Build the Mosque

Ah, but Joe does it really stand for what you say it does? I, for one, have my doubts.

“It is an instant, international symbol that mocks the closed, vicious religious insanity of the far right who want to tear this country down.”
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There. Fixed.

Another insult to America and capitualtion to Islam. Joe, you are just another traitor.

So you endorse Christianity as the official religion of America. There’s this little thing called the Constitution….

Don’t mind ricardo, nflfoghorn.
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He’s a Limey who isn’t too familiar with our Constitution.

No government action should be based on religious considerations in our country. Nor should taxing exemptions be so based.

Figures. McVeigh killed in the name of Christ. Is it “Hate All Christians” time too?

Not to get too pedantic with facts, but the mosque’s desired location is NOT “on the site of the World Trade Center.” It’s on Park Place, two blocks north and half a block east and a few tall buildings away, in what once was a Burlington Coat Factory. The building has been abandoned for almost a decade. It was abandoned more than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Yes they apparently want to set up a “Muslim Free Zone” anywhere within tee-shot distance.

It signals American strength and freedom, our national celebration of ethnic and religious diversity.
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So in that freedom for ethnic and diversity its ok to fly the Southern Cross or Nazi flags near Rev Wright’s church or a synagogue? Or is it once again a case of selected freedoms by the looney left. Tolerance by everyone but not me is the battle cry again by the looney left.

“There’s this little thing called the Constitution”

Yes and I strongly suggest you have someone explain it to you. First, the “limey” as Paul so tolerantly put it, never said anything about endorsing Christianity. Second, the Constitution and other rights, the Founders wrote were based on Christian principles. The left doesn’t like that and has spent the last century trying to eliminate church and state under the false premise of separation of church and state.

Rod Dreher, apparently, does not know what is known as “The narrative”.

It is a completely false hypothesis post-9/11 Islamic Radicals tell.

They say again and again that America is in Afghanistan to humiliate Islam and, using Bush’s blunder of “crusade” and fulfilling bin Laden’s prophesy, that we are in Iraq to rob them of their oil as well as their dignity.

As an American of Catholic Christian origin I am 100% aware that we went to Afghanistan in self defense and that Bush sent us into Iraq based upon lies to win the 2004 election (barely, if it all).

How do you tell the Islamic world that we neither fear your religion nor hate your religion nor your people?

Let them build.

Although a very distant relative (third cousin I never met) I did loose a relative in 9/11 and love NYC as my home.

I don’t hate anybody’s religion. (I dislike having people try and convert me and use religion as an excuse for draconian laws, but that is totally different).

I want the Mosque there to say to the Islamic world, “we do not fear nor hate you. Pray all you like, we are not your enemy. Your terrorists are.”

I’m sure if the Israeli government decided to turn the site of the Baruch Goldstein massacre into a synagogue, our muslim friends would be perfectly OK with it.

“..the Southern Cross or Nazi flags..”
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North of the Mason Dixon line the one and only meaning of the confederate flag is hatred of black people.
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Some parts of the Southeast feel the same way, but, I have never lived there to understand the details.
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The Nazi flag did not exist before or after Hitler’s government and has no other meaning at all.
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The Muslim religion is more than 1,000 years old and a mosque does not equal terrorism more than a church means either the crusades or the Inquisition.
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For us to ban a Mosque from lower Manhattan would be like every Arabian country (which all have a Christian minority) to ban all churches anywhere the wars of the Crusades had gone.
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It would be wrong.
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NYC is a liberal city. It, also, has many Muslims.
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We don’t need the right wing coming and telling us to go against our neighbors, thank you.

Actually, according to the first amendment you CAN do that. As long no hate crimes are committed OR ENCOURAGED (often the problem) it’s perfectly legal.

We are supposed to be there moral superiors. So, why don’t we act that way and show an absence of fear.

“The Nazi flag did not exist before or after Hitler’s government and has no other meaning at all.”

Actually the swastika is a symbol of peace in Hinduism and Buddhism which dates back to the neolithic period and is still widely used in the eastern world without a stigma of hate.

Joe, thank you for writing this post. It’s important to take on this kind of idiocy, not just by writing it off, but by showing people the alternative. I’ve seen a lot of right-wing hatred on this subject, and this is the first article I’ve read pointing out that it’s perfectly okay to be a Muslim in America, even in New York.
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The idea that this building would be an affront to 9-11 victims and a capitulation of the United States to islamic extremism is a noteworthy, though not rare, example of the creative minds fighting this war from the right. Put it together with the growing claims that Mexican immigration represents an “invasion” and a threat to US sovereignty, and one really wonders what depths of ignorance and racism modern America is capable of being panicked into embracing.

