The pastor at the centre of the now global controversy that has raged over his church’s plans to stage a ‘Burn a Quran Day’ on the anniversary of 9/11, has temporarily placed these plans on hold.
Yesterday, Rev. Terry Jones was convinced to cancel these plans by an Orlando imam, Mohammed Musri, who told Jones that if he called off this event then the project of building an equally controversial ‘mega mosque’ near Ground Zero in New York would be rethought and the mosque would be relocated.
However, since then the imam leading the mosque building project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, has firmly denied that any such agreement had his authorization, and said that the project would go ahead as originally planned.
Jones claimed that since he had been promised the mosque project would be relocated that he was left with no choice but to step back from his earlier promise, and place the the Quran burning event on temporary hold rather than cancelling it outright, pending a meeting with the imam in charge of the project.
“We put a suspension on it because right now we are actually really disappointed and very shocked because if this turns out to be true, he (Musri) very clearly lied to us,” Jones said.
There have been daily updates in most major media publications detailing the latest twists and turns in the Quran burning controversy generating world-wide attention. World opinion is almost unanimously against the event, asides from small pockets of ultra-conservatives.
It seems though that there will be at least one more twist in this tale before its conclusion.