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Pastor Terry Jones says he’ll call off his Koran burning party on 9/11.

According to a BBC report, he made this statement:

This has been for us a very, very difficult, trying time. We have been in much thought and prayer over this whole period.

A lot of times we were asked what would it take for us to call this thing off. We have thought it over many times. We felt very convinced that we should do this.

We thought about what would have to happen for us to call our event off. As we prayed about that, in the past we did have one idea.

This idea we put out in prayer to God. That if he would want us to call this off, if we have accomplished our goal, then our thought was the American people do not as a whole want the mosque at the Ground Zero location.

That if they were willing to either cancel the mosque at the Ground Zero location, or if they were willing to move it away from that location, we would consider that sign from God.

We have, or he has [indicating Iman Muhammad Musri, standing beside him], been in contact with the imam in New York City.

I, with the imam here, will be flying up there on Saturday to meet the imam at the Ground Zero mosque.

He has agreed to move the location. That of course cannot happen overnight. But he has agreed to move that.

We felt that that would be a sign that God would want us to do it.

The American people do not want the mosque there. And of course Muslims do not want us to burn the Koran.

The imam has agreed to move the mosque. We have agreed to cancel our event on Saturday. And on Saturday I will be flying up there to meet with him.”

So Pastor Jones is flying to New York to meet Iman Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the proposed mosque and community center two blocks from Ground Zero. I wonder how he’ll explain this to the imam:

Or this:

It would seem Pastor Jones’s god is both a blackmailer and a gangster. “Move de mosque, punk, or we burn de books.”

Pastor Jones is of the opinion the American people “as a whole” do not want the mosque two blocks away from ‘Ground Zero’. He, and possibly his god, are wrong.

Of those Americans that really matter – the people of Manhattan – only 31% were opposed to the siting of the mosque. Among New Yorkers, only 53%, slightly more than half, were opposed. Unsurprisingly, the further away pollsters lived from the site, the more they were against the mosque; probably because they weren’t personally involved, simply swayed by the negative media attention. Even so, one third had no problem with its siting.^[1]

Hardly the American people “as a whole”.

Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the Ground Zero site, said today that moving the mosque could stir up racial hatred abroad:

If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse. The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack.”^[2]

He’s probably right. It’s one of those ‘damned if we do, and damned if we don’t’ situations that America is really good at getting itself into. It’s why this country needs a bigger military than anybody else.

If the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his people agree to move the site away from Ground Zero, Pastor Jones and his tribe of christian nutters will think they’ve won a great battle.

Of course, they’ll be wrong.

The true winner will be the Islamic faith; the reason blatantly obvious to anyone sufficiently removed from the half-baked emotion of the issue to still think clearly.

^{[1] “68% of Americans Oppose ‘Ground Zero Mosque'” TPM, August 11th 2010}

^{[2] “Imam Says Moving Mosque Site Could Endanger National Security” DNAInfo – Manhattan Local News, September 9th 2010}

Filed under: You really got yourselves into this one, America

While Pastor Jones of Florida raves about burning copies of the Koran, US General David Petraeus publicly denounces him, saying such an act would put the lives of American soldiers at risk.

The intervention of such a high-ranking military official as Petraeus only serves to further highlight Jones’s brain-dead scheme, providing the US media with even more fodder for their insatiable news machines.

No-one has, as yet, chosen to point out that no US soldier’s life would be on the line if they weren’t all busy tramping over, and waging purposeless war on, several Muslim nations.

Filed under: Where’s the common sense

If there’s one thing I despise about America, it’s the ability of a small minority here to whip up a national fervor. The Dove World Outreach Center in Florida has a congregation of only fifty members, yet its pastor’s decision to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has induced a reaction that’s been skilfully spread throughout the world.

Pastor Terry Jones is a sad, sad, man. He says he’s prayed long and hard about his decision to go ahead with the burning, and has apparently convinced himself his wild and dark thought processes are some sort of communication from his god.

Presumably, it’s down to the great American notion of ‘Freedom’ to do as one wishes, that inspires the US media to turn this half-baked, petty, and amazingly belated response to the attacks of 9/11, into a world-shattering event.

Truthfully, in any other country of the Western world, Pastor Jones would be equally entitled to do as he wishes. The difference is that, anywhere other than America, no bugger would take the slightest notice. He might make five lines in the local rag, but only after the event and if there were no dog or cat show hitting the headlines on the same day.

It’s time America learned to ignore its idiots. God knows, it has enough of them. If it’s not politics it’s religion, and if it’s not religion, it’s some crank trying to unload snake oil.

^{[1] “US church defiant despite condemnation of Koran burning” BBC, September 8th 2010}

Filed under: More religious nutters