Terry Jones: How the Mad Pastor Oozed Back
"The world tried to ignore Terry Jones' "Koran trial"—until it incited deadly riots. The fringe preacher tells The Daily Beast's Leon Dische Becker how he pulled off the bloody stunt.
Pastor Terry Jones had just been informed that Jamaat-ud-Dawah, an Islamic organization banned in Pakistan, had issued a fatwa against him. "$2.4 million on my head!" he said, apparently exalted. Is that true? I asked him. (I have interviewed Jones several times now, and know that a fatwa is the kind of thing he brags about, exaggerates—especially to a print journalist. Later I'll find out that the price on his head is only $2.2 million.) "It is!" he says, promising that Mrs. Sapp, his media-relations person, will "shoot" me all the relevant names and publications, as soon as our interview is over. . . . . .
.....Imam Musri is worried that the violent outbursts in Mazar-i-Sharif are only the beginning. "All news channels are carrying this story now. Terry Jones has played into the hands of extremists on the other side—as he intended to. And their response will be fierce." One such extremist, Anjem Choudary, played right back into the pastor's hands. "Whoever insults the prophet, kill him," he said, as a matter of course. "It's the same as Theo Van Gogh. Sometimes the message has to be drummed home to people: Do not insult the prophet. Yet people still continue to do it and they will continue to face the consequences."
Unfortunately, precisely those arguments attract people like Terry Jones and his congregation of 30 to spectacular acts of Islamophobia. As long as insulting Islam generates a disproportionate response in the Middle East, reckless, attention-hungry Westerners will think up new, creative ways of insulting the religion. The only way to hurt a Terry Jones is to ignore him. His symbolic struggle against radical Islam is actually a tangible struggle against his own obscurity."