Fatimah Ali: Post-9/11 tolerance & media hysteria

NOW THAT the ninth anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone with no Quran burnings by that fanatical pastor from Gainesville, Fla., we can all breathe a sigh of relief, right?

Hardly. Religious intolerance continues to sweep the nation, and it's being fueled in part by a willing media, which broke just about every journalistic rule by reporting on that so-called Christian "pastor" Terry Jones, the fruitcake with a mustache who staged his ultimately empty threat to assault Islam.

Never mind that Jones has only a couple of handfuls of followers. That fact alone should have been a warning signal to reporters intent on giving him so much face time on national TV.

But his own estranged daughter, Emma Jones, who lives in Germany, told a news website she believes her father "suffers from megalomania and delusions of grandeur," which should have prompted journalists to dig a little deeper into the pastor's motives and makeup.

In the news biz, credibility is everything, and reporters are trained to smell out a rat who wants to take them for a ride.

Attention-seekers like Jones pop up all the time, but they aren't always successful in duping the media. The last media-savvy Jones who put the title "Reverend" in front of his name was Jim Jones, and we all know how that turned out: He managed back in 1978 to lead 900 followers to their deaths in a mass suicide in Guyana.

It's not that I don't believe that Terry Jones fully intended to consummate his hatred of Islam by burning 200 Qurans, until a wiser head warned him that such a move such would only serve to cause harm to Americans overseas. It's just that news isn't really news until it actually happens.

And for reporters to have spent endless days and nights covering an event that he said he was planning only served to drive further hatred of Islam and its 1 billion followers.

As a Muslim, I know that Islam is not a religion of violence or terror, but it gets a bad rap because of the heinous acts committed by a handful of fanatics who've distorted its truth.

But who besides Muslims, or religious scholars, will know about the beauty of Islam if they don't read the holy book that Jones threatened to burn?

In reality, Islam offers a prescription for life, which includes, among other tenets, praying to one God, Allah, five times a day, believing in his books (all three including the Quran, the Bible and the Torah), his angels and his prophets, giving to the poor and fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

But fanatics have been using religion to commit their reigns of terror since the beginning of human civilization.

The European Crusades to the Holy Land were some of the most violent wars in history. The Pilgrims, who stole the land that we now call America from the natives who already lived here, left England to escape their own religious persecution, then committed horrific crimes against this country's indigenous people.

And for centuries after, their fellow English-speaking immigrants used Bibles and burned crosses to promote racism, slavery and the Ku Klux Klan.

Gov. Rendell got it right on Saturday when he joined with Muslim, Jewish and Christian clergy in front of Philadelphia's Independence Hall to "reaffirm America's commitment to religious tolerance."

Speaking of the vulnerability that all of us face if we attack each other because of our religious beliefs, Rendell used the ninth anniversary of the horrific 9/11 terrorism attacks to highlight the similarities in the world's three major religions - which each believe in the oneness of God and kindness to humanity.

THE TRAGEDY of 9/11 is a wound that may never heal, and most God-fearing Muslims will continue to denounce the violent acts committed on that fateful day.

But we refuse to carry a rap that we aren't responsible for.

The media should know better than to fuel the hatred and bigotry that sometimes greets those who practice Islam. We should not be blindsided by false interpretations of the world's fastest-growing religion - which is committed to promoting peace by the vast majority of its practioners.

As one of Philadelphia's most brilliant journalists, Reginald Bryant (who died earlier this year), used to always say on the radio, all of us - but the media in particular - should always be "in pursuit of truth"!

Fatimah Ali is a regular contributor to the Daily News, and blogs about food at healthysoutherncomforts.com.