Former Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin called on the Florida pastor who is planning a Koran burning on Sept. 11 to cancel the event, and compared the book burning to the plan to build a Muslim community center two blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks in Lower Manhattan.
“People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation – much like building a mosque at Ground Zero,” Palin wrote in a note on her Facebook page. “I would hope that Pastor Terry Jones and his supporters will consider the ramifications of their planned book-burning event. It will feed the fire of caustic rhetoric and appear as nothing more than mean-spirited religious intolerance.”
While the man behind the book burning, Gainesville, Florida-based pastor Terry Jones, has said he is “praying” about whether to go through with the event on Saturday, he spent the week defending the planned event.
“We have firmly made up our mind, but at the same time, we are definitely praying about it,” he said in a television interview with CNN. “We are burning the book. We are not killing someone. We are not murdering people.”
The book burning has received international attention over the past few weeks, eliciting critical responses from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, The Vatican, and General David Petraeus, who said it will “undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan — and around the world — to inflame public opinion and incite violence.”