More freeper BS:

Constitution and other rights, the Founders wrote were based on Christian principles

Perhaps you can reference this line of BS for us but I seriously doubt it.

As a Christian, I appreciate the fact that our Founders, most of whom were Christians, determined not to attempt to base the government of the new nation upon Christianity, upon the Bible, or upon any facet of a particular religion. If the word “Christianity” had been used in the Declaration, then confusion would be rampant. There would be disagreement and confusion within the government even as to the basic tenets of Christianity, to put it mildly

..
http://www.libertymagazine.org/index.php?id=1380

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/meanwhile/

Freedom of speech means nothing if it only applies to unconroversial speech. Freedom of religion means nothing if it only applies to popular religions.

Alexander Hamilton

The Episcopalian authored many of the Federalist Papers, signed the Constitution, and became the first Secretary of the Treasury. In an April 1802 letter to James A. Bayard, Hamilton proposed The Christian Constitutional Society:

In my opinion, the present consitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banner bona fide must we combat our political foes, rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provided for amendments. By these general views of the subject have my reflections been guided. I now offer you the outline of the plan they have suggested. Let an association be formed to be denominated “The Christian Constitutional Society,” its object to be first: The support of the Christian religion. second: The support of the United States
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Samuel Adams organized the Boston Tea Party, and served as Governor of Massachusetts, a delegate to the Continental congress, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

In his 1772 work, The Rights of the Colonists, Adams wrote:

II. The Rights of the Colonists as Christians.

The right to freedom being the gift of the Almighty…The rights of the colonists as Christians…may be best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutions of The Great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament.

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Benjamin Franklin, in his 1749 plan for schools in Pennsylvania, insisted that they teach “the necessity of public religion … and the excellency of Christian religion above all others, ancient or modern.” James Madison said that public officials should be “fervent advocates in the cause of Christ.” In his first inaugural address he put confidence “in the guardianship and guidance of that Almighty Being … .”
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The BS is the looney left being in denial which is not new either. Many of the Founding Father held strong beliefs of faith and that was the guiding principles for America, not in the practice of the religion itself but in the practice of the underlying principles. I understand that principles are an oxymoron for the left which is the main reason one position is contradicted by the next for liberals

There is truly nothing the left won’t tax

Freedom of speech means nothing if it only applies to unconroversial speech. Freedom of religion means nothing if it only applies to popular religions.
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Maybe you can explain speech codes on college campuses or “hate speech”. By any other name they are nothing but politically correct intrusions on freedom of speech.

I won’t explain anything because I happen to agree. They are an abridgment of free speech.

Paul:

Agreed. I do notice silence from others here on the left about the contradiction.

Don’t know why people outside of NYC would get their panties in a bunch about this. As residents know, there are mosques all over the place in our city, along with churches and synagogues and temples and houses of worship of many religions, and everyone gets along fine. I can’t remember the last time NYC has had a religion on religion crime.
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Second, if conservatives would put aside their hate for a second (yeah, I know it’s hard for them) and thought through the logic of it, wouldn’t it make sense to put a mosque right smack dab in the center of a place you want to protect from Muslim extremist-terrorists?* Doubt Allah would look kindly on some dude who blew up one of his places of worship or the other Muslims praying within it.

* Yeah, astroland already points out that the location is several blocks away in the holy location of a defunct Burlington Coat Factory. People who are mad don’t have enough to do in their lives.

“Maybe you can explain speech codes on college campuses or “hate speech”.”
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First, just as I would be removed if, in the middle of your church service I decided to announce that there is no god, on private property the owners of the property may limit speech and activities far more than they would otherwise.
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For that matter, if a person of a different Christian denomination came in during the middle of your service speaking up and telling you that you do not have the true faith, he or she, will, also, be removed from the property.
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Second, hate speech is extremely limited and, almost always with the consequence being a meeting.
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Universities are private property.
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I do think it keeps things more peaceful if you are not allowing people to call black people N and so on.
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With few exceptions – and none I know of – this is, generally, what hate speech restrictions are about.

“Actually the swastika is a symbol of peace in Hinduism and Buddhism which dates back to the neolithic period and is still widely used in the eastern world without a stigma of hate.”
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We are discussing the entire flag.
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In Cambridge, Ma, there is a Church Tip O’Niel called his home parish built in the 1900s or 1920s. At the top, in stone, are the fish, the Chalice and, the Swastika.
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However, pre-Hitler, the Swastika was, basically, unseen in the West.

