This year’s 9/11 commemoration was like no other and this because of a decision to build a mosque near Ground Zero, seen by the majority of Americans, and acknowledged even by their President, as “hallowed ground”.
When the question of building the mosque surfaced and public opposition to the idea grew, President Barack Obama jumped in where angels would have feared to tread. It was not Presidential business and by making it his, Mr Obama opened a Pandora’s Box out of which, eventually, Terry Jones, a self-proclaimed pastor of 50 souls, if that, floated in surreal fashion over the entire American and, indeed, international landscape.
The President’s initial, pre-pastor intervention, has been criticised on three counts. Initially, he gave the building of the mosque his blessing. He later qualified that approval by saying that he “was not commenting on the wisdom of making the decision to put the mosque there” but on the right that people have to put a mosque there. It was only after that it struck him that there may be a question of insensitivity involved in asking for a mosque to be built on “hallowed ground” and he could “only imagine the continuing pain and anguish and sense of loss that (families of 9/11 victims) may go through”.
In steps an unknown from Gainesville, Florida, who declares he intends to publicly burn copies of the Koran unless plans to build that mosque near Ground Zero were rolled back. It was a declaration that further embarrassed Mr Obama. He was only energised into some form of reaction after an international and strident outcry from key allies like Pakistan and Indonesia and other Muslim countries. But his response, compared with that of his Secretary of State and rival for the Presidency, was slow-footed. For her part, well before Mr Obama had reacted at all, Hillary Clinton denounced the pastor’s intentions as “disrespectful and disgraceful”.
By the time the President stepped in, the media had taken over a non-story and broadcast it to the four corners of the world. The four corners of the world seemed to descend on Gainesville, now immortalised, and on Pastor Jones.
No copies of the Koran were burnt on September 11 but Pastor Jones still refuses to apologise for having made the threat and renewed accusations that radical Islam was a “destructive” religion.
The problem some Americans are now having is one of identity, not just their own but, perhaps more seriously, so important is his office, the identity of their President. They are starting to ask what he stands for. That is a dangerous question to ask, one not made since the days of President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.
Pastor Jones’s threat to burn the Koran was irredeemably malevolent. Only an increasingly secular mind-set sees no harm in the threatened gesture. A gesture by just one man that could have set the whole world alight.
Yet, it would be opportune to ask Muslims and their governments, who have understandably raised their voice in condemnation, where they stand when, as has often been the case, non-Muslim religions are denied their right to build places of worship in their lands or, indeed, the right to worship itself. Worse, where do they stand when Christians in particular are murdered in Muslim countries not for burning the Koran but for living by the Bible?
There are many lessons to be learnt from Pastor Jones’s folly.