Well, this is good, at least:The pastor of a small US church who planned to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11 has cancelled his protest.
Terry Jones said he was calling off the event after the group behind a planned Islamic centre near Ground Zero in New York agreed to relocate it.
(...)
But the organisers of the New York centre said no agreement had been reached with Mr Jones.
AFP news agency quoted Daisy Khan, wife of the imam behind the project, as saying: "We don't know anything about it".
Hah, I like the part where he blatantly lied about his reasons to save face. (Edit: Actually, "lied" is too harsh... it seems he's actually going to meet with the people behind the mosque at some point, so perhaps in his addled mind that means they "agreed to relocate it.") I feel like, just perhaps, the fact that the president, the secretary of state, the commander of the U.S. military, numerous current and former world leaders, and the Pope all told him this was insanity might have played a larger role. (Either that or behind-the-scenes CIA maneuvering... who can know, really?) But if that's what it took for him to be able to rationalize backing down, then I'll take it.
My vote would have been the same as everyone else's: he has the right to burn the books if he wants. That's freedom of speech, and that principle is at the core of the American way of life. But it would be a terrible idea - not just terrible, but DANGEROUS. Remember when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published those cartoons of Muhammad in 2005? The fundamentalist backlash against that was sheer insanity. Protests all over the world. Three Danish embassies were torched. The guy who drew the cartoons is STILL under 24-hour guard and has had numerous attempts on his life.
Nonetheless: if this fool had gone ahead with his plans, we would have no right to stop him. Like the Danes, we can't censor what Americans decide to say and do in America just because we're scared of what the Muslim world would think. That would be abandoning one of our central founding principles - freedom of speech - out of fear.