Terry Jones

[yolland]

Christian Post, April 23

Terry Jones, infamous for burning a Quran in Florida, was jailed for a brief time on Friday, preventing him from protesting in front of a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, as he had planned. He and fellow preacher Wayne Sapp had refused to pay a $1 peace bond set by Judge Mark Somers after a jury determined that his planned Good Friday protest would lead to violence. The two were released hours later after paying the $1.

Jones' demonstration was scheduled to take place Friday evening in front of what he says is America's largest mosque, the Islamic Center of America. He announced that he, along with a handful of others, would be protesting against "jihad, sharia, and the radicalization of Moslems in America."

"Our commitment to the Constitution is unwavering, not merely convenient, which makes your hyperbole about Sharia Law being practiced in the courts or civil law of Dearborn nonsensical," [Dearborn mayor John O'Reilly] stated in a letter Wednesday. "So, you are coming to protest against an imaginary threat that doesn’t exist in our community." He went further to denounce his actions as "twisted paranoia."

...O'Reilly said the city would not prevent Jones from expressing his free speech but instructed him to carry out his protest in "Permit Free Zones"--one of which included City Hall. Jones was denied a permit to protest in front of the mosque for "public safety reasons," according to city spokeswoman Mary Laundroche...Wayne County prosecutors, who asked for a bond of $45,000, argued that the protest would disturb the peace and pose a risk to the community's security. According to Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad, at least four serious threats of violence were made. They also contended that given it was Good Friday and there are Christian churches adjacent to the mosque, the protest would limit pedestrian access or add to traffic congestion.

Though disagreeing with Jones’ views, some have criticized the city, arguing that the government cannot order him to pay in order to express his First Amendment rights. "This is a complete abuse of the court process, and all those involved should be ashamed," Rana Elmir of the ACLU Michigan office told the Detroit Free Press. "The prosecutor's office and the Dearborn court turned the First Amendment on its head. What happened today should never have happened."

Dawud Walid, the Michigan director for CAIR, had been warning on the news for several days that preventing the protest would likely backfire, provoking Jones to sue the county and to challenge the order by attempting to protest again at the mosque. Looks like he was right, as Jones is now vowing to do both. Both Walid and the mosque's imam also expressed concerns that, in citing "public safety issues" as a reason for preventing Jones' protest (and thereby also the planned, far larger interfaith counter-protest), the city might wind up reinforcing stereotypes that Muslims can't be trusted to protest peacefully. I think they should've let him protest, but perhaps made him wait until next weekend when there wouldn't be Holy Week-related traffic complications (shouldn't a pastor have more important things to do with his time on Good Friday, anyway)?

Kind of surprised they didn't cite this in their "public safety" argument, though:

Detroit Free Press, April 22

Controversial Pastor Terry Jones accidentally fired his .40-caliber handgun while he was at a Southfield television studio Thursday night, according to police.The outspoken pastor, 59, of Gainesville, FL, was getting in the passenger side of his car at 11:10 pm after an interview when the Taurus handgun went off, sending a bullet into the floorboard, Southfield Police Lt. Nick Loussia said today. "Officers heard a gunshot, approached the vehicle, asked Mr. Jones if he was OK," Loussia said. Jones and the driver were in the parking lot of Fox2 studios on West 9 Mile. "He was, and they also observed he had a gun in his hand."

Officers took the gun, and also found another gun near the 42-year-old driver, a man from Florida traveling with Jones. Both men were carrying valid Florida concealed weapon licenses, which are recognized in Michigan, Loussia said. "Based on the facts of the investigation it did not appear a crime had been committed," Loussia said, explaining that officers returned the weapons and sent the men on their way. He did not know the type of weapon carried by the driver.

As he entered a Dearborn courtroom this morning, Jones told reporters that he had been up since 4:30 a.m. and firing his gun was "an accident."

Jones was invited to Dearborn by a local branch of a national militia group which calls itself "The Order of the Dragon." Hilarious; bunch of rednecks comparing themselves to a medieval order of knights fighting the Ottomans. Only in America...

[yolland]

by Asra Nomani (Daily Beast), Feb. 22

In the pre-dawn darkness Tuesday morning, I watched US Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force, as he issued a contrite apology for the burning of Qurans in northern Afghanistan at Bagram airfield. It had all the cultural sensitivies of a man schooled in the honor-shame culture of Afghanistan, Allen saying, "To the noble people of Afghanistan, salam-alai-kum," ("peace be upon you") the "tan" of "Afghanistan" pronounced with a deliberate short "a" sound, not like the long sound in "tan" leather. "I assure you, I promise you, this was not intentional in any way. And I offer my sincere apologies for any offense this may have caused," he said. "My apologies to the president of Afghanistan. My apologies to the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. And most importantly, my apologies to the noble people of Afghanistan." I felt uncomfortable just listening to him bend over backwards doing cultural sensitivity gymnastics. He went on to thank "the local Afghan people" who saved the Qurans, ending in Pashto with manana tashakor, or "thank you very much."

