Radical Florida cleric says he’s “reconsidering” cancellation of Koran burning.
Not sure I’ve ever seen a political ad quite like it. Just take a look.
From TPM Reader MA …
I remember being sent to monitor a tiny Ku Klux Klan rally in, of all places, Ann Arbor, when I was a stringer for the Detroit News in the early 1990s. Clearly they had chosen an avowedly liberal college town in the spirit of provocation in the hopes of getting some coverage. The editors told me that they didn’t want to give the KKK any free press, but I should show up in case anything newsworthy happened.
I remember that time the President and Secretary of Defense had to intervene to prevent a fringe pastor in Florida from dragging the United States into a global religious war. Those were strange days.
Several news outlets are now reporting that the Park51 folks say there is no deal with Florida pastor Terry Jones to move the “Ground Zero Mosque” farther away from the World Trade Center site.
We’ll have more shortly, but if you listened closely to the Central Florida imam who appeared with Jones at his press conference a short time ago, he only spoke of having arranged a meeting in NYC with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the public face of the Park51 project. The Florida imam didn’t mention a deal to move the GZM.
Christina Bellantoni interviews the local GOP candidate in Ohio who became an internet sensation overnight for his impassioned (perhaps unhinged is more apt) speech to the local Republican Party. Phil Davison concedes he didn’t even know what YouTube was before now.
Pastor Terry Jones just announced on live cable news that he has canceled his Koran-burning plans. The reason? According to Jones, the organizers of the planned Park51 Muslim center have agreed to move their project farther away from the World Trade Center site. That is a sign from god, Jones said, and just the kind of sign he and his followers in Florida were looking for to cancel the Koran burning. No word yet from the Park51 people on whether any such agreement has been struck. Jones says he is heading up to NYC on Saturday to meet with the Park51 folks. Color me skeptical. More soon …
Read the fascinating, bizarre and vaguely comic background of Pastor Terry Jones, the guy who wants to hold the Koran-burning festival down in Florida. Before he and his wife were expelled from Germany in 2008, he ran a charismatic church in Cologne for more than two decades. There he was in constant trouble for tax problems, accusations of being a cult, tragically failed faith healings. And it was there that he got increasingly involved in anti-Islamic rants. He also became the darling of Senate Republicans who claimed he was the victim of religious persecution in Germany. We’ve got the whole story here.
FBI and virtually everyone else trying to convince radical cleric Terry Jones to call off the Koran burning.
Speaking just now on MSNBC James Zogby made a very good point — and pressed Andrea Mitchell on it. His point was that sure, this Pastor Jones fool is one guy, who’s managed to get worldwide attention for his stunt. But you cannot separate him, as I noted below, from the whole climate of hate speech and anti-Muslim agitation from the Newt Gingriches and the Sarah Palins and the rest of them.
At that point, Mitchell jumped in and said, wait, Palin said she disagrees with the Koran burning. To which Zogby replied, something to the effect of ‘C’mon’. ANd that’s just the right reply. This is the standard approach of race haters and demagogues. They keep stirring the pot, churning out demonizing rhetoric and hate speech. Then some marginal figure does something nuts and suddenly … oh, wait, I didn’t mean burn Korans. Where’d you get that idea from? We were just saying that Islam is a violent, anti-American religion and that American Muslims should stop building their mosques and focus on apologizing for 9/11 and maybe get out of America. But burn the Koran? No way.
That’s a bit much.
Actions have consequences. This isn’t about one guy.