Email Response to a Rightie Suggesting We Support the Ground Zero Mosque

Kat from Missouri writes:

We are in the midst of losing an important ideological battle. A battle we cannot afford to lose because it is at the very heart of this war. The enemy believes that freedom and democracy, particularly the freedom of religion, is our most egregious sin and must be destroyed. He thinks it makes us weak.

We are, at this very moment, about to rip out one of our most basic freedoms and hand it to him on a silver platter.

I believe we should step aside and let the mosque be built. Not only that, we should defend their right to do so as we have defended nothing else. If we do not, we hand the enemy a powerful weapon that he can use to bloody us with again and again. He will use it to recruit more men by pointing to it as the truth of OUR oppression of "his" people, our hypocrisy to the very idea of freedom and its real weakness. Who knows how many of our men and women in or out of uniform will pay the price for this one moment?

I cannot and I will not abide handing the enemy this weapon.

Here is the response I just wrote. And, by the way, gloves are off now, just as the MFM's and Democrats' gloves are off with 70% of America.

You felt compelled to share your opinion of how awful Americans are, Seattle Times?

Okay, here's what I'm compelled to say, in that case.

Has there been built a single Muslim museum of 9/11 atrocities with the message that this was wrong? Have there been powerful ecumenicals circulated of the Muslim religion taking any responsibillity or showing any shame for this?

I do not believe this happened in a vacuum: This happened because, as we've seen time and time again, defending terrorism, or explaining the NUANCES of murder, is far too common in Muslim circles. This creates an atmosphere of social acceptance and encouragement of terrorism.

Are most Muslims terrorists? Of course not. But, speaking among themselves, would most Muslims continue insisting this is a far more "complicated" issue than we in the West can comprehend?

I believe the answer is "Yes." And yes, I think a majority. When clerics appear on tv and refuse to forthrightly and unambiguously repudiate terrorism, preferring instead to give a qualified statement of disfavor followed by a list of reasons why the West is to blame for our own murders, I have to imagine that these clerics are not free-lancing, but instead offering the basic sentiment of their congregation.

This Ground Zero Mosque has nothing within it to *disclaim* a glorification of 9/11. There is no museum for the dead; no exhibit showing the bloody fruit of religious extremism. It permits itself to be taken two ways-- to the West, they will say "moderation" and "tolerance," but will the more excitable elements within the religion get that message? Well, I don't think so-- because there's nothing, nothing in these plans to expressly repudiate that.

The message remains open, open to differing interpretations, and I believe that's by design -- just as Imam Rauf's nuanced views of organized murder are open to differing interpretations, one designed to placate the West, the other designed to offer succor and moral uplift to killers.

Yasser Arafat did this all the time, offering one message in English for his patrons in the West, and another one for his supporters in the terror cells of Palestine.

Enough, enough.

There are dozens of bureaucrats in NYC government tasked with making sure the government is sensitive to Muslim feelings.

Is there a single person at Cordoba House tasked with monitoring the sensitivities of non-Muslims, or victims of 9/11? Did they ask any of the 9/11 families if they'd have a problem with this?

No, they went right ahead because they don't give a shit.

And on my end-- If someone so aggressively tells me to my face they don't give a shit about my sensitivities, concerns, and values, then I am not going to extend myself a micron to understand theirs.

...

Here's what I didn't write, but should have:

It would never even occur to me, or any decent person, to erect a Museum of American Achievements in Aviation in Hiroshima.

This is not a joke -- I am not saying a museum celebrating the bomb. I am saying a museum that does exactly as I said -- notes American achievements in aviation. Not the Enola Gay, but the Wright Brothers, etc.

The museum I am talking about, hypothetically, would not be baiting, nor celebratory of the bomb, in the least. It would just be a museum of American advancements in aviation.

But of course no sentient being could possibly fail to see how Japanese would take it as a direct provocation, and a nasty reminder of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima 6 August 1945.

And if I were so stupid, tasteless, and Asperger's-afflicted to have suggested such a museum in the first place, if Japanese then told me "That brings up horrifying memories," I wouldn't then arrogantly double-down and begin explaining to them how intolerant they're being, how irrational they're being, how unfair to my enthusiasm for American airpower they're being.

I would say, "Damn, I didn't think of that! I intended this as just a museum of aircraft, but I can in fact understand how you, a Hiroshima survivor, would even 50 years later have a rather more negative feeling about American airplanes in the sky that I do. Thank you for informing of this -- my bad. I'll put it up somewhere else."

Because -- why wouldn't I put it somewhere else.... unless my intent all along was in fact to remind Hiroshima residence of what happens when you defy the Big A? (A as in America.)

If I didn't have that in my heart, why would I want to visit such unwelcome and painful reminders on a population that experienced an awful tragedy 50 years ago at the hands of my fellow Americans?

Not me, mind you -- I didn't fly the plane. I didn't build the bomb. I didn't even vote for war. I wasn't even alive.

But they were Americans, thus my kin, and certainly I would not want to further traumatize the Japanese over reminding them of what my fellow Americans did to them that day.

(Which isn't to say I disagree with the decision -- it's to say I have enough respect and courtesy to not wish to remind them of the bombing every day as they walk to work.)

And because we all would understand that such a feeling is not only inevitable but perfectly reasonable, of course no American -- no nobody -- would ever dream of erecting such a museum in Hiroshima.

Such a museum is fine in and of itself-- there's a good one, I'm told, at the Smithsonian in DC.

But in Hiroshima? Utterly insensitive, inappropriate, cruel, triumphal, offensive, demeaning to the memory of the dead of Hiroshima, provocative, disrespectful, arrogant, shameless.

Mark that last word because that's the one that I think is most important. People keep saying what this debate is about, or isn't about. It isn't about this, it isn't about that. It's not about freedom of religion, it's about sharia. Etc.

What it's about is the utter shamelessness of this. The utter refusal for anyone involved in this grotesquerie to exhibit the sense of decorum and taste that even animals possess and evaluate what impact their designs may have on other people, including the direct victims of radical, triumphant Islam.

Shamelessness.

I would suggest that Cordoba House fixate itself less on selling Islam to the West and more on selling Western values of anti-terrorism, render-unto-Caesar, and tolerance to Islam.

Were they actually doing that, I would support this-- wholeheartedly!

But they're not. Next to a hole in the ground created by Muslim excess and Islamic equivocation over the rightfulness of murdering the infidel, they want to erect and advertisement -- not for peace, not for understanding, not for dialogue, not for anti-terrorism -- but just for Islam.

And they didn't bother to ask if anyone would have a problem with this, and that's because they never cared. It was never about that -- it was about, just as suspected, erecting a trimuphal tower to the might of Islam.

And they didn't ask about that, and now that people have -- since they weren't asked in private, we have to tell them in public -- they still don't care.

So don't tell me this is about tolerance and moderation and building bridges.

This is about a shameless attempt to grab up a piece of property on the cheap, a piece of property in downtown Manhattan that is only on the market at all because of the actions of some Muslims, and the shamelessness of other Muslims in plunking down cash of dubious sourcing to purchase the land at jet-fuel fire-sale prices.

Update: Russell Simmons: We Didn't Blame Christians for the First World Trace Center Bombing, Did We?

No, Russell, we didn't. Because that was Muslims too.

Atoms

We're not going to split ourselves, you know.

Teh Funny: MegaIndependent: Planning Board Approves Erecting a Ham Sandwich Beside the Grave of Mama Cass.

Thanks to TXMarko.

posted by Ace at 02:29 PM

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