Terry Jones, a name that was made infamous in news headlines months ago, has resurfaced into the nation’s limelight. This pastor, who preaches at the Dove World Outreach Center, in Gainesville, Florida, recently completed an action that the international community pressured him not to partake in.

Last August, Rev. Jones, along with his church, organized a day in which he called for Korans, the holy book of Muslims, to be burned in protest of Islam. While he agreed to not facilitate this event, on March 20, he burnt not only the Koran, but also the already-diminishing credibility of the U.S. in the eyes of the citizens of the war-torn countries of the Middle East, such as Afghanistan.

In terms of American law, this act is yet another deplorable use of America’s freedoms and rights. At the beginning of this year, I wrote an editorial titled “A curse and a blessing,” which focused on whether or not the Westboro Baptist church had the right to protest America’s tolerance of gays at a soldier’s funeral, which I concluded, with reservation, that it did. The question then was: is it legal? The same question can be applied here.

Since the first case of American symbolic speech, the Boston Tea Party, the legitimacy of symbolic speech in American law has been pushed and prodded, thinned and stretched into the cases of today’s society. Symbolic speech is legal if it is not inciting fear, or directly intimidating a population- which is why it is legal to burn an American flag in protest, but it is not legal for members of the Ku Klux Klan to burn crosses with the aim of inciting fear in them. It is safe to conjure that this particular case of a Koran burning will eventually be brought to the High Court’s attention.

Across the Middle East, particularly in Afghanistan, where a recent bombing of a U.N. compound has been linked to this burning, the effects of this act of hate can be sensed. People such as Rev. Jones have existed since the dawn of time, yet it is in time of distress that the population lends an ear to them. Xenophobic groups should not be able to capture the world’s attention, yet it seems that they have succeeded.

Churches such as that of Rev. Jones’ should not be able to make a profit off of t-shirts that read “Islam is of the Devil,” yet they are. The sole way to prevent an ever-perpetuating sense of war in the Middle East is to convince the hubs of power in those countries that America is a country of acceptance and tolerance, and the only way to do that is to convey to people who share beliefs such as Rev. Jones that their beliefs do not parallel that of the American people.

The American population must stand by their values and state that it is groups such as the Westboro Baptist Church or the Dove World Outreach Center who are the causes of violence, not a whole religion, and certainly not a widely-accepted way of life.