Saturday, August 21, 2010

NYC to alleged “Ground-Zero Mosque”:


Another post I didn’t want to write. Mainly because the subject has already been talked to death; from the interwebs to the mainstream media, everybody but me has weighed in by now. (I’ve been extremely busy feeling sorry for myself for no appreciable reason other than missing the current RUSH tour.)

But there’s something I’m not hearing in the discourse about the supposed “Ground-Zero Mosque” which compels me to once again torture my forefinger-tips. It’s not racism or xenophobia that’s missing, no, I’ve heard plenty of both. Chest-thumping and flag-waving? Check and check.

All the responsible coverage (which by my definition immediately excludes Fox News and MSNBC) seems to center around either the sensibilities of 9/11 survivors and first-responders, who are understandably offended; and how a mosque at Ground Zero would become a gathering place for would-be and future terrorists (too stupid a proposition for me to even dignify with a comment, especially after Jon Stewart exposed its ridiculousness so nicely this week already).

Here’s what occurred to me has been missing from the debate, from least important to most.



Least important niggling factoid: I was pissed too at first, when I heard they wanted to put a mosque AT Ground Zero. But as anyone can see by the map above, the proposed mosque isn’t at Ground Zero. It’s a couple blocks away. And in big city downtowns, two blocks can make the difference between a thriving redevelopment area with chain stores and artist’s lofts—and brown-bag winos and drive-by shootings. And the proposed mosque is two blocks away, in the middle of the block, out of sight of the still-fresh wound that is the un-reconstructed Ground Zero.

The thing that initially, mistakenly pissed me off leads me to the second, actually meritorious angle that isn’t being discussed, or at least I haven’t seen it. I’m pretty mainstream media-oriented, so if it’s only been on HuffPo or the Drudge Report, I have missed it and I apologize for wasting your time.

The reason I still think it’s a bad idea to put a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero—even a couple of blocks away, out of sight—is not because I’m afraid of who’s going to come to it to worship, but who’s going to come to vandalize or destroy it. Especially with nothing else up yet in the place of the fallen Towers, building a high-profile mosque in their former shadow is going to attract every kind of nut-job with an axe to grind and two tons of fertilizer in his rented moving van.

Like it or not, this controversy has made the place a target. A big red, pulsating neon target. And not just to right-wing, home-grown dipshits like the all-American kid who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. But mosques the world over are repeatedly blown up by their faithful’s own internecine squabbles.

Let’s be perfectly honest, Islam’s fringies have earned themselves a rep as the baddest, most ruthless religious zealots currently plying their bloodthirsty trade on the world stage. They’ll kill anybody and everybody—including themselves—at the drop of a hat. Even Stephen Colbert doesn’t fuck with Muslims.

I live two blocks away from both a Mormon temple and a Baptist Church, and I’m not sweatin’ it. I wouldn’t live a blast radius away from a mosque, however. Not these days.

There’s every good reason in the world not to put this particular mosque in that particular site at this particular time and only one reason not to—that damned pesky Constitution. And single-occasion events don’t rise to level of importance to justify fucking with the Constitution. Not even 9/11 and certainly not a single house of worship.

So my plea is for the proposed mosque’s owners to find a less high-profile place to put their house of worship. Practically anywhere else in the world would be fine. There are plenty of lovely neighborhoods in New York to build a new, classy-looking place of worship (inset); locations that Fox News and Tea Party candidates won’t be able to spin into ratings and electoral gold.

And, more importantly, locations that won’t put punishing you for your perceived temerity at the top of every homicidal zealot’s—literally from here to Timbuktu—To-Do list.

Just the same, I’m not optimistic that cooler heads will prevail, especially where matters of religion and 9/11 are concerned. If I were the Amish market currently next door to the proposed mosque, I’d hitch up my wagon and go looking for greener pastures until the whole issue blows over. Or up.

15 Comments:

Anonymous The Missus said...

I don't understand this bit:

"9/11 survivors and first-responders, who are understandably offended"

Why should they be "understandably" offended? As I understand it, a mainstream mosque is related to the 9/11 terrorists only as much as, say, the United Church of Christ is related to Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist.

2:35 PM

 
Blogger Fang Bastardson said...

I say understandably because being victims, 9/11 survivors and first-responders are coming at the issue from a victims' perspective, not the average man on the street's. Victims come from a place of fear, especially fear of those who have already injured them, or people they are told might be associated with them. Capice?

2:56 PM

 
Blogger Anjali said...

A mosque is not a hideout for terrorists. I can't understand why you'd be pissed even if it was at Ground Zero.

No one should be offended, understandably or otherwise by this building. Law-abiding, tax-paying Muslims have absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, terrorism, first-responders, or victims. If this is victims' perspective (which, I don't know how common of a victims perspective this really is) then they are wrong. Fear that justifies racism and bigotry has been around from the beginning of time. And as much sympathy as I have for anyone who suffered as a result of 9/11, I could never justify racism as a means for them to heal. And I have to wonder how many of the victims would would really want that...

7:04 AM

 
Blogger Fang Bastardson said...

I'm not justifying racism. I'm simply acknowledging—as you do—that it exists and that it poses a legitimate threat to anyone who might come to occupy the proposed mosque/community center. People with ugly personal and professional agendas have painted a giant target on it and I am only suggesting that the proposed facility's backers should take that into account before they proceed.

In case you haven't noticed, we live in increasingly polarized, dangerous times. And the people on the side of racism and xenophobia are armed to the teeth. We would be fools—and irresponsible to posterity—to ignore that, or think that by wishing their senseless hatred away, it would make it so.

10:45 AM

 
Blogger Mark Dowdy said...

This whole controversy is just another phony wedge issue brought to you by the GOP. I wish these tactics weren't so successful, but they are.

