Americans whose memory of public events goes back more than a news cycle or two may recall Terry Jones, a previously obscure Gainesville, Florida, preacher whose announcement in 2010 of a plan to burn copies of the Koran drew public condemnations from then President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the top US military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates phoned Jones personally and asked him not to go ahead with the burning.
In the end, Jones put off his planned 2010 action, burning one Koran in 2011, another in 2012, and hundreds on September 11, 2014.
Jones did not escape legal consequences for these actions. In 2011 he was jailed for a few hours in Dearborn, Michigan, by authorities worried about the possible consequences of his planned participation in an anti-Islam rally, but the ACLU took his side and a county court ruling upheld his First Amendment rights. He was fined $271 in 2012 for violating Gainesville’s fire safety rules. A planned mass burning of Korans on September 11, 2013, resulted in an arrest for transporting fuel, but this verdict was overturned by a circuit court judge. In short, although high-ranking federal officials from the president on down were concerned about Jones’s activities, and although some local officials overreached in their efforts to squelch his plans, the courts ultimately protected his rights.
Fast forward to Norway in 2019. On November 16, at a protest in a public square in Kristiansand, a group called Stopp Islamisering av Norge (“Stop the Islamization of Norway” – SIAN) set fire to a copy of the Koran in a garbage can. At least thirty police officers were present, and put out the fire within a few seconds. After the incident, Marie Benedicte Bjørnland, director of the national police, told the media that representatives of her department had been in contact with SIAN before the gathering and had warned that if SIAN tried to burn a Koran, they would stop it. Their argument was that such an action could be seen as violating “clause 185.”
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