US officials are monitoring the situation and the military is fearful for the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan and elsewhere if Jones goes ahead with his plan, announced on his website, to set fire to the Qur'an next week.
Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Centre in Gainesville, Florida and self-appointed scourge of Islam, has set a deadline of 5pm on Saturday April 28 for his demands to be met for the release of a Christian religious leader in Iran. If the Iranian cleric Youcef Nadarkhani is still imprisoned, Jones says he will set fire to a Qur'an and multiple images of Muhammad.
The threat from Jones comes on top of a row over the publication this week by the Los Angeles Times of pictures showing US troops with dismembered bodies in Afghanistan in 2010 and the apparently accidental burning of Qur'ans and Islamic religious documents by US troops at Bagram airport in Afghanistan in February that left 41 dead and more than 200 injured.
The last time Jones organised such a spectacle was on March 20 last year when he burned a Qur'an dressed in a judicial robe in the grounds of his church. The act prompted attacks on a UN compound in Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan in which seven UN employees died, and there were other fatal protests around the region.
Asked by the Guardian whether the cost in terms of lives lost of his previous escapade did not make him pause, Jones said that the impact of his Qur'an burning was not his responsibility. "What happened last time and what could happen this time is not our responsibility. All we did was burn a book. It posed no threat to anyone else, yet riots broke out several thousand miles away – which just proves how extreme Islam is."
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