Protesters Outnumber Wyoming Anti-Islam Group at Quran Burning
The burning of a book considered holy by some 1.6 billion people worldwide will probably get more attention over the internet than it did on Saturday, when only about 15 people turned out in support.
"We understood that we may not have very many folks showing up, so we actually planned to make it an audio/visual experience we can share with others,” said organizer Frank Jorge. "We’re going to share it with hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube.”
Jorge made it clear that terrorists or takfiri militants were not the focus of Saturday’s gathering; rather, he and his group are targeting all of Islam, which they maintain is not a religion, but "a criminal organization that passes itself off as a religion.”
"What we’re looking at here in Gillette, all of a sudden you have a mosque, and that’s what raised everybody’s hackles,” says Jorge, who could not identify any strife associated with the presence of Muslims in Gillette.
While Jorge addressed hisband in a park shelter, another group roughly twice the size of the anti-Islam assembly stood by to represent the "silent majority” of Gillette residents, as described by Lisa Harry, who she says haven’t responded to anti-Islamic rhetoric.
"This group will inevitably get media coverage and publicity from what they’re doing, and I felt that our stance, our opinions needed to be represented as well so people know that we are out there, that we don’t agree with that,” said Harry. "I think they’re a minority, but I think that they have impact because they’re vocal and they’re out there trying to get attention.”
"They are a very small group. We’re just standing against the hate that they represent and stand for,”said Tanya Krummreich, who founded the group A Gillette Against Hate and protested the Quran burning to, as she put it, let the anti-Islam group know that they don’t speak for Gillette, Wyoming or the majority of people in the United States.
"I believe that this group does not directly impact the community,” Krummreich added.
Source: KOWB
