Pastor Terry Jones and other members of the lunatic fringe are doing
Osama bin Laden's work for him
Editorial
Saturday September 11 2010
The Guardian
When Andy Warhol predicted in 1968 that in the future everyone would
be world-famous for 15 minutes, he could not have meant Pastor Terry
Jones [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/sep/10/usa-
islam" title="Guardian: How the crazy Qur'an-burning pastor ?]. The
idea that t he world's media has been hanging on every word uttered by
a low-rent bigot with a gun ? who has been mulling over whether to
burn 200 copies of the Qur'an today ? is grotesque. Hillary Clinton,
David Petraeus, Robert Gates, the presidents of Afghanistan and
Pakistan and lastly Barack Obama himself have all been sucked into the
media maelstrom created by the pastor with a dodgy past and 30
congregrants. And the circus is not over yet. Jones plans to fly to
New York to discuss the proposed location of the Islamic centre near
Ground Zero with the New York imam Feisel Abdul Rauf.
Whether or not this meeting takes place - and last night the pastor
was still threatening to burn the Qur'ans if it did not - the damage
has already been done. A protester was shot dead [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/10/quran-burning-nato-troops-shoot"
title="Guardian: Qur'an burning] after a crowd of 10,000 converged on
a German-run Nato base in north-eastern Afghanistan. Thousands of
Indonesian Muslims demonstrated outside the US embassy in Jarkarta.
President Obama has said and done the right things, neither reacting
too soon-? and thus inflating the importance of the pastor - nor too
late. But the vulnerability of America's image in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, and the possibility that it would be recast by the lunatic
fringe of Christian fundamentalists at home, is all too real. The
pastor may be the most extreme version of it to date, but he is
symptomatic of a larger trend, particularly in Florida. In May a
mosque in Jacksonville was attacked with a pipe bomb, and a mosque
south of Miami was attacked twice last year, once with gunfire. The
pastor may have been condemned by Sarah Palin, but anti-Islamic
rhetoric has begun to creep into the words of some Republican
political candidates [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/us/
26gainesville.html" title="New York Times: Far from Ground Zero] in
the state.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is planning to
distribute 200,000 copies of the Qur'an under an initiative called
Learn, Don't Burn. Its spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, said that the
group's research shows that when people learn about what it is they
are supposed to be hating, intolerance lessens. This is the right
reaction, even if it feels at the moment like trying to hold back an
incoming tide. There are around 7 million Muslims in the US, but no
one knows for sure as they are as ethnically and culturally diverse as
America is itself. This community is already fully integrated.
Reactions such as seeing the headscarf as a symbol of "sharia by
stealth" will, if allowed to continue unchecked, reverse this process.
As we report today, growing numbers of Muslims who have lived in
America for most of their adult lives, whose children do all the
things American kids do, are enduring a backlash of hostility and
suspicion on the ninth anniversary of al-Qaida's assault on New York
and the Pentagon. Islam is thus portrayed not as a faith but an
invading system of government and justice. Mosques are not religious
centres but the outposts of "radical Islam". While this mood is driven
by politics in an election year, Republicans do not have to drill that
deep. After nine years of incubation, anti-Muslim sentiment has burst
on to the scene. Ignorance triumphs, and as the Tea Party activists
are discovering, if you lie often enough and loud enough, it works.
Nearly one in five Americans suspect that their president is secretly
a Muslim.
Europe has got very little to teach America on this score, and about
the last person it should be exporting to New York to speak at a rally
today to oppose the Manhattan mosque plan is Geert Wilders, the
virulently anti-Islamic Dutch political leader. The one thing European
leaders should be telling America is not to go down the path that
Holland, Switzerland, France and Austria have trod on this issue, each
in different ways alienating the very communities on which their
intelligence services depend to defend them against al-Qaida's plots.
The pastor is doing Osama bin Laden's work for him.
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2010
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