About Burn a Quran Day

In Reddit, one guy asked a question: "Why was 'Draw Muhammad Day' a great thing but 'Burn the Quran Day' a bad thing?". In his answer, one user replied the following, which I liked a lot and hence this post.

"Go watch a John Woo movie. I'd recommend The Killer, but Hard Boiled Works to, as does A Better Tomorrow.

In John Woo's world, there are cops and there are mobsters, and they are on opposite sides. There is a cop/mobster axis and you are on one end or the other.

However, there is also an honorable and dishonorable axis, and it is perpendicular to the cop/mobster axis, so it divides Woo's moral universe into quadrants. You can be an honorable cop or a dishonorable one, and similarly you can be an honorable mobster or a dishonorable one. The way Woo tests his characters is by making them decide which axis is more important to them. If you're a good cop, do you take down the honorable mobster because he's a crook, or do you recognize that you share a similar code and help him defeat the dishonorable mobsters?

That's sort of what's going on here. There are people who believe in freedom and tolerance and diversity. There are both Muslims and... well hell I'm not sure what word to use here. I'm going to use Americans, but I'm a little uncomfortable with it. But there are both Muslims and Americans in that camp.

There is also a camp of religious and cultural extremists who want to demonize the other side and everything they do. And there are both Muslims and Americans in that camp as well.

Draw Muhammad day was about the freedom/repression axis. It was about people of either faith who value freedom standing up to those who would suppress it in the name or religion. I seem to recall Muslims on Reddit (and any Muslim who's on Reddit, you can pretty well figure where he falls on the freedom/represson axis) saying that they had no problem with Draw Muhammad day.

This wackjob who's going to be burning Qurans is working the other axis entirely. This is all about Christian America on one side, and the Islamic world on the other, and one side pissing all over the other to show that we hate them. I object to it because I think working the the Islam/America axis is a real dick move."