@rabel22,
rabel22 wrote:
This idiot has used this burning thing to increase his church membership. More money for him and all the like thinking idiots in the area will flock to his church thanks to stupid newspapers and media making an unknown famous.
Well, i think that is a pretty accurate description of the initial motivations for this international debacle, but it hardly sums it up.
It seems to me that the situation shapes up like this: Small-time charismatic preacher, kicked out of the German pentecostal church he set up for being too much of a nut-bag, sets out to make a name for himself with an inflammatory act. The motivations: aside from those already mentioned? To draw national (and possibly international) support to his intolerant agenda, and by uniting its numbers in defense of a central symbolic act, increase a fanatical fringe group's social influence on national (and international) events.
Once the obvious drawbacks of the scheme were (metaphorically) beaten into the pastor's head, i.e. increased anti-US sentiment, the increased danger to US soldiers in various parts of the world, global moral outrage and mockery, etc, etc, he decided to
postpone the burning of the Koran.
In this short interval, he either came upon the idea of finding a political way of equating the building of the mosque a few blocks away from Ground Zero with book-burning, or the idea was fed to him by those of his party or his religion that quietly supported his ridiculous crusade. Now he is trying to hold the American builders of that church ransom, hoping that they are more concerned with the American way of life, and actual American lives, than he is. He still
threatens to hold the book-burning, which while symbolically supporting his faith's self-righteousness will ultimately undermine its effectiveness on a world-wide scale, hoping to blackmail other Americans into betraying their own faith.
Who would have imagined such a thing could happen? ...I can think of a few people who could, and would, imagine it...
my final answer on the question: "How do you see the burning of Holy Koran by pastor Terry Jones?":
An act of cocksure bravado turned into an act of terrorism.
"Is he what America stands for?"
Sometimes. The US is a big place with lots of different points of view. Some people, i don't have any accurate count of them, support Jones. "America" doesn't stand for something, so much as it is an abstraction of a lot of contrary things.