Timing is everything.

[randomness]

From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10media.html:

A renegade pastor and his tiny flock set fire to a Koran on a street corner, and made sure to capture it on film. And they were ignored.

That stunt took place in 2008, involving members of the Westboro Baptist Church from Topeka, Kan., an almost universally condemned group of fundamentalists who also protest at military funerals.

But plans for a similar stunt by another fringe pastor, Terry Jones, have garnered worldwide news media attention this summer, attention that peaked Thursday when he announced he was canceling — and later, that he had only “suspended” — what he had dubbed International Burn a Koran Day. It had been scheduled for Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Unlike the Koran-burning by Westboro Baptist, Mr. Jones’s planned event in Gainesville, Fla., coincided with the controversy over the proposed building of a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan near ground zero and a simmering summerlong debate about the freedoms of speech and religion.

Mr. Jones was able to put himself at the center of those issues by using the news lull of summer and the demands of a 24-hour news cycle to promote his anti-Islam cause.

Fred Phelps must be ripshit.

Comments

[gee-tar.livejournal.com]

I appreciate the difficulty in choosing to remain silent on an issue and thus appearing to give tacit approval versus loudly denouncing it thus giving the issue more credence. General Petraeus is essentially in a lose-lose situation. Nevertheless, I'm not convinced his decision to issue a statement was the better one. I'm not sure if anyone in Afghanistan is actually going to listen to him, or if they do, believe him. But he did capture the attention of American media transforming the story from a minor thing buried in a paragraph on page 23 to front-page, above-the-fold news.

It'd be nice if the moderate Islamic world learned to ignore American extremists, though to be fair, American media does a terrible job of ignoring any extremists. However, as a consumer of one and not the other, I'm in a slightly better position to tell the American press on what we should focus on.