Meanwhile, outside Bagram, a crowd of the "noble" people threw rocks and set an Afghan police booth on fire. Reuters later reported that shots were fired into Koran-burning protests in Kabul, wounding several people. On the second day of protests, the Washington Post reported that Afghan officials said at least three people were killed after police opened fire on protests in Parwan province, where Bagram is located, to disperse thousands of anti-American demonstrators.

Watching the video of the apology and the protests, I just thought: how unfortunate. In the West, we bend over backwards to express cultural sensitivities that the most hardened of Muslim militants or the most ordinary of Muslims don't even practice. When militants firebomb mosques and plant suicide bombers in mosque congregations, they don't apologize for the Qurans that burn and smolder in the aftermath of their attacks. When I was on the pilgrimage in Mecca in early 2003, my family and I were on the top floor of the sacred mosque, where Qurans were scattered on the floor, offending some but not causing a riot.

Like the video of the Marines urinating on the bodies of slain Afghans, this isn't a debate about moral equivalence. Ten years into the war in Afghanistan, it's shortsighted (to put it nicely) for American soldiers, to be burning Qurans. But on the flip side, just like a lot of other misguided honors that Muslims are trying to protect in our community, from wounds dating back to the days of colonialism and harkening into the modern day with protections over the national sovereignty of Pakistan during the Osama bin Laden raid, we, as Muslims, go too far protecting our perceived "honor" at the expense of common sense. No book, while sacred, is equivalent to human life. In April 2011, demonstrators stormed the United Nations compound in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, killing 12 people, after a copy of the Quran was burned in Florida.

In our Muslim community, we're taught to handle the Quran respectfully—put the Quran on the highest shelf in the room, wrap it in cloth to protect it from dust, and do a ritual washing, called wudu, before we touch it. Hardliners go further. The Internet is filled with all sorts of rulebooks and folklore, like at a conservative Muslim website that even pushes the idea that "non-Muslims" can't touch the Quran. Another site says it's a "great sin" to enter a lavoratory with a Quran. Yet another conservative website declares that we can't "stop reciting when one yawns, for when reciting, one is addressing one's Lord in intimate conversation, while yawning is from the Devil." On a deeper level, I believe that we, as Muslims, have to change our relationship with the "sacred text" and make it something that we study, think about and critically examine—not "honor" with such blind reverence that we lose our sense of common sense and rationality. In Islam, we're taught to reject idolatry. Just as some in the Christian faith struggle with "Bibliolatry," or the worship of the Bible, I would argue that, in our Muslim faith, we face a similar struggle with "Quranolatry," a virtual idol worship of the Quran.

I learned this when I visited the pioneering Muslim feminist scholar Fatima Mernissi in Rabat, Morocco, some years ago. The pages on her Quran were dog-eared, and she read it without covering her hair or doing wudu, the traditions I was taught I had to do whenever I opened the Quran. "To me, the Quran is a research book," Mernissi said, respectfully. Her easy access to the Quran challenged my other-worldly relationship with the Quran, and, in a very magical way, she liberated me from relating to the book as if it was beyond my capacity for research and ijtihad, or critical thinking. Later, in the women's balcony at my mosque in my hometown of Morgantown, WV, I was intellectually liberated by pioneering modern-day Quranic scholars and their re-reads of the Quran. I read scholar Amina Wadud's book, "Quran and Woman: Re-reading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective," and scholar Asma Barlas' book, "Believing Women: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Quran." They challenged an even more sacred notion about the Quran that is most unsettling and disturbing, but also very much a part of the problematic relationship we, Muslims, too often have with the Quran: that we can't question how we read the Quran. In fact, I learned, we can, and indeed we had to do just that if we were going to see a progressive interpretation of Islam express itself in the 21st century. Something tells me their books weren't available at the detainee library at Bagram.

...In handling the Quran as I did, some—such as the "noble" men pelting rocks at Bagram—would say that I dishonored the Quran. But I arrived back home safely, as did my Quran. I penned this column, my Quran beside me, and I emerge now from my seat to tuck the Quran back into my bookshelf, not on the highest shelf, but—more significantly to me—within arm's reach.

