in Kabul, protesters burned Jones in effigy and chanted "Death to America" and "Death to Obama."
By Tara Bahrampour and Michelle Boorstein Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 8, 2010; 11:12 AM
The plan by a tiny Florida church to burn Korans on Sept. 11 is drawing condemnation from top U.S. officials and religious leaders, including the White House, the State Department and Gen. David H. Petraeus, who warned Tuesday that it could endanger U.S. troops in the Muslim world.
At the Dove World Outreach Center, a 50-member evangelical Christian church in Gainesville, the Rev. Terry Jones told CNN on Tuesday that he is “taking the general’s words very serious” and that “we are definitely praying about it,” leaving open the possibility that the event could be canceled. But he also said the plan is firm and is meant as “a warning to radical Islam” that “if you attack us, we will attack you.”
The 58-year-old pastor told the Associated Press that he has received more than 100 death threats and has started wearing a pistol strapped to his hip.
The planned burning of the holy book of Islam comes at a time of rising expression of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide, and many fear that it will harm U.S. relations with the Muslim world as NATO troop levels increase in Afghanistan.
Already, repercussions have begun. On Monday in Kabul, protesters burned Jones in effigy and chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Obama.”
In Washington, two dozen Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders from across the country gathered Tuesday for an Emergency Faith Leaders Summit on anti-Muslim sentiment.
In an op-ed piece published Wednesday in the New York Times, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a Muslim prayer leader in Lower Manhattan and chairman of a project to build an Islamic community center near the “Ground Zero” site of the destroyed World Trade Center, called on Americans to set an example of religious tolerance as they mark the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“Let us commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 by pausing to reflect and meditate and tone down the vitriol and rhetoric that serves only to strengthen the radicals and weaken our friends’ belief in our values,” Abdul Rauf wrote. He did not mention the controversy over the planned Koran burning in Florida but said his group would go ahead with the Lower Manhattan community center as part of its mission to “strengthen relations between the Western and Muslim worlds” and help counter radical Islamist ideology.