9/11 anniversary: Charged with hate

Pastor Terry Jones and other members of the lunatic fringe are doing Osama bin Laden’s work for him

Editorial

The Guardian, Saturday 11 September 2010

larger | smaller

Article history

When Andy Warhol predicted in 1968 that in the future everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes, he could not have meant Pastor Terry Jones. The idea that t he world's media has been hanging on every word uttered by a low-rent bigot with a gun – who has been mulling over whether to burn 200 copies of the Qur'an today – is grotesque. Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus, Robert Gates, the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan and lastly Barack Obama himself have all been sucked into the media maelstrom created by the pastor with a dodgy past and 30 congregrants. And the circus is not over yet. Jones plans to fly to New York to discuss the proposed location of the Islamic centre near Ground Zero with the New York imam Feisel Abdul Rauf.

Whether or not this meeting takes place – and last night the pastor was still threatening to burn the Qur'ans if it did not – the damage has already been done. A protester was shot dead after a crowd of 10,000 converged on a German-run Nato base in north-eastern Afghanistan. Thousands of Indonesian Muslims demonstrated outside the US embassy in Jarkarta. President Obama has said and done the right things, neither reacting too soon – and thus inflating the importance of the pastor – nor too late. But the vulnerability of America's image in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the possibility that it would be recast by the lunatic fringe of Christian fundamentalists at home, is all too real. The pastor may be the most extreme version of it to date, but he is symptomatic of a larger trend, particularly in Florida. In May a mosque in Jacksonville was attacked with a pipe bomb, and a mosque south of Miami was attacked twice last year, once with gunfire. The pastor may have been condemned by Sarah Palin, but anti-Islamic rhetoric has begun to creep into the words of some Republican political candidates in the state.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is planning to distribute 200,000 copies of the Qur'an under an initiative called Learn, Don't Burn. Its spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, said that the group's research shows that when people learn about what it is they are supposed to be hating, intolerance lessens. This is the right reaction, even if it feels at the moment like trying to hold back an incoming tide. There are around 7 million Muslims in the US, but no one knows for sure as they are as ethnically and culturally diverse as America is itself. This community is already fully integrated. Reactions such as seeing the headscarf as a symbol of "sharia by stealth" will, if allowed to continue unchecked, reverse this process.

As we report today, growing numbers of Muslims who have lived in America for most of their adult lives, whose children do all the things American kids do, are enduring a backlash of hostility and suspicion on the ninth anniversary of al-Qaida's assault on New York and the Pentagon. Islam is thus portrayed not as a faith but an invading system of government and justice. Mosques are not religious centres but the outposts of "radical Islam". While this mood is driven by politics in an election year, Republicans do not have to drill that deep. After nine years of incubation, anti-Muslim sentiment has burst on to the scene. Ignorance triumphs, and as the Tea Party activists are discovering, if you lie often enough and loud enough, it works. Nearly one in five Americans suspect that their president is secretly a Muslim.

Europe has got very little to teach America on this score, and about the last person it should be exporting to New York to speak at a rally today to oppose the Manhattan mosque plan is Geert Wilders, the virulently anti-Islamic Dutch political leader. The one thing European leaders should be telling America is not to go down the path that Holland, Switzerland, France and Austria have trod on this issue, each in different ways alienating the very communities on which their intelligence services depend to defend them against al-Qaida's plots. The pastor is doing Osama bin Laden's work for him.

Printable version