Meanwhile the parasitic upper 1/10 percent of the population continues to prosper while the rest of us struggle. But we don't want to think about criminally minded billionaires and the corrupt politicians (Democratic and Republican) who are in thrall to them. No, let's think about 9/11! Let's get hysterical! NINE FUCKING ELEVEN, PEOPLE! NINE FUCKING ELEVEN!

To Republican Party, 9/11 is the gift that keeps giving.

2:07 PM

 
Blogger Mark Dowdy said...

Actually, it's really the top one percent. Not ten percent.

1:40 AM

 
Anonymous Jeff said...

I just can't agree with you on this one. You may not be openly justifying anti-Muslim hatred, but the effect is the same: denying them the dignity and freedom afforded to every other religious community in America.

Sadly, attacks against Muslims, mosques and Islamic religious centers have been common since 9/11. Every Muslim I know has a story about a family member being assaulted or ridiculed for wearing a hijab. A friend's mosque was defaced, and her auntie's was burned down.

I'm a hundred times more concerned that non-Muslims in the US would do the building and its congregants harm than I am of attacks by jihadists. The kind of sectarian violence your concerned about comes from extremists trying to influence local Muslim politics and is completely different than what happened here almost a decade ago.

If this building were to be a target, it doesn't matter in the current climate where it might be located. New Yorkers are (for the most part) fine with it being sited there. The rest of America -- those who might do it harm and those who just don't like the idea of it being in Lower Manhattan -- are just going to have to get over their pain and their hatred and fear of Muslims. To require this community center to be built elsewhere for safety reasons is paternalistic and un-American.

5:12 AM

 
Blogger Fang Bastardson said...

Sigh… None of my left-wing friends agree with me.

Look, your penultimate graf sums up my concerns exactly. With the Tea Party and Birthers and all the other formerly loosely-affiliated right-wing, Christian cranks organizing and coalescing, this is an extremely unwise time and unsafe place to put this particular house of worship.

I'm not condoning it. This isn't a political post, but a pragmatic one. The recent flurry of media attention on this site is fucking guaranteed to make it an irresistible target of opportunity for a home-grown terrorist, the kind you describe (and I do, too, in my reference to Oklahoma City).

Don't kill the messenger for pointing out what should be obvious. Yes, in our ideal left-wing, equal-rights Perfect World utopia, there would be no problem with this proposed building. But since we live in Fox News's world, not an equal-rights utopia, we ignore the ugly realities of racism and xenophobia at our own peril.

It's okay to light a candle and curse the darkness at the same time.

6:24 AM

 
Anonymous Jeff said...

I'm saying your entire thesis is BS. :^) If anti-Muslim craziness knows no bounds and if they can't build it there (safely or not), they can't build it anywhere.

Left or right has no bearing at all. The haters are going to have to suck it up... even the armed ones. And the ones who won't? That's what the FBI is for.

7:01 AM

 
Blogger Fang Bastardson said...

Well, it seems we agree on one thing. The inevitable violent aftermath of the completion of this building, now that it's become such a hot-button issue among so many heavily-armed, home-grown nuts will definitely become a job for the FBI. And first responders and grave-diggers…

Come to think of it, that sounds an awful lot like a re-statement of my BS thesis.

8:15 AM

 
Anonymous Jeff said...

You clever bastardson. You almost have me agreeing with you. If it weren't for my sunny disposition...

Please don't rub it in too much when I come back here to say you were right.

8:30 AM

 
Blogger Anjali said...

I agree about the dangers you speak of, Fang. It's scary. But it's still a racist solution. If after the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, the family of a Muslim victim asked that a new Christian Church not be built within 2 blocks of the site (I'm making this up, obviously), no one would ever agree to that solution. It's because its Muslims that the community center is a problem.

8:37 AM

 
Blogger Fang Bastardson said...

Look, I totally agree. It is anti-Muslim sentiment that is the motive power of this ugly brouhaha.

I don't think caving into it is racist, though. It's capitulation, pure and simple and I'm not proud of it.

But I'm not trying to stand on a mountaintop and preach the ideals of The Perfect World; hell, I think we need people to do just that! And sometimes—rarely—I'm one of them.

Usually, though, I'm the guy in the middle, trying to take in all sides and then answer the question, politics and even personal ethics aside, what solution best protects public safety?

I will say this. I saw NYC Mayor Bloomberg on Jonny Stewart this week, and if I was the mayor of New York City, I would take his stand on the issue ("Let the mosque be built - this is America!"), not mine. As an elected official, he's there to protect and defend the Constitution and that is how you'd do it in this case.

Me though, I am but a humble blogger, who doesn't want to turn on the TV one morning and see more horrible bloody footage from a terror-ravaged downtown NYC. That could have been 100% avoidable if cooler heads had prevailed in the planning stage.

Put me in office, however, and I'll fight for equal rights to my dying breath.

And for what it's worth, it really boiled me to be accused of being racist.

8:57 AM

 
Blogger Anjali said...

Oh Fang, I'm certainly not saying you're racist. I don't believe that for one second. I agree with most of what you say -- there is a reality that doesn't quite jive with my "we are the world" perfect vision. Perhaps I'm naive. But I still believe that the solution of disallowing/discouraging Muslims to build their community center simply because they are Muslim is a discriminatory solution. I can't get around that.

5:17 PM

 
Blogger me†al s†orm said...

I wish you'd at leaste attempt to educate yourself historically before you open a blog topic that makes you look stupid. Did you even catch the name of the mosque? Cordova House may mean nothing to unsuspecting Americans, but for Muslims it is fraught with meanings.
http://the-third-jahada.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-ground-zero-mosque.html

12:06 AM

 

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