogeyman with sufficient hysteria, and the Muslims because they did not let this insult against their faith go unanswered.

Each, of course, has indeed won, because each of the three sides in the drama has different objectives. The media has a moral paradigm to uphold, so they focus on controlling the narrative. The Muslims, more often than not driven by concerns of honor, are motivated to not allow an insult to go unpunished. The activist, however, craves media attention, because his ultimate goal is to raise awareness, which could uncharitably be described as “attracting attention” — words which would accurately describe Rasmus Paludan’s career as a politician and agitator in both Denmark and Sweden.

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One wonders what the end goal is for such activism. Is the ultimate goal for Muslims in Europe to become as cowed and as docile as Christians are when they are subjected to insults to their own faith? If so, I can’t say that’s a positive development from an aesthetic viewpoint, first and foremost. Few things are as ugly as ornamental faith — faith not taken seriously. The lack of faith that European Christians exhibit is not something that adherents of other faiths should aspire towards.

I’ve personally had the misfortune of meeting a number of secularized Muslims, people who use Islam in the same ornamental way in which most Christians today use Christianity. The women may wear a hijab or a smaller headscarf, and the men may exclaim bismillah instead of “damn,” but otherwise they’re indistinguishable from their secular, globalized peers. I remember once seeing a young Turkish woman walking around wearing a light headscarf, which is supposed to protect a woman’s modesty, while also wearing a bikini top, with half of her bottom hanging out of her outrageously short Daisy Dukes ^[6]. It is simultaneously one of my fondest (she was a very shapely woman) and most depressing memories: the hijab on her head concealing her hair, but revealing her hypocrisy. This is, of course, not an isolated incident. As I was recently informed by my younger friends, the phenomenon is common enough in Bosnia that it has a humorous name: Selam gore, bujrum dole — tastefully translated as “honor upstairs, welcome downstairs.” As much as I enjoy observing young women’s shapely bottoms, I am not a fan of faith taken lightly. And indeed, the Christian cousin of Selam gore, bujrum dole — the gaudy gold crucifix draped over silicon cleavage — is just as indicative of a faith becoming merely an ornament; a flavoring in an otherwise homogenized global anti-culture.

But even leaving aside my personal hang-ups, we have to ask ourselves what is achieved by burning the Qur’an from the perspective of white identitarian nationalism. How many browns will be deported as a result of the act? In what way will the Nuremberg moral paradigm be deconstructed? Will this act stimulate the development of white racial consciousness? Will it encourage white people to reproduce at a higher rate? Will it intercept and halt the actions of anti-white regimes? The answer to all these questions is no, with a possible exception concerning racial consciousness: Insofar as white people have a genetic tendency to be fair-minded and in a sense liberal, the resoundingly illiberal calls for censorship and retaliation from the overwhelmingly brown Muslims could hypothetically make white Europeans see them as more of an “other” than before. This would nevertheless remain inchoate and easily misled into various dead-ends, as we’ve already seen in the counter-jihad movement over the past decade-and-a-half that they’ve been kicking around. Moreover, if the problem is that brown Muslims are acting illiberally and are actually willing to make sacrifices for their faith, then the solution is not what we, as White Nationalists and identitarians, want to implement — the removal of browns and other racial aliens from European countries — but rather something that our enemy wants: the homogenization of Muslims into the denuded global anti-culture, just like the Turkish girl with her ass hanging out of her jean shorts.

A clever quip that I’ve seen floating around the Internet is that you’ll never see one of these counter-jihadists burning a copy of the Talmud, even though that text is orders of magnitude more hateful and supremacist than the Qur’an. This is of course true, but allow me to point out that burning the Talmud would not accomplish anything, either, except perhaps to draw attention to the burner. When it comes to tackling the Jewish question as a key part of implementing the White Nationalist agenda, our resources are far better applied to deconstructing gentile Zionism ^[7], exposing Jewish subversion and crimes, pointing out the alien nature of Jews, ^[8]and generally revealing the Jews for what they are — piercing the veil of lies they use to cloak themselves as they ply their nefarious trade. In other words, the White Nationalist cause is far better served by reading and publicizing the truth about the Talmud than by burning it.

Rasmus Paludan’s burning of the Qur’an may have opened a geopolitical can of worms the effects of which will be interesting to observe. I have my own opinions about Sweden, Turkey, and NATO, as well as what ought to be done to ensure Europe’s security, but we’ll leave them for some other time. For now, suffice to say that his stunt has done little to advance the cause of white people in Sweden, has not meaningfully contributed to the effort to deport brown Muslims from Sweden, and in certain ways may even strengthen our enemy’s position. But at least he got those Muslims angry — and we know that whoever gets angry loses, right? ^[9] RIGHT? ^[10]

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