He burned the Quran.
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| Pastor Terry Jones touting the burning that he postponed in 2010. |
He said he would, and he did.
Last year there was a firestorm of controversy over the building of Park 51, the Muslim cultural center that was to be built two blocks from nine-eleven's Ground Zero. This controversy, this planned project brought the bigots out in force. Pastor Terry Jones of Florida stood out in that motley crowd. In September he proposed to burn Islam's holy book, the Quran, in a ceremony on September 11. He said it would "stop Islam" and that "what we are also doing by the burning of the Quran, we’re saying stop, stop to Islam, stop to Islamic law, stop to brutality." He did not realized that brutality breeds brutality.
Immediately Gen. David Petraeus called upon Pastor Jones to give up his plan, saying that such an action would endanger our troops and our overall effort in our current wars, remarks for which he drew fire from the right, his most prominent critic being Frank Gaffney. President Obama called the proposed action the "destructive act" that it was, and, well, he draws fire for everything, so never mind. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates personally called Pastor Jones and asked him to please not burn the Quran. One wing nut cried plaintively, "If we stop doing things they don't like, where will we draw the line?" But this action was not just something Muslims would not like. This was the ultimate lack of respect for their holiest book, the revelations of their Prophet Muhammed.
Pastor Jones agreed to postpone the burning, and we all breathed a sigh of relief, taking his action not as a postponement but as a cancellation. Well, ignorance is bliss, and we were shocked out of our ignorance this week when Pastor Jones held his Quran Burning.
On March 20, in his church, the house of God, he held a so-called trial of the Quran and found it wanting. Pastor Jones served as judge from the pulpit of the Dove World Outreach Center. A Muslim convert to Christianity prosecuted the case, and an imam from Texas defended the Quran. There was a jury of twelve church members. At the trial, the Quran was faced with three charges: "1) Crimes against humanity: training and promoting terrorist activities throughout the world. 2) Death, rape, and torture of people worldwide whose only crime is not being of the Islamic faith. 3) Crimes against women, against minorities, against Christians with the promoting of prejudice against anyone who is not a Moslem."
"If the Koran was found guilty then there there four forms of punishment," Pastor Jones said. In a YouTube video, he challenged Mulsims, threatening, "There are four possibilities! The Koran can be BURNED!… or the Koran can be DROWNED! OR the Koran can be shredded… into little bitty pieces, destroyed, shredded. Or a firing squad! Muslims, we challenge you! Last time y'all had a big mouth. …Submit to us… a defense attorney. Come on that day! March the 20th!"
There was an online poll to determine punishment. "The one that the people chose was burning," said Pastor Jones. "That is why the Koran was burned after it was found guilty." Jones supervised while another pastor soaked the holy book in kerosene and then burned it. But the mainstream media missed this. Everyone was asleep at the switch until after Pastor Jones finally had burned his Quran. We were all shocked and surprised. Jones posted pictures of the burning on the internet, with the effect that they knew in Afghanistan before we knew here what he had done.
Fifteen people were killed yesterday in Afghanistan because Pastor Jones held his Quran burning. That number is now possibly up to 20. In Mazar-i-Sharif, one of Afghnistans's most peaceful cities, about two thousand people were demonstrating the burning peacefully when suddenly an angry mob overcame the police and stormed the UN compound in that northern Afghan city. They killed ten UN staff members, beheading two, and they killed five Afghans while they were at it. Police turned their weapons on the mob, killing at least four.
And now today the violence has spread to Kandahar. Hundreds of angry men ran in the streets protesting Jones' action. Nine were killed. Eighty-one were injured.
Pastor Jones says that he is not responsible for the violence in Afghanistan and that it proves his point. On Nightline, Pastor Terry Jones said, "We wanted to raise awareness of this dangerous religion and dangerous element. I think [today's attack] proves that there is a radical element of Islam." As if we need Pastor Jones to bring THAT to light. Pastor Jones justifies his actions by referring to New Testament scripture, the book of Acts in particular, which he says tells of newly converted Christians bringing their old books, like books of magic, to be burned.