Paul:

I am also glad you didn’t substitute rationalization fo reason on the abridgment of free speech that “hate speech” codes use.

freeper: The Catholic Church is taxing their dioceases into non-existence to pay for the pedophile law suits. They own some of the most valuable property in the world but are forcing their local churches to pay for their perphidity. Maybe they can also afford to share their wealth with others in this country by paying taxes. The same is true for all denominations. So many religions seem to want their political views known. They probably should participate in our democracy by paying their fair share.

I like the thought, and it would certainly be a symbol. I fear though, that whether it would be a symbol of strength or submission would be in the eye of the beholder.

Don’t you understand it is 2 blocks from the World Trade Center? There is also a strip joint 2 blocks away. How disrespectful is that? What else is in the near vicinity?
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Just get the memorial built.

Apr,
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When they finally build the replacement, I might well be placing companies into the Freedom Tower.
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First, it is my firm belief that the best way to annihilate terrorism is to, when they are not a eminent threat at that moment, to ignore them. The last thing we should do is to lump the few thousand terrorists with the one billion Muslims. It would be like England associating all Catholics everywhere with the IRA.
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Second, in terms of New York City since the mode of transportation is your feet, two blocks away seems like a mile away when you are driving everywhere.
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Third, people, including one of my distant cousins, did not die because of the good Muslims of the thousand year old tradition. They died because of a few insane radicals.
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Fourth, New York City is about keeping keeping on and not about stopping to mourn and memorialize. As it is the 9/11 memorial will be if not the only, one of the only places where a tragedy will get so much as a plaque on the wall much less a full block. (There is Grand Army Plaza at Central Park and the Arch in Greenwich Village among the very few exceptions).
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Disrespect, as far as I am concerned, is to break the way New Yorkers live and alter it due to, as one employer said, “because a few nuts flew an airplane into a building” (and he grew up in Manhattan and was working their that day).
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Nobody takes 9/11 off of work except for the unfortunate few who had a relative die. But, after nine years, just as one does not visit their grandmother’s grave beyond the first couple of years, many of them, too, just keep on keeping on.
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Having the Mosque there says to me three things:
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1) New York is still New York and no terrorist can change that.
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2) Muslims we don’t fear you.
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3) Muslims, we don’t hate you, either.
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Almost nobody knows that 3,000 New Yorkers were killed on Black Tom’s Island in 1916 after German spies ignited the weapons depot there. So, the fact that these are non-Europeans and non-Christians who killed our people shouldn’t make any difference.
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Move on.

Freeinpa,
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Massachusetts had a state religion. It was puritan. Maryland was officially Catholic.
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Several individual states had official religions until the bill of rights was extended to the states.
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However, how would you feel if you were near Detroit and the 30 to 50 year Americans originally from the Arabian world decided that the town’s official religion was Islam?
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Jefferson, who most conservatives base their thinking on, was a deist. He was not Christian. He believed that there was God the creator, no holy spirit on earth, that Jesus was a philosopher who did not do any actual miracles and did not know about an afterlife.
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Clearly one’s theology is a deep part of one’s life, however, until England gradually grew towards Democracy after the Magna Carta, all of Christianity was pro-monarchy and anti-Democratic.
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When France became democratic and overthrew the monarchy, the Catholic Church was infuriated.
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To say the Christianity equals democracy is about as illogical as saying that powdered wigs equals democracy.
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Just because the founding fathers nearly all practiced one religion or another does not mean that any of them believed it was right for one religion to dominate over the others.
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Thomas Jefferson even owned a copy of Muslim Koran. He was a voracious reader and no more Muslim than Christian, he believed that somebody created the world and then left us alone to figure it all out for ourselves.

freeinpa:
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It really does not matter at all what people have done in the past concerning religion.
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You seem to be arguing out of both sides of your mouth, on one hand, you proclaim ricardo4max innocent, yet on the other hand, you endorse the very same duplicitous view that he has.
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Not very smart at all, freeinpa. However, try a dose of the Consitution of the United States:
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“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
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http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am1
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No how is that for one of my “no name” links?

“Maybe you can explain speech codes on college campuses or “hate speech”.”
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“I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.”
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– John D. Rockefeller Jr.
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Therein lies my entire position on hate speech.
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Every institution has the right to bar such speech. Likewise, every institution has the right to broadcast it.
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However, also under the first amendment, everyone, without exception, has every right to oppose it.

