Pastor Terry Jones is an obscure obscurant whose pratings once reached fewer people than most Facebook status updates. In a sane world, his name would have languished unheard by all but his family, friends and the few dozen yokels who attended his Dove World Outreach Centre church in Gainesville, Florida. In the last few months, however, Jones has become one of the most famous preachers alive, the subject of demonstrations around the globe – some of them lethally violent – and condemnation from the planet’s highest offices. This week Jones was banned from the United Kingdom – a proposed speaking tour kiboshed by the Home Office on the grounds that Jones’ presence would be “not conducive to the public good”.
The ostensible reason for this opprobrium is Jones’ declaration last year that he intended to observe the anniversary of September 11, 2001, by burning a Koran. This was not, on its own merits, newsworthy: silly, unpleasant people say stupid things all the time and are ignored by CNN, the BBC and Al-Jazeera. In this instance, however, the world’s media and polity decided to turn Pastor Jones into a bogeyman. Though Jones’ opinions, in and of themselves, are no more interesting than the fulminations of the dishevelled gentleman shouting at bins in your shopping centre car park, his elevation to the status of global village idiot is instructive.
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