Nutbag of the month: special 9/11 edition

Of course, a discussion of right-wing Christian nutbags would not be complete without mentioning Terry Jones, the "pastor" of an organization in Florida called the Dove World Outreach Center. (Despite its name, which makes it sound like the visitor center of a soap factory, it is a "tiny church," according to the New York Times.) Jones is the fellow who wants to burn copies of the Koran on Sep. 11.

Today's story in the NYT on the man and his plan draws attention to the fact that one of his justifications for the act of burning a Koran is a "never-reported story" of an attack on Christians by "radical Muslims" during the Balkan war in the 1990s. "Never-reported story" is the NYT's way of saying "completely made-up bullshit;" this is clear when the writer goes so far as to say:

To a reporter who worked in Bosnia during that war, the story Mr. Jones told on Wednesday sounds very like the kind of fictional tales of wartime atrocities against Christians that were cited by Bosnian Serbs and Croats at the time to justify the well-documented massacres of Muslims that did take place — like the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys buried in mass graves around Srebrenica in 1995.

The story goes on to say that Jones is not just one more Florida cracker (like Chuck Baldwin); he and his wife led a church in Cologne, Germany until two years ago. And it gets weirder after that.