Guest AuthorTerry Jones’ Sept. 11 picnic checklist: Matches? Check. Lighter fluid? Check. Three thousand Korans? Check. Ignorance and intolerance? Double check. Bring your own hot dogs.
Jones – onetime anti-Islamic pastor and now anti-Islamic public nuisance – is up to his old tricks again. Say what you will about him, he is certainly single-minded. He really, really wants to burn Korans.
Jones, former pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center, a small Pentecostal church in Gainesville, announced several weeks ago that he would re-enact the publicity stunt he was forced to abort in 2010. On that occasion, he intended to publicly burn a copy of the Koran, but senior national officials, including then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, persuaded him that some of our allies who are Muslim might not take it so well.
Now, in his own manifestation of Fahrenheit 451, he wants to burn 2,998 of them, one for each victim of Sept. 11. A citizen of Mulberry, a small town just south of Lakeland, offered his private land as a stage for this publicity stunt, but last week he backed out, saying that the pasture was too soggy.
According to reports in The Ledger of Lakeland, Jones scouted around and found a nearby public park that he thought would do nicely, but Polk County officials say that any plan to burn about 3,000 books would need a permit.
That many books would make quite a large bonfire. I would think you’d want a fire truck standing by, even in the midst of the rainy season, lest the size of the fire match that of Jones’ appetite for publicity and burn down the park.
The situation is still evolving, with Jones threatening to go ahead with his little ceremony anyway. A citizens group has planned a counter-protest. My guess is that the county leaders by hook or by crook will prevail. Jones will bluster and put up some lame excuse and slink away without igniting his unholy pyre.
It is worth noting that Jones’ self-described purposes for carrying out this despicable act are very much at odds with the act itself. He is claiming that it is not aimed at all Muslims but is some kind of protest against extremists who try to forcibly convert others to Islam.
Jones told Tampa TV station WTSP that “we by no means, and never in any of the protests we have ever done, demonstrated any type of hate. And we definitely do not hate Muslims. We respect their right here in America to be here, to practice their religion under the First Amendment. It’s not about Muslims, it is about that violent core message that Islam has.”
So Jones claims he doesn’t hate Muslims, he’s just trying to protest their violent religion by burning their holy book. Got that?
A photo in The Ledger captured a telling message on Jones’ T-shirt. It said, “Everything I know about Islam I learned on 9/11.” His desire to burn the Korans is transparently nothing other than a blind act of retaliatory hatred against Islam generally.
You would think that after 12 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in those two countries, the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the commando-raid killing of Osama bin Laden, Jones would have had his fill of revenge.
But despite his disclaimer, you can’t escape the feeling that if Jones thought he could get away with burning 3,000 Muslims on the National Mall, he wouldn’t hesitate to do so.
As the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine prophetically said, “Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.”
