A reader writes in with an email from Dove World, the ministry of Florida's Terry Jones, whose plans to burn Korans to mark 9/11 have just received a 2011 performance art grant from the National Endowment for the Arts -- of course, that's obviously not true at all, but with a deft twist Leftward, it could well be. Anyway, back to the church email shared by a reader. It describes a situation where the walls are closing in on the church organization, namely:
City of Gainesville has denied the church a burn permit.
RBC Bank has called in its mortgage on the property, meaning that there is now a limited time to pay it off.
Cotton All-Lines Insurance has cancelled its commercial insurance policy on the church property, which puts the mortgage into immediate default.
And a commenter at Lawrence Auster's View from the Right notes that Dove World's internet provider Rackspace shut down the Dove World church website. The commenter reports:
The center 'violated the hate-speech provision of our acceptable-use policy,' explained Rackspace spokesman Dan Goodgame. 'This is not a constitutional issue. This is a contract issue,' said Goodgame, who added he did not know how long it had hosted the church's sites. Not quite the same thing, but would Kurt Westergaard's cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad also violate Rackspace's AUP? How about Christopher Hitchens' Slate articles? Could articles from one-time Rackspace poster child The Onion pass muster?
Update via Drudge: Now AP reports it will not "distribute images images or audio of the Quran-burning demonstration planned for Saturday evening by a Gainesville, Fla., church." And neither will Fox News, which has issued little explanation. AP writes:
"AP policy is not to provide coverage of events that are gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend," [editorial standards editor Thomas] Kent wrote. "In the past, AP has declined to provide images of cartoons mocking Islam and Jews. AP has often declined to provide images, audio or detailed descriptions of particularly bloody or grisly scenes, such as the sounds and moments of beheadings and shootings, displays of severed heads on pikes and images of hostages who are displayed by hostage-holders in an effort to intimidate their adversaries and advance their cause. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis."
Funny, the boldfaced list above brings to mind only acts of jihad: the beheadings of Nick Berg (depicted below, just before his murder) and Daniel Pearl, for example, as well as countless hostages of jihad groups. Thus a symbolic act against jihad, a symbolic act that is protected by the Constitution and harms no living thing, has become the equivalent of the most grisly and unspeakably cruel acts of jihad, and in the proudly blinkered eyes of the free press.