I agree with her sentiments here, but I have to wonder if her eloquent and thoughtful case for a contemporary ijtihad isn't a lost cause with regard to the people whose actions inspired it. (Nomani is an Indian-American Muslim who often reports from South Asia; in fact, Danny Pearl and his wife were staying with her in Karachi when he was abducted and murdered back in 2002.) Does a space even exist in their culture within which the critical theological scholarship that she's arguing for would make sense? And if it doesn't, what else would need to change first in order for one to be opened up?

Lately there's been a rash of articles in Western media about baad, the traditional Pashtun practice of "resolving" a dispute between families by forcing a girl from the accused family into marriage with a man from the accusing family. (The practice remains common in Afghanistan, and to some extent in Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan as well.) Over and over in these articles, the girls and/or their relatives express the same sentiment: We're not happy with these arrangements either, but it's the only way to secure justice and prevent further vengeance; when we try taking matters to the local official courts (as opposed to the tribal councils), nothing at all happens unless you've got money for bribes, plus if the judge turns out to be a relative of someone friendly with either family involved (as he often does) there'll be no pretense of balance at all. And the reason this happens is that the official courts aren't reflective of or grounded in the surrounding culture; most judges are in it for the money and the connections, and haven't been steeped in any sort of public service ethos or civic awareness as we'd understand that. Likewise, in a country where less than a third of men (let alone women) have any education whatsoever, and the goal of education isn't cultivating original critical thought but rather the preservation of an ever-fragile basic social stability--what kind of space can there be for critical analysis of the most esteemed text of all? I'm a firm believer in the power of the human longing for justice to transform repression into renaissance, but how that happens is always informed by circumstances endemic to that place and time, not someone else's place and time.

[INDY500]

When militants firebomb mosques and plant suicide bombers in mosque congregations, they don't apologize for the Qurans that burn and smolder in the aftermath of their attacks.

That would be my first point but then again I'm an infidel.

[Pearl]

Egyptian protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy in Cairo on Tuesday and pulled down the American flag during a protest over what they said was a film being produced in the United States that insulted Prophet Mohammad, witnesses said.

In place of the U.S. flag, the protesters tried to raise a black flag with the words "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger", a Reuters reporter said.

Once the U.S. flag was hauled down, protesters tore it up, with some showing off small pieces to television cameras. Then others burned remains.

"This movie must be banned immediately and an apology should be made ... This is a disgrace," said 19-year-old, Ismail Mahmoud, a member of the so-called "ultras" soccer supporters who played a big role in the uprising that brought down Hosni Mubarak last year.

Many Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet to be offensive.

Mahmoud called on President Mohamed Mursi, Egypt's first civilian president and an Islamist, to take action. Many others were supporters of Islamist groups.

About 20 people stood on top of the embassy wall in central Cairo, where about 2,000 protesters had gathered.

"There is no god but Allah, Mohammad is Allah's messenger. We will sacrifice ourselves for you, Allah's messenger," they chanted, with many waving religious flags.

However, according to the website www.standupamerianow.org, the Christian Pastor Terry Jones, who angered Muslims by burning a copy of the Koran, was due to take part in an event on Tuesday called "International Judge Mohammad Day" in Florida in which it would symbolically put the Prophet on trial and play it out live over the Internet.

Egypt Protesters Attack U.S. Embassy In Cairo

[BEAL]

Seems as though Muslims are a very sensitive bunch!!!!

And way to keep making this dumbass pastor's ego keep growing and growing.

He knows by doing this he's going to create a reaction. Yet those other dumbasses over in the middle east keep falling for it.

I get that your prophet is sacred to you, but seriously get a grip and learn to ignore those who rile you up!

And what kind of a person is this christian pastor for doing this? Does he not realize that innocent people are going to get hurt, or even killed because of his actions? Doesn't seem like something Jesus would approve of.

[INDY500]

Originally Posted by BEAL

Seems as though Muslims are a very sensitive bunch!!!!

And way to keep making this dumbass pastor's ego keep growing and growing.

He knows by doing this he's going to create a reaction. Yet those other dumbasses over in the middle east keep falling for it.

I get that your prophet is sacred to you, but seriously get a grip and learn to ignore those who rile you up!

And what kind of a person is this christian pastor for doing this? Does he not realize that innocent people are going to get hurt, or even killed because of his actions?

I really don't want to defend this guy but no one will be killed or hurt because of his actions.

[BEAL]

I'm not going to put the full blame on this guy, but he stirred up a hornets nest and now we have a US Ambassador killed because of protests. Why were they protesting? Because of Terry Jones.

He has every right to say what he wants, but he also knows this is exactly the reaction that was going to happen.

How about we send Terry over to the middle east so he can explain his positions on Islam?

[cobl04]

[Kieran McConville]

Mrs Jones?

Oooh... no? I must be in the wrong house!