DEARBORN, MICH. — Controversial Florida pastor, the Rev. Terry Jones, is planning to protest “jihad, sharia law, and the radicalization of Islam” Friday in front of America’s largest mosque in a city with one of the largest concentrations of Arab Muslims outside the Middle East.
Jones will hold the protest on public property near the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich., regardless of legal efforts to move the gathering to a designated “free-speech zone,” said Wayne Sapp, a pastor at Jones’ Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla.
“We feel they would be violating our constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech” if government officials try to force a relocation, Sapp said.
He said the group picked Dearborn for the Stand Up America Now protest because the Detroit suburb has the largest mosque in the United States and because nearly one-third of its 98,000 residents are of Arabic descent.
Organizers said in requesting a permit that they expect “two” people to attend the demonstration.
That would be fine with Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini, spiritual leader of the 10,000-member Islamic center.
The imam said Jones has the right to speak out “even if he is misinformed,” but he urges Muslims and others to steer clear of the protest.
“We are asking people not to attend, not to confront. The man can say what he wants, do what he wants, but we are not interested in a confrontation,” Al-Qazwini said.
He said Jones “apparently is trying to provoke the Muslim community” by coming to Dearborn and “defying them in their own stronghold,” and instead urged people of all faiths to attend alternative services.
“The plan is to fight hatred with love, to show the world that there are two ways to communicate — one is hatred and bigotry, which Pastor Jones has been following, and the other is by having dialogue and showing the world our unity and our commonalities, and this is what we are planning,” Al-Qazwini said.
He said he has invited Jones to come to the mosque and sit down and talk with him and other Muslims.
Sapp said he and Jones will attend a court hearing on a complaint by the Wayne Country Prosecutor’s Office seeking to keep demonstrators away from the Islamic Center.
In the 72-page complaint filed in Michigan’s 19th District Court, the prosecutor’s office said Jones’ appearance threatens to “breach the peace” and incite a riot.
Sapp disputed that assessment.
“We have never promoted violence. We have never tried to spark violence,” he said. “We’ve done rallies in Los Angeles in front of the Egyptian consulate and there was no violence. Police were there, but kept a distance and never got involved. We have held protests in Gainesville and there was never any violence, no altercations.”
The prosecutor’s complaint said that as of April 13, 20 people have died in violence in Afghanistan resulting from Sapp’s burning of a Quran during a live Internet event broadcast March 20. The group does not plan to burn a Quran in Dearborn, a church spokesman said this week.
Sapp, 42, said he has been a pastor at Dove World Outreach for five years and a member for 17 years. He said the church professes that “Islam is of the devil” — proclaiming it on signs and selling T-shirts and coffee mugs with that slogan — because its teachings run counter to Christianity.
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