Terry Jones: Inconsequential Loon

Terry Jones has received more than his fifteen minutes of fame.

The guy has managed to get the world hanging on his every word. Even Obama got involved and commented on his stunt.

What is going on here?

From the New York Times:

First, Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who set the world on edge with plans to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11, said Thursday that he had canceled his demonstration because he had won a promise to move the proposed Islamic center near ground zero to a new location.

Then, hours later, after learning that the project’s leaders in New York had said that no such deal existed, Mr. Jones backed away from his promise and said the bonfire of sacred texts was simply “suspended.”

The sudden back and forth suggested that the controversy — the pastor drew pointed criticisms from President Obama and an array of leaders, officials and celebrities in the United States and abroad — was not yet finished even after multiple appearances before the news media on the lawn of his small church.

Mr. Jones seemed to be struggling with how to save face and hold on to the spotlight he has attracted for an act that could make him a widely reviled figure.

But Mr. Jones seemed to have been wrong or misled from the start.

Minutes after he announced the cancellation alongside Imam Muhammad Musri, a well-known Islamic leader in Florida who had been trying to broker a deal, Mr. Musri contradicted Mr. Jones’s account. He said that Muslim leaders of the project in New York had not actually agreed to find a new location. “The imam committed to meet with us but did not commit to moving the mosque yet,” Mr. Musri said.

Even that may not be accurate. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the New York project, said in a statement that he had not spoken to Mr. Jones or Mr. Musri, who said later that he received the pledge of a meeting from a staff member in Mr. Abdul Rauf’s office.

The saga of Mr. Jones appeared likely to continue — with more pressure likely to come as well. In just the past week, the list of his critics had come to include Mr. Obama, the Vatican, Franklin Graham, Angelina Jolie, Sarah Palin, dozens of members of Congress and Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was among the first to declare that the burning of Korans would put Americans soldiers and civilians in danger.

That risk of violence seemed to be rising, as large protests against Mr. Jones were staged over the past week in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Jakarta, Indonesia. It led the Obama administration to work furiously to end Mr. Jones’s plans.

This is insane.

A pastor with a 50-member church in Florida is attracting worldwide attention.

WHY?

Why not ignore him and dismiss him as the nutcase that he is?

We know that in the Muslim world groups are always gathering to burn American flags and chant "Death to America" and "Death to Christians." It seems to be a favorite pastime over there. Thousands take part, but there's no concern whatsoever about inflaming the Western world. They don't care about offending us.

But here we have the doofus Jones and if he takes a match to a Quran, World War Whatever may break out.

It's crazy.

This is being fed by the media. The New York Times reports on Jones' latest statements and plans while it questions the media's role in the saga.

A renegade pastor and his tiny flock set fire to a Koran on a street corner, and made sure to capture it on film. And they were ignored.

That stunt took place in 2008, involving members of the Westboro Baptist Church from Topeka, Kan., an almost universally condemned group of fundamentalists who also protest at military funerals.

But plans for a similar stunt by another fringe pastor, Terry Jones, have garnered worldwide news media attention this summer, attention that peaked Thursday when he announced he was canceling — and later, that he had only “suspended” — what he had dubbed International Burn a Koran Day. It had been scheduled for Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Unlike the Koran-burning by Westboro Baptist, Mr. Jones’s planned event in Gainesville, Fla., coincided with the controversy over the proposed building of a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan near ground zero and a simmering summerlong debate about the freedoms of speech and religion.

Mr. Jones was able to put himself at the center of those issues by using the news lull of summer and the demands of a 24-hour news cycle to promote his anti-Islam cause. He said he consented to more than 150 interview requests in July and August, each time expressing his extremist views about Islam and Sharia law.

By the middle of this week, the planned Koran burning was the lead story on some network newscasts, and topic No. 1 on cable news — an extraordinary amount of attention for a marginal figure with a very small following. On Thursday, President Obama condemned Mr. Jones’s plan, and his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said that there were “more people at his press conferences than listen to his sermons,” in a bit of media criticism.

...The episode has given rise to at least a little soul-searching within news organizations. Chris Cuomo, an ABC News anchor, wrote Thursday afternoon on Twitter, “I am in the media, but think media gave life to this Florida burning ... and that was reckless.”

Yeah, it was really lame.

I suspect that on a daily basis the Bible is burned in protest in this country and around the world more often than the Quran.

The numbers don't matter. What matters is that the Jones case has been blown out of proportion and nearly into an international crisis.

Thank you, media. Good work!

It's nuts. Who is Terry Jones that he should be receiving this sort of attention?

Obviously, Jones doesn't really care about burning the Quran. He cares about satisfying his ego. Period.

Jones is like Richard Heene, orchestrator of the balloon boy hoax. They're media whores at heart, and the media are drawn to whores like moths to flames.

A protest doesn't have to be a media event, let alone a worldwide media event.

As an American, Jones and his flock can quietly burn Qurans. As long as he doesn't violate any fire codes or other regulations, he's good to go. End of story.

But Jones didn't want it to stop there, and I don't think the media wanted it to stop either until the whole thing started to snowball out of control and they realized how foolish it had all become. Plus, there was that added factor of the possibility of violence and death thanks to Muslim radicals being in the mix. Not good.

Now there's a lot of embarrassment to go around.

I think it's time for Jones to be stripped of his all-powerful monster status and sent back to being just another inconsequential loon.

Note: You can burn whatever book you want and there won't be any problem. Just don't alert the media or hold press conferences or post a recording of the event on the Internet.