Quotes of the Day

There was a time when Terry Jones, the pastor at the center of the Koran-burning storm, might have felt right at home in Gainesville. A generation ago, the north Florida college town was comprised of a conservative Bible Belt community best known for the invention of Gatorade. The University of Florida (UF) football team didn't field its first black player until 1970. Ideas like interfaith dialogue and homosexual rights were as far away as the Sodom and Gomorrah of Miami.

But the Gainesville that Jones inhabits today is a lot different. In the past couple of decades, as UF has gained academic stature and become an increasingly popular choice for students from other parts of the country and the world, Gainesville (pop. 125,000) has morphed into a progressive metropolitan area known as much for recycling as for religion. This year, it elected its first openly gay mayor, and with a Muslim population that's grown to 1,500, its interfaith relations are widely considered among Florida's best. Says Ismail ibn Ali, 21, a UF senior and head of the Islam on Campus group: "People here are a lot more open and accepting than I expected for a town in the middle of the Bible Belt."

And that, say locals, helps explain why Jones, the pastor of the Evangelical Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, plans to burn the Koran on Saturday to mark the anniversary of 9/11 — and most likely set off a bonfire of protest across the Muslim world that U.S. officials fear could put American troops and citizens abroad at greater risk. In a city where there's really no longer a place for the kind of religious intolerance promoted by Jones' shrinking congregation, which has fewer than 50 members and whose website recently decried Gainesville's prevailing credo of "coexistence," Jones is simply lashing out for attention in the only way delusional bigots know how.

But what's most ironic is that a big impetus for Jones' publicity stunt is the anti-Islamic feelings emanating from New York City — whose residents, we heartland philistines are told, are the nation's most enlightened, but whose majority opposition to a mosque near Ground Zero has only encouraged Islamophobes like Jones and, in the process, tainted the image of a Florida town that seems to deserve it least. "What Mr. Jones' so-called church is doing is definitely not representative of Gainesville," says Mayor Craig Lowe, who has declared Saturday "Interfaith Solidarity Day" in his city, for clerics, students and residents to plan peaceful events while the Dove folks torch a couple hundred copies of Islam's holiest book. "This actually presents us with an opportunity to project who we really are."

Although Jones has every First Amendment right to burn books, Lowe says city officials hope to persuade him to call off the Koran conflagration, which Jones insists on carrying out even though the Gainesville Fire Department has refused him a permit. This week Jones said that he and his congregation were "praying" over the statement of General David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, who warned that "images of the burning of a Koran would undoubtedly be used by extremists ... to inflame public opinion and incite violence." Christian leaders across the U.S., among them conservative Evangelicals, have condemned Jones' plan; his property insurer has canceled the Dove center's coverage and the North Carolina bank that holds the church's mortgage is demanding repayment of the $140,000 balance.

But Jones, 58, who is packing a pistol because of death threats he claims he's received, told CBS's Early Show on Wednesday morning that he is "still determined to do it" and send a message to "radical Islam" that it can't "push their agenda upon us." Jones, a bushy-mustached Missouri native who until a couple of years ago also ran the Dove's sister church in Germany, has written a pamphlet titled "Islam Is of the Devil." It's the same message he and his congregants have painted on signs that they plant alongside Gainesville roads and on T-shirts that they love to parade around the UF campus. He's also endorsed the anti-gay crusade of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, whose members stage protests at the funerals of U.S. service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The WBC says the deaths of these soldiers is punishment from God for the U.S.'s condoning homosexuality.)

Such is the sad ignorance that Gainesville and the rest of the country are having to deal with this week. Jones admits he's never even opened a Koran — and doesn't know, therefore, that if he did, he'd find out he's about to burn a text that mentions Jesus Christ in reverential tones almost 100 times. Although Muslims don't believe that Jesus was God incarnate, as Christians do, they venerate him as a prophet and "believe in his miracles," says ibn Ali. But Jones is no theological heavyweight. In fact, Dove's standing as a tax-exempt religious institution is under investigation by Alachua County officials because of accusations by former church members that Jones and his wife require congregants to work for free at his for-profit company, which sells furniture on eBay. (The Joneses deny the charge.)

An equally pathetic facet of this exhibition is that if extremist Muslims do respond with violent or even terrorist acts — which will of course only prove them no worthier of being called true Muslims than Jones is worthy of being called a true Christian — the pastor will no doubt claim that as evidence that he was right all along. But as soon as the first match is struck on Saturday, communities like Gainesville will confirm that they were right all along to move beyond the likes of Jones. And they might also conclude that the residents of enlightened cities like New York aren't always such tolerant examples themselves.

• Tim Padgett
• The Florida town of Gainesville wants nothing to do with the Koran burning of Terry Jones, an ugly stunt aimed at reviving the fortunes of a failing church