Our Mother of the Sacred Publicity in OD

I have been reading (not that there’s actually been a hell of a lot of choice) about Pastor Terry Jones* and his plans for tomorrow.

When I first heard about his plan to turn September 11th into ‘International Burn a Koran Day’ I thought to myself, this sounds strangely familiar. When the press started frothing at the mouth about the whole thing, dragging President Obama, William Hague and General Patreus into the mix, the feeling grew. When he finally announced that he had decided against it (now changed to it being merely ‘on hold’) I knew where I’d heard of something like this before.

In Jon Ronson’s excellent book Them: Adventures With Extremists, he writes about the time he spent with Omar Bakri Mohammed, a London based Islamic extremist. He quickly became hated in Britain for the things he was saying.

During the time he was was following Omar, the guy had a grand plan. He was going to hire out the 14,000 seater London Arena and hold the worlds biggest Islamic rally. Once word about this got out, media chaos ensued. There was a lot of frothing at the mouth about how this was evil and shouldn’t be allowed. There were calls for the Government to put a stop to the event.

Ronson tells about how Omar had a 4 stage plan for the event. The fourth stage? Cancellation. Blaming the Government and the owners of the London Arena, he called the whole thing off and went instead to Speakers Corner at Hyde Park.

But this is the point. As Ronson says, there was no way that Omar could afford the event unless it sold out. Which it wouldn’t. So, what was the point of the whole thing? To get publicity for Omar, to get people talking about him.

I suspect that was the whole point of the pastor of a little, 50 strong church in Florida, doing this. It’s not going ahead. It was never meant to.

Or so I thought. Then, when the event was cancelled, Pastor Jones stated that it was because the imam behind the community centre near 51 Park Place had agreed to move the centre. Instead of burning books (an entirely pointless, though legal act that I personally disagree with**) he and another person would make a trip to New York.

Only problem is that the person responsible for the community centre hasn’t the foggiest idea what Pastor Jones is on about. So the burning may be back on.

So it seems that I was wrong. Well, partially. I still believe that it was partly about publicity, it also appears to be some insane game of chicken with the imam planning 51 Park Place. But here’s where Pastor Jones has messed up. He thinks that if community centre isn’t moved then people will blame them for his actions. Sadly, he overstepped by having announced that the centre would be moved. Now, he has to go ahead with the burning (cos I don’t think the centre will be moved, nor should it be or his reputation will be even more ruined than it is now.

Oh, to all those Christians who are now at pains to point out that Jones doesn’t represent all Christians, can we now agree that not all Islamic extremists represent all Muslims. No? Ah well, nice try.

Will

*I, for one, would love to know what his Monty Python namesake would make of it.

**The main reason I’m against is because I hate seeing books destroyed.