my social production

nedhepburn:

I just got off the phone with Dove World Outreach Center, the “church” that’s pulling the ‘Burn The Koran’ stunt on the anniversary of 9/11.

It’s a for-profit church that runs a furniture business out of the back of the building. They have an eBay store. They’re a rather small church of around 50 congregants. That’s… fifty. Not five thousand. Not five hundred. Fifty.

This stunt is, fundamentally, about fundraising for the church, who recently lost their tax-exempt status due to their for-profit furniture store business that they run on the same property as the church. Via the view of pastor Terry Jones (who was not available for comment for my particular story, anyway) that Islam is “evil”, they basically created this media stunt and from what I gather in the tonality and word-choice of the women I spoke to is already overwhelming them with the incredible sheer number of people that oppose it.

There appears to be two different people running the phone lines there, one of whom admitted to having knowledge of more than one of the children of members of the congregation currently fighting in Afghanistan and the dangers that it might pose, but that “fighting the evils of Islam” is their churches “top priority”. Other than that, they hung up after two minutes. I’ll post the audio later if I get the chance. 

Interesting how it only really takes a couple of assholes to cause such a commotion.