Jones had promised last year on the Today show that he would not burn the Quran, "Not now, not never." But he had come up with a rationalization any addict would love. He said his church was, for the moment, no longer a church. It was a courtroom. And that plus the trial and guilty verdict made everything all right.
There is reason to believe that Pastor Jones went ahead with his plans to burn the Quran for publicity, not principle. The Daily Beast reports that he had grown despondent over the lack of media attention, which he had come to enjoy and expect, and he missed the media trucks and journalists camped out at his home. Last year, after he had "canceled" the Quran burning, he traveled to New York City, hoping to meet with the imam behind the Park 51 project, which Pastor Jones called the Ground Zero Mosque, which of course it was not. But Feisal Abdul Rauf would not see the pastor, dressed all in leather, and the cameras that had been following him, hoping to capture the meeting fell away. Pastor Jones was reduced to touring New York City and visiting Ground Zero like any other tourist.
Despite his worldwide impact, Pastor Jones is truly a fringe element. The man who was mayor of Gainsville at the time of the Park 51 incident said that Jones did not speak for the community. Pegreen Hanrahan, who left office last May, said that for every person who agrees with Pastor Jones, you can fine a thousand who find him ridiculous. Jacki Levine, editor of the local paper, says that Pastor Jones has an "exceedingly small" congregation, perhaps as small as 30 people.
The right is full of these characters. There is John Hagee who commands much more attention than Pastor Jones. Hagee is pastor and founder of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, a nondenominational evangelical church with more than 19,000 members. His John Hagee Ministries broadcasts in more than 200 countries. And he has written twenty-five books. No Pastor Jones is he. John McCain wanted to link himself to Hagee in 2008 until some of Hagee's quotes became public, and now that famous sinner and seial adulterer Newt Gingrich has sought the Hagee seal of approval and the use of Hagee's name in his run for the presidency in 2012. Hagee could fill a book with his anti-Catholic, anti-Islamic, and, despite his Zionism, his anti-Semitic remarks. He has called the Catholic church a cult and a whore. And we all remember others.
I grew up in one of these churches, a fundamentalist, evangelical, Bible-thumping Baptist church, too conservative for the Southern Baptist Convention (which itself was formed when the Baptist Church became abolitionist). We were not supposed to go to the movies, to play cards, to dance, to do anything really, and my father would go through periods in which he would enforce these strictures. My mom ran interference for me, so that I had a fairly normal social life with my school friends, to my father's dismay. And there were were such hypocrites. My mother and father sang in the church choir, and my father treated my mother terribly for years while he pursued an affair with another choir member, whom he eventually married. He's divorced from her, too, now.
There was much adultery, wife-beating, child abuse, alcoholism throughout that congregation of saints, and they looked down on those who were baptized other than by complete immersion. In the Sixties, the pastor said one Sunday that if ever any Black people came to the church, he would pronounce the benediction and end the service immediately. Some members sent their children to Bob Jones University, where you could be expelled for holding hands. It took me years to find my way back to God after I grew up and got away from my father and that church. The intolerance, the self-righteousness, the quirky interpretation of scripture, the hatred of certain Others, the hawkishness, the hypocrisy, and so much more, made me avert my gaze to save my life. So unlike your Christ, said Gandhi.
And now this little wing nut pastor of a tiny congregation in Florida is putting the Quran on trial, finding it guilty, and ceremoniously burning it, directly causing up to twenty deaths in Afghanistan. Time Magazine Online said, "Jones has a right to burn the Koran. And Rick Warren has a right--no, more than a right: a moral responsibly--to blast Jones for the nitwit bigot he is, and to rally mainstream evangelicals against this profoundly disgusting, and extremely dangerous, act. Warren tries to stay out of the political spotlight and he is to be admired for that. But this is different and, as David Petraeus warned last time Jones threatened this sort of unChristian behavior, not just the lives of unarmed UN and other aid workers, but also of American troops, are at stake.
"But there should be no confusion about this: Jones's act was murderous as any suicide bomber's. If there is a hell, he's just guaranteed himself an afterlifetime membership."
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