Florida preacher Terry Jones gives two-hour deadline for New York to call him over planned mosque at World Trade Centre site
The Florida pastor who sparked an international crisis with plans to burn hundreds of Qur'ans appeared ready to go ahead with the stunt – despite an intervention by Barack Obama.
Terry Jones gave a two-hour deadline to the New York Muslim leader behind a planned Islamic cultural centre near the site of the former World Trade Centre.
At a televised press conference, Jones read out his phone number and asked Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to call him to clarify whether the location of the mosque would be moved. He did not spell out what actions he would take if the call was not made.
Earlier President Obama attempted to defuse the crisis which today claimed several lives when thousands of Afghans protested against the potential desecration of the Muslim holy book.
Speaking at a White House press conference, Obama called on Jones to completely abandon his plan. "My hope is that this individual prays on it and refrains from it," the president said.
In Afghanistan, two people were killed and several were injured when police opened fire on protestors in the north-eastern city of Faizabad.
Unconfirmed reports from Farah province in western Afghanistan said one civilian was killed and three were wounded in violence which erupted when several thousand protestors gathered outside a Nato base in the Bala Baluk district.
The faceoff between Obama and the Florida pastor came on the eve of tomorrow's ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. With feelings running high across America, a series of commemorative ceremonies have been planned, as well as rallies in New York for and against the proposed Islamic centre.
Obama issued a blunt warning to Jones and any copycats who might be tempted to issue similar threats to burn Qur'ans in order to gain publicity. In a rare show of emotion, the president said burning Qur'ans would risk the lives of young Americans serving in the military in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the world. "This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters .... you don't play games with that," he said.
Jones, the pastor of a tiny pentecostal church in Florida, last night dropped - at least temporarily - his plan to burn Qur'ans after the intervention of the US defence secretary, Robert Gates.
Jones later said the stunt had merely been postponed. His change of heart came after a row with a Muslim leader in Florida, Muhammad Musri, who Jones claimed had promised that the Islamic centre in New York would be moved. Muslim leaders in New York said this was not the case.
Jones today accused Musri of having "clearly lied" about the New York centre being moved.
Musri, from the Islamic Society of Central Florida, said Jones had "stretched and exaggerated" their conversation on Thursday.
Jones is due to fly to New York tomorrow for a meeting with Rauf, the Islamic leader involved in the building of the controversial centre.
But in a further complication, Rauf today denied that any meeting with Jones was planned. "I am prepared to consider meeting anyone who is seriously committed to pursuing peace. We have no such meeting planned at this time. Our plans for the community centre have not changed. With the solemn day of September 11 upon us, I encourage everyone to take time for prayer and reflection," he said in a statement.
Obama's press conference, which the White House had hoped would focus on plans to revive the US economy, was instead dominated by questions about Islam, including whether relations with Muslims in America and elsewhere in the world had deteriorated over the last nine years, and whether Gates's intervention with Jones had elevated the importance of a pastor of a small church.
Obama told reporters: "The idea that we would burn the sacred text of someone else's religion is contrary to what this country stands for."
The president suggested blame for the extensive coverage that Jones's threat had received lay with the media, not the White House. "I hardly think we were the ones who elevated this story. But it is something, in the age of the internet, that can cause us profound damage around the world, so we have to take it seriously," Obama said.
Obama came into power in 2008 on a promise to try to improve relations between the US and the Islamic world. But the rows over Jones's stunt and the New York centre threaten to the undermine this ambition.
Asked about inter-faith relations inside the US, which has seen rising incidents of Islamophobia, the president said suspicion and fear was partly the result of the economic climate. He praised his predecessor, George Bush, for saying, after 9/11, that the enemy was not Muslims, but al-Qaida.
Obama has been ambiguous in recent weeks over the New York mosque controversy, but he was unequivocal yesterday, saying that all religions were equal. "What that means is that if you could build a church on a site, a synagogue on a site, a Hindu temple on a site, you should be able to build a mosque on a site."
Asked about his failure to close Guantánamo within a year of taking office - a deadline that passed in January this year - Obama said he had fulfilled lots of campaign pledges, but admitted he had not been able to achieve that particular one yet.
