Religious Fruits & Nuts

The Florida church that is planning to burn copies of the Koran on September 11 has now gained international attention.  Protests have broken out in Afghanistan and Indonesia, and the State Department and General Petraeus, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, along with commentators across the spectrum, have sounded off to condemn the planned actions.

The church's protest has been denied a permit, but the pastor insists that the event will go on anyway.

But here is the question: why is a 50-member church in Florida garnering this kind of attention?

The answer is blindingly obvious: the media latched on to this story right away because it makes Christians and the Right look bad.  Never mind the fact that no reasonable person is defending this pastor or his church - in light of the wide-spread condemnation the Ground Zero mosque has received in recent weeks, the leftist media needs something to use against the opposition to the mosque - something that is completely unrelated to the vast majority of the opposition, but an issue nevertheless that they can generalize to the rest of the mosque's opposition to try and make the Right look bad.

The truth is that this pastor and any of his congregation that is going along with his book-burning are wackos who have been universally condemned.  As far as Christian sects go, they rank right up there with the Westboro Baptists or Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United.  They're stupid extremists and not really worth paying attention to.  But instead of ignoring them like they deserve, the media has sensationalized this story to the point that it has now become an international incident. 

Just like the Westboro Baptists, the best thing the media could do to marginalize these freaks would be to ignore them.  But to the media, this opportunity was just too good to pass up, and as a result, they have given the fringe an international stage and sparked unnecessary conflict in a region just looking for an excuse to demonize the United States.

This is not to say that the media is responsible for this planned act of gargantuan stupidity; only the pastor and his congregation can truly carry the blame.  But the duplicity of a media that tries to pass itself off as unbiased while ignoring the extremism of the church President Obama attended for 20 years and sensationalizing a small fringe group can not and should not be ignored.