Terry Jones



Terry Jones is the love-child of Ron Paul and Hulk Hogan a nutty American Christian pastor currently based in Florida. He heads a small church, ironically called the "Dove World Outreach Center". Jones and his church's main claim to fame is their threat to stage a mass burning of copies of the Qur'an to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 attacks in 2010. The book-burning was condemned by other religious leaders in a rare show of unity, and Jones initially wussed out. Eventually, on March 20th, 2011, he went ahead and burned a Qur'an and posted it on the interweb. This set off a massive shitstorm that led to many deaths in Afghanistan, as pissed off Muslims at protests turned violent.

Expulsion from Germany
In 2009, he was expelled from a religious group in Germany, which he had run in a climate of "fear and control" (and, it seems, financial impropriety).

Book burning
The first Qur'an burners might have been Muslims themselves. This burning, however, had initially been planned to go ahead on September 11th, 2010, coinciding with the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks but was canceled on the 9th after talks with Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Foundation of Central Florida. The rationale for canceling was an alleged agreement for moving the Park 51 site, although operators of that project have denied any knowledge of such an agreement. It later emerged that no such agreement was reached, and the situation degenerated into confusion and farce. Fred Phelps and several others then announced that they would stand in the gap for Jones and burn Korans if he didn't. By the time September 11th came around, Jones' church was swamped with the media, and it became clear that the entire affair was turning into (if it wasn't from the start) a farcical publicity stunt, with many in the media wondering if it was even right to afford Jones the publicity in the first place.

An unbridled rage
On March 20, 2011, he fucking showed us, though. Dressed in judge robes, he held a mock trial against the Qur'an and, not surprisingly, found it guilty of some very bad things. He did not bother to have a mock appeals process: he immediately proceeded to burn the Qur'an. This was all streamed on the Internet with helpful Arabic subtitles. This caused shit to blow up in Afghanistan. Protesters in Afghanistan were whipped into a frenzy by Muslim extremists; rioting ensued. Five demonstrators and seven UN workers were killed in protests in Mazar-e Sharif and at least nine were killed and many more injured in Kandahar. Of course, none of the people killed by the protestors had anything to do with Terry Jones, his church, or any kind of book burning: they were innocent victims of religious extremism. Jones doesn't feel like he did anything over the top, though, and he is pondering putting Muhammad on trial.

Other creepy shit
In June 2012, he and his followers hung an effigy of Barack Obama in front of Dove World Outreach Center headquarters for all of the usual batshit crazy reasons. The irony of him doing so in a state where racially-motivated lynchings were once common probably didn't occur to him; that, or he simply doesn't give a shit.

In September 2012, he and a mysterious "Israeli real estate developer"/filmmaker purportedly named "Sam Bacile" (who turned out to actually be an Egyptian Christian Copt Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, notorious for drug convictions, tax evasion, and bank fraud) helped publicize a movie called Innocence of Muslims. The movie isn't much more than a collection of intentional slurs against Muhammad in particular and Islam in general. The release of a 14-minute YouTube clip had predictable results, namely violent demonstrations across the Middle East. It was also blamed for the murder of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American citizens in the 2012 Benghazi attack, but evidence would eventually show that the attack on Benghazi was actually premeditated. Jones' reaction was pretty much what you'd expect in terms of taking personal responsibility, which just means that he's graduated to an even higher level of the job classification "irresponsible douchebag".