At least we know this, the nutty Rev Jones is having fun tweaking the media. To the media's annoyance.
“So will you say you’re going to burn a Koran anytime you want press coverage?” snapped a reporter with a German accent…
“You’re just using us! We should all leave!” someone yelled from deep in the media pack.
Silence – for a moment. “Yeah! Let’s all leave!”
Jones’s response: “Fine, we’re not press hungry, go!”
But no one moved, until Jones turned and shuffled back to the church.
And the media is wallowing in it.
Well, maybe not the whole media, there is one notable exception.
Of course it's not just the media that jumps when a guy with a book and a lighter says boo. Here's Victor Davis Hanson's thoughts.
We are reaching the point where the damage done to America’s image by 50 book-burners is outweighed by the damage done by hypersensitivity on the part of the United States government, which hopes to assuage the hurt feelings of those abroad who equate that tiny number with our culture at large — often in an abjectly hypocritical fashion. We know where this leads — to endless efforts to micromanage all elements of American life to protect the sensitivities of those who, by act and deed, are far more intolerant of different religions and cultures.
Already we’ve seen the omnipresent Imam Rauf suggest that, if he were not to get his selfish way, then nebulous, omnipotent radical forces abroad would be upset, and consequences for our troops would follow. His time would be far better spent either lecturing Saudi financiers to stop funding hate-filled madrassas and mosques or, even better, galvanizing world opinion over the carnage in Chechnya, where Russians used a level of violence against Muslims in Grozny that we have not seen since Mr. Assad leveled Hama.
If our leaders don’t relax, cool it, and stop these weird presidential “teachable moments” and all this stooping to editorialize about local irrelevancies (cf. the beer summit, the Tony Robbins–like escapades of the ubiqutious Imam Rauf, the line about Arizona law enforcement supposedly deporting the innocent “out to get ice cream,” etc.), we will devolve to the level of psychodrama. Indeed, this brilliantly entrepreneurial book-burning pastor has taken our government down to that level as it is. What’s next? Heaven forbid a gang-banger in East L.A. and his 50-person tribe should start sporting anti-Islamic insignia on their chests. Or Mr. Rushdie should quite rudely publish a sequel to The Satanic Verses. Two more inappropriate Danish cartoons? Is the Cabinet going to start devoting 3-4 hours a week to apologetic commentary directed at the Islamic world for the rude and uncouth among us?
Radical Islamists surely hope so.
And Richard Lowery wonders who is the real madman? ... Nixon?
Richard Nixon famously had his “madman theory” during the Vietnam War. He wanted the North Vietnamese to believe he was irrational (not such a stretch, as it turned out) and ready to do anything to end the war. Faced with this dangerous lunatic, the North Vietnamese would beg for peace.
The madman theory didn’t work out for Nixon, but it has now become the strategy of a slice of an entire civilization. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the leader of the Ground Zero mosque, says failing to build the mosque will threaten “national security” by empowering Islamic radicals. Practically everyone in America urged Pastor Terry Jones not to burn a Koran to avoid provoking Muslims around the world. This is the “madman theory” writ large: Don’t offend Muslims for fear of their wholly unhinged reaction."
"The danger is that threats of violence will intimidate us into limiting the ambit of freedom in the United States. It isn’t such a long step from saying Jones’s pyromania endangered national security to forbidding it for our own protection. In Europe, it can already be a crime to criticize Islam. This constitutes the importation of Islamic prohibitions on blasphemy that are used to stifle debate and inhibit reform."
"One day, perhaps, a Terry Jones will be invited as a performance artist at the Islamic equivalent of the Tate museum to “shock the Muslim bourgeoisie.” One day. Civilizational change doesn’t come quickly — the West’s escape from feudal backwardness took centuries and depended on fortuitous social and historical circumstances. In the meantime, we can’t be beholden to the dictates of madmen.
Though we might already have a form of defacto blasphemy laws...
Not only has the President and several high ranking cabnit members weighed in on this but now the FBI is interested.
Richard Fernandez wonders if others will follow Jones' lead.
What happens if the Administration’s fears of copycats come true? What if people in small or large groups forever mark September 11 by burning Korans starting with 2010? What then? The President’s blustering may have set up a Gessler’s Hat. When leaders push an unpopular policy by fiat they are bound to inspire defiance for its own sake. Sometimes a little thing can be made into big cause simply because nobody knows when to stop.
Though you don't really need to do anything, just make the threats and the media will come running.
We seem to be looking, then, at a case of a story that didn’t need to be a story at all, until the media turned it into one and the American government itself made it a bigger one. There’s probably someone somewhere in the world burning a Koran for one reason or another every day. If they don’t post it on YouTube it didn’t happen, though, and if the media doesn’t pick up on it, rioters don’t take to the streets of Kabul. No media coverage, no administration weighing in, no riots.
Jones may be obscure, but he’s evidently not stupid. While the Andres Serrano comparison remains apt, all this brings another figure to my mind: P.T. Barnum. The famed showman and circus founder knew how to manipulate his fellow man, and Jones, with his Mark Twain facial hair and his constant story changes, seems cut from the same cloth. “Every crowd has a silver lining,” said Barnum, and Jones has definitely figured out how to draw a crowd. Oh, don’t get me wrong here, his Koran burning is crankery of the first order (so was Serrano’s pictorial), but it’s crankery that either intentionally or accidentally is creating a teaching moment for the world. And here’s the lesson: Man threatens to burn Koran, sparks riots and gets his country’s flag and his own effigy burned, and has the world waiting on his every word.
Notice I didn’t say “Man burns Koran…” The mere threat is enough, because the possibility of riots and destruction in response is all too real.
He finishes with the quesiton:
And second, is it really worth trying to change serious national security policy to appease anyone who’ll riot and burn you in effigy for just threatening to burn a book?
It's not just national security policy. "Apeasing" in this case would require blasphemy laws. Free speech, ugly and stupid speech is still speech, would have to be curtailed in the name of "protection".
It's a real test to see who is okay with that idea. But hey, at least it'll get the nanny-staters and the Islamists working together... again.
Update: Fooled you!
Pastor: Now God’s telling me not to burn the Koran
I think, wish, and hope that we’re done with this guy now, but one more note before we leave him for good. Jones didn’t expose anything about jihadism that we didn’t already know; what he did expose is how pathetic and sensationalistic the media can be (we knew that too, of course, but the sheer extent of it in this case is astounding) and how weak the government’s defense of free speech remains whenever jihadis start getting restless.
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