Top Stories More Important than Quran-Burning Nut Job, By Juan Cole

 The horrible era of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States yielded a one-day silly season on Thursday, covered wall-to-wall by the US cable news channels. The weird cultist Terry Jones, fired from his church in Cologne, Germany last year for abusing his congregants, preaching hate-filled sermons, and demanding absolute obedience, was favored by an unprecedented telephone call from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asking him not to burn the Quran, the Muslim scripture, on Saturday. Jones, who can’t seem to get even 50 people to follow him in Gainesville and is a nobody with a nasty stunt, is nevertheless getting millions of dollars worth of free advertising for his lunacy courtesy Time Warner, Newscorp, etc. If there were any responsible adults left in the producers offices of the major television news shows, they would have long since pulled the plug on this non-story. Then Imam Mohammad Musri of central Florida came out and announced that he and Jones would be flying to New York to see Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on Saturday. Jones seemed to be under the impression that he was in a position, by calling off the Quran-burning, to force Abdul Rauf to move his proposed inter-faith community center. Then Abdul Rauf came out and said he’d had no contact with Musri or Jones and though he was glad the book-burning had been called off, he wasn’t going to have the issue toyed with. Jones replied that he had been lied to and was only suspending the Quran burning and reserved the right to go ahead with it.