Fareed Zakaria returned his First Amendment Freedom Prize (a plaque and $10,000) to the ADL for its siding with the anti-Moslem bigots.
Gentle Reader, you should read both his letter to the ADL and his article in Newsweek.
There is a river bigotry in this country, that had been and is still being fueled by the Right. From the Jim Crow segregationists, the "Yellow Peril" formenters, the pre-war anti-Semites, the homophobes to the modern haters of all things Hispanic and/or Muslim, it is the same music being played for centuries. Only the lyrics (and the targets) change. When it becomes unacceptable to target one group, the haters on the Right find another one. Which is why the party of Hoover has been largely silent about the Proposition 8 decision; they've found other groups to bash.
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11 comments:
What is especially galling about this is that Jewish organizations long played a role in civil rights struggles in this country. The Freedom Riders who desegregated buses and lunch counters in the South during the Civil Rights movement were organized by young Jewish intellectuals. Now it appears the opposite is happening. Disappointing.
= Badtux the WTF Penguin
The Times article suggested government funding of mosques. I'm upset by that, they aren't funding all religions, and they should not be funding any one religion.
If the Islamic community wishes to build a mosque there then NY and everyone else has no say other than building codes and traffic. It's up to the property owners.
I see no affront that the place may be a mosque.
The government has no business being
involved in supporting any theism, at all. If governnment or it's figureheads expresses a preference that is already too much.
Eck!
I can't speak about what the tea partiers have been saying about this, I don't follow their drivel.
You do not have to be racist or bigoted or a hater to have good reasons to oppose this mosque, though.
The financing is sketchy (sources), principals involved do not condemn terrorist organizations, and the fact they would pick that location speaks volumes about muslim insensitivity (or turning a blind eye) to muslim involvement in terror.
No, there's not a muslim boogeyman preaching hate in every mosque, and every time a muslim group does something it's not an act of political jihad, but it does happen and ignoring it is as wrongheaded as assuming every muslim action is in the name of terror/jihad.
Dave
a) The location is several blocks from the WTC site and four buildings down from an existing mosque, b) the organization involved (a Sufi organization) indeed condemns violence of all kinds (note there is a *significant* difference between the Sufi and the Salafi who are the heart of Saudi terrorism, the Sufi are the Quakers of Islam), c) you are painting with a black brush all members of a large family of religions -- there is no single "Islam" any more than there is a single "Christianity", blaming the Sufi for the crimes of the Salafi is like looking at the Pentecostals and saying that all Christians are violent batshit crazy evolutionists who hate gays, a notion which would be very surprising to the Unitarians, Quakers, and members of the Church of Christ.
In short, out of ignorance (willful?), you are committing an act of bigotry as stupendous as looking at an episode of Cops where a black felon is being arrested, and turning to your wife and saying "all those niggers are criminals and should be sent back to Africa." The fact that it's out of ignorance doesn't make it any less bigotry. Sorry, but I grew up in the segregated South, and I know bigotry when I see it, and call it like I see it.
- Badtux the Southern Penguin
Yeah, BadTux, damn those Quakers for molesting the alter-boys!
I'd love to have it pointed out where I painted all muslims with one brush.
I don't care which batch of apostates happen to be building this mosque (to each branch they are the one true faith, all others are apostates), if you are going to build a mosque near ground zero (and I for one do not buy into 'this is a holy 9/11 shrine' shtick) and play the 'peace and outreach' card you better be able to say you renounce terrorism and terrorist organizations.
It would be great if islam was on a level playing field with other religions, but no matter the branch, it is not. In any predominantly muslim nation, other religions are suppressed. Don't even try to equate resistance against a few high-profile mega-mosques in the US (justified or not, mostly not) with suppression of other religions in muslim countries.
Christians of any branch seem to be willing to condemn the actions of other christian sects they consider fringe, and to do so to anyone who'll listen. Muslims of a branch may decry the actions of other branches to themselves, but do precious little of that in open discourse.
As for bigotry, if there was an objective measure for that, I'd put my stats against yours as being lower, if your rhetoric is any indication.
Dave
"Screw the left and the right, they're both nuts"
Seems to me that there is no shortage of Christians who glorify in acts of terrorism and murder when the victims are in or around medical providers who offer abortions and other family planning services.
Mote. log. eye. Seems that there was some proverb about that.
I don't see it appropriate to compare who's worse or who's without blame, but if you want to go that route I'll put christian NGO acts of terrorism over the past 100 years to the numerical test against NGO those-claiming-to-be-muslims and I don't think there'll be a clear 'winner'.
Scope that down to the past 30 or 50 years and it'd be a different story, I think. (No cheating, I said non-governmental organizations, imperialists always use whatever lever is handy and religion is always one of 'em, but that's a means, not an end.)
I do see it appropriate to examine closely the motivations and relationships of those involved, starting with why a center claimed to be for peace and outreach would be placed in a location sure to produce much hurt and acrimony.
I'm no damn centrist or libertarian, by the way, the right path sometimes uses aspects of the liberals, sometimes aspects of the conservatives.
Ideology need not apply.
Dave
Hmm, so only *unorganized* murder by Christians counts? Not things like, say, the extermination of most of Europe's Jews by European Christians during the period 1938-1945, little things like that, because these European Christians were waving flags? Wow, I didn't know flags were so powerful that they made a difference over whether dead was, well, dead! Alrighty, then!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
'Tux, my point is if you/whoever want to compare christian killings to muslim killings, government actions should be compared to government actions, and NGO actions should be compared to NGO actions.
9/11 was NGO, abortion clinic bombings were NGO, the holocaust was governmental, and the crusades were governmental.
Did individual christians oppress/kill jews before the holocaust? Of course.
Would there have been a holocaust without government planning/execution/support? No.
NGOs are the relevant portion in this discussion, unless you want to treat this mosque as an extension of saudi political doctrine (which I do not think is the case).
Dave
I should add the abortion clinic bombings were NGO, IMHO, but that doesn't mean the right portion of the gov't didn't love 'em.
Dave
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