As an addendum to my commentary on hate speech, I add this:
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No one may pass laws that bar hate speech. As a case in point, no laws at the municipal, county, or state level are extant in the area of the university.
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Just as FOX has the right to air hate speech, and radio has the right to air Rush Limbaugh’s hate speech (or Wrights’ for that matter), they, or any other institution, has the right to bar it.
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Among the more practical reasons are that such speech would attract both the protagonists and antagonists creating the potential for violence.
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There is more than adequate precedent for such reasoning.

Maybe it will protect the area from a similar attack. And the surveillance cameras should have a field day. Metal detectors, police barricades, cement blocks, security guards making $ 7 an hour, warning signs, it’ll just be like any other building in this great nation of ours since 9/11.

And tourists will walk by wondering about this monument to the melting pot … or do you think they will stay away just in case?

I think the following points have to be realized:

1. Muslims were also among those who were murdered on 9/11. And Muslims also died avenging that murder. This seems lost on the commenters for whom the only Islam is that of Osama bin Laden.

2. What Mr.Klein understands and some of the commenters do not, is that there is a huge struggle going on within the Muslim world over the direction and narrative of Islam. This predates 9/11. Fouad Ajami of all people wrote a long article about it in response to Samuel Huntington’s essay. Faisal Abdul Rauf who I believe will be running this Islamic center is someone who I think is firmly on the side that we all want to WIN, because it is inextricably linked to whether WE win or not. If you keep undermining the likes of Mr. Rauf then you are basically empowering the likes of Awlaki and Omar Abdul Rahman.

Patrick: Why are you lecturing me? I was being ironic. This is just another delay in accomplishing what should have been completed some time ago. Of course there is nothing wrong with having a mosque 2 blocks away.

“Of course there is nothing wrong with having a mosque 2 blocks away.”
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There should be a different font for sarcasm.

http://www.abercrombiehot.com
http://www.abercrombiecity.com
http://www.afandhco.com
http://www.afandhco.com

There are no words sufficient to express the bone-deep, bizarro-universe, head-in-the-sand stupidity expressed in this article and in some of the comments — which, I guess, represent the off-the-charts lunatic-fringe “hyper-selective perception” pathological mentality of the few remaining TIME regular readers.

To NOT call this Mosque proposal out as anything but the utter travesty and in-your-face insult that it is — to NOT see it as a “shrine” to the Islamic terrorism of 9/11 that resulted in the unspeakable slaughter of thousands of civilians — it is beyond my ability to adequately express such an utterly degenerated upside-down thought process. It’s surreal.

Where’s the edit button? The word “monument” might be more appropriate in place of “shrine” in the context I used it above in my previous post.

You get the point.

No, you fool. What he said was beautiful and perfect. Totally changed any doubts I had about building this.

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The best reasons for rejecting the construction of a Moslem’s Mosque in downtown New York City:

——————-This is a COPY
of University of Michigan Professor Indred S. Wichman’s e-mail to the University’s Muslim Student’s Association in response to the students’ protest
of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist.
The group had complained the cartoons were ‘hate speech.’

Dear Muslim Association,
As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest.
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I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like:
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beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings,
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suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey),
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burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt,
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the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims,
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the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called ‘whores’ in your culture),
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the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France.
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This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many of my colleagues.
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I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Muslims to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile ‘protests.’
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If you do not like the values of the West – see the First Amendment – you are free to leave.
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I hope—that most of you choose that option.
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Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.
Cordially,
I. S. Wichman
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
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The reasons you have for the support of the building of the mosque near ground zero are idealist at best.

I would be more for the construction of it if a Christian church, Buddhist temple, Hindu temple and Judaic synagogue were additionally being constructed in the same area to really represent the idea of religious unity and tolerance.. but a single religion, and in this case a Muslim mosque, is in no way showing the Islamic extremists who devastated the lives of so many that day that we laugh in the face of violence and intolerance.

It is an insult to the victims of 9-11 to even propose the building of the lone mosque, and the extremists would see it as a victory.

“I would expect that they will accept this”

Why not just ask them? Have they given anyone any indication that they would accept this? Not that I’ve heard. In fact, it seems apparent that they would be against this.

No war has ever been fought by the US on behalf of “forced tolerance”, in fact I would gather that forced tolerance is exactly the reason this country became an independent nation in the first place. “we will tolerate all evil enacted upon us with smiling faces” was never the battle cry of the Republic.

Shut up Bloomberg!

If altruism was on the forefront of Muslims motives, they would have wanted to build a Christian Church. As it is, they are simply building a trophy.