On Wednesday 8 September, with the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks still three days away, Kabul police went on high alert for violent protests in the Afghan capital. The move was triggered not by the repercussions of a local conflict, but the actions of a little-known American church pastor thousands of miles away in Florida who was planning to burn copies of the Qur’an in a protest against what he called ‘radical Islam’.

The crisis, which elicited stark warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan General David Petraeus, and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, followed weeks of intense debate in the United States about the viability of establishing a mosque and inter-faith center in the Manhattan district adjacent to Groud Zero. Detractors of the plan spoke in apocalyptic terms, referring variously to the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ as a plan to establish a ‘Muslim Caliphate on the ashes of Ground Zero’ and a ‘center for training terrorists’.

Just a week before Pastor Terry Jones’ controversial move, bottles, cans, stones and three smoke bombs were thrown in the northern English town of Bradford at a protest by the English Defence League (EDL), a far right group that aims to counter the ‘Jihad movement based in England’. The group has rallied in many British cities, each time bringing wide media attention to its actions. The reason broadcasters make sure to cover EDL events, even though protests are often small, is that they are almost guaranteed to result in pictures of violence. The EDL’s founder, Tommy Robinson, in turn admitted that his movement in part grew up in response to a tiny vociferous protest by some very extreme Muslims who greeted the homecoming of the 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment with banners reading “Butchers of Basra” and “Anglian soldiers go to hell”.

What these events reveal is not only the growing strain of anti-Islamic feeling in western societies, but how globalization has increased the interconnectedness of media events such that religious violence is only ever one media event away. Most of these events are not, in fact, of national or even international importance. They only become so when they are distorted to represent national trends. Nevertheless, they play into an overwhelming tendency for mass media to polarize and dramatize religious conflict and seed the expectation of conflict between religions in the wider public.

In an interconnected world, mass media can lose sight of the boundaries between the local and obscure on the one hand, and the global on the other. A pastor’s tiny and inane protest becomes an issue of global significance. But really it shouldn’t be.