At any given moment the desk at which I type this is littered with books, layers upon layers forming a sort of geological record of my failed, pseudo-intellectual ambitions. If I chose to, I could select a book right now, take it into the garden with a box of matches, and set fire to it. It would be a fairly senseless act, and a waste of a tenner, and my reputation with the neighbours would reach depths not plumbed since the thing with my… thing; but it would be my right to do so.
Similarly, Pastors Terry Jones and Wayne Sapp are perfectly entitled to burn their Koran. As political acts go it's a faintly pathetic one - putting a book 'on trial' reveals far more about the Pastors' fears and desire for publicity than it does about the book - but he's more than welcome to do so. Much more intelligent and considered was PZ Myers' infamous cracker desecration and its message that "nothing must be held sacred. "
It's equally pathetic to respond to such a provocation with violence – the irony of the massacre of UN workers in Afghanistan is that by resorting to force, those responsible have simply highlighted their own weakness; people with genuine strength and confidence are not sent into a murderous rage by the burning of an old book.
In any case, the fault for what happened at the UN compound in Mazar-e-Sharif lies with those fundamentalists in Afghanistan. Neither the pastors nor the media should be held accountable for the actions of extremist militants. We should be free to mock religious beliefs and symbols as we see fit.
And yet it's troubling to see the sheer amount of exposure Jones and his followers have been given over the last several months (which of course I'm ironically contributing to here). If some daft bugger burns a Koran in the forest, does it matter? Probably not, but Terry Jones, cutely-described by the Telegraph as, "a homophobic used furniture salesman with a love of controversy," is no ordinary daft bugger; he and his glorious silver moustache are a global media phenomenon.
The legend of Pastor Jones is to a large extent a creation of the media (both traditional and new-fangled), fuelled by perhaps ill-advised comments from political figures who saw fit to wade in. While his 9/11 Koran-burning stunt in the words of the Washington Post "started with a tweet" last July, it was endless saturation coverage of his threat in more established media that propelled him to international celebrity.
In the end Jones backed down, and the world was spared the dull irony of a religious man commemorating 9/11 with an ignorant and deliberately provocative attack on the symbols of a major ideology he believed to be evil. He had secured himself a platform though, and ensured that when he and his colleague eventually did carry out the Koran-burning last month, the world paid attention.
The validity of drawing a clear line of causality from the Pastors' actions to the ongoing violence in Afghanistan is of course debatable. A UAE paper for example highlights, "one report from Mazar-e-Sharif [that] suggests crowds were incited by local clerics when someone announced that not just one, but hundreds of copies of the Quran had been burned," while the BBC report crowds elsewhere shouting for US troops to leave Afghanistan and burning an effigy of President Obama, who of course spoke out against Jones last year and described the book-burning last weekend as "an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry."
So it would be silly to claim that the media hold responsibility for the killings of the UN staff; but on the other hand it's tempting to fall towards the conclusion I clumsily articulated yesterday, that providing Jones with such a powerful voice may have been a bit of a reckless thing to do – even if, as is probable, Jones was really just a convenient pretext for violence that might have happened anyway.
That may sound a little weak and self-contradictory on my part, and this is an issue I've wrestled with in an unsatisfactory way before. The coverage of the Raoul Moat manhunt and its target's eventual suicide last July led me to put several questions to the media which remain, to my mind at least, largely unanswered. To this day I do not understand what purpose was achieved by the press quoting Moat's mother saying "he would be better off dead," knowing full well that Moat was reading coverage of his plight and was agitated by it. The press can't really be held accountable for the tragic outcome of his six days on the lam, but was their reporting sensible? Did they contribute to the way things played out?
The "zombie controversy" surrounding the MMR vaccine presents a similar sort of problem. Journalists swept along with Andrew Wakefield's dodgy claims helped to create an environment in which public confidence in the vaccine fell dangerously, and the lives of children were put at risk. The decision not to vaccinate a child is ultimately the responsibility of the parent, but that doesn't absolve journalists of culpability for the impact their shoddy coverage may have had (or indeed Wakefield for his original 'research').
Journalists cannot be assigned direct guilt for the actions of fundamentalist militants, suicidal fugitives or misguided parents; but they ought to have the awareness to stop once in a while and consider what the impact of their stories will be, and what public interest they serve.
Jones has suggested to the world's press that his next step will be to "put Mohammed on trial." It is a cynical, calculated move which presses all the right buttons for those looking for an outrage. And all of us are good at having our buttons pressed - I have a Post-It® note stuck to the top of my monitor upon which is scrawled, "don't reply to whatever Delingpole's latest daft blog post is, the attention just encourages him!" in my own blood (of course I've failed here, just as I've failed to not talk about Jones by writing a whole article about him - what can I say, I'm a hypocrite.)
Thankfully, mainstream coverage of Pastor Jones and his gang had died down this year until now. A question journalists, editors and bloggers might want to ask themselves before writing more about Pastor Jones' increasingly transparent attempts to provoke outrage is this: what public interest is served by giving such a prominent platform to the bigoted ramblings of a minor Pastor and used-furniture salesman; what exactly, beyond sensational spectacle, is this coverage designed to achieve? How much coverage is too much coverage?
There probably aren't any definite right or wrong answers, but ultimately book-burning isn't a big deal unless people choose to make it one.
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