US pastor Terry Jones has put away his gasoline and scrapped his plan to publicly burn the Koran, BBC News reports.
The pastor from Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, had planned to burn the Koran on September 11 to protest against a mosque that was to be built at Ground Zero. Since the mosque has moved a few blocks away, Jones has decided to respect the Muslim holy book and abandoned his plans for a public book burning. He’s also encouraged members of his church (who number less than 50) to stay away from biblio-inflamation. Jones told a press conference, “We would right now ask no one to burn Korans. We are absolutely strong on that.”
Jones, author of Islam Is of the Devil, has not had a last-minute fit of tolerance however. He claims to have reached an agreement with the imam of the planned New York mosque that has let him put away his gasoline. There’s some doubt if Jones' book burning threats had any impact on the decision though as the imam’s wife, Daisy Khan, commented, “We don’t know anything about it”.
Discussion has raged in the US all week about the pastor’s project. At Newsweek they asked “Is the Koran worth burning?” concluding that if Jones had gone ahead with his plans to burn the Koran then September 11 would be “given over to the violent and the prejudiced.”