This piece was originally posted at brainspank.org 8/21/10 and an edited version appears here for the Nevada Appeal
This one that has irresponsibly, recklessly come to be known as the "Ground Zero Mosque". Nomenclature at it’s most absurd. It’s stupid.
Let’s start with the indefensible hijacking of the issue by hard right demagogues and the various porcine zealots of faux patriotism and vicious jingoism, all calculated to exploit fear and racism. For Newt Gingrich to equate the placement of a COMMUNITY CENTER, that happens to devote a small portion of it’s proposed 13 story architecture for worship of the Islamic faith, a COMMUNITY CENTER that will not be built at ground zero or even viewable from there, for such a loathsome hypocrite to suggest the intention here is no different than putting a swastika next to the Holocaust Museum chaps my hide. This from a man who left one wife while she was in treatment for cancer and cheated on another while leading the charge for impeachment against a sitting president for lying about about a promiscuous encounter with an intern. Why would anyone listen to to such a charlatan? What makes Newt's opinion on anything worthy of dissemination via American owned airwaves?
Fox News does. The second largest individual share holder in Newscorp, the parent company of Fox News, is Saudi Arabian Prince named Alwaleed bin Talal, they in turn own aprox. 9% percent of his, the largest most influential Arab entertainment company, Rotana. A prince from a theocratic oligarchy where brutal misogynist Sharia law is absolute. Irony irony irony. Anybody feel like they're being played?
Newt Gingrich is a frighteningly adroit, modern Machiavelli. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s whipping the great unwashed, the willfully ignorant, into froth and frenzy by employing those by now, tried and true GOP archetypes of fear and racism. He’s not the only one, the Palins and the Boehners and the Cantors........have all fallen in line to manifest the inevitably hysterical Greek chorus. In the key of indignant, arrogant and ignorant.
These people don’t realize they are embarrassing themselves and I don’t care. What matters is they embarrass the rest of us.
Are you one of them?
It’s to be called the "Park 51 Community Center". Not a Mosque by definition, but even if it were it would be among 400, attended by some 600,00 Muslims in the state of New York alone. There are Mosques in every state and major city in this country and they have been there for a very long time. Common sense dictates that it shouldn’t be any big deal. There is far more logic in protesting Catholic churches anywhere near public schools.
There exists more of a Mosque in the Pentagon.
Other than any of that, the proposed "Ground Zero Mosque" is nothing at all of any of that. It's not a Mosque, it's a COMMUNITY CENTER, that won't even be viewable on the clearest day from ground zero. The impetus is to bridge the gap between east and west, between religious ideologies that share far more common interest than conflict. The Imam at it's head is actually in the employ of our own state department as an ambassador of sorts, with the stated goal of normalizing relations between Christians and Muslims. There is not a thing suspect here. Nothing provocative intended in any way. There's that and the fact that it's in a depressed neighborhood. An address that has been abandoned since 9/11.
The single most salient tragedy here, and it’s deliberate and hypocritically intentional, is how this nontroversy is more than mere catalyst for the devolution of national discourse over just about anything into fear by way of racism and bigotry. The terrorists would like nothing better than for ordinary Americans to see the war on terror as an existential conflict between Christianity and Islam. Such demagoguery hands them the advantage they would most like to have. A rudimentary Us vs. Them vaulting horse. Those that would foment as much seek to convince us that we are a Christian nation as opposed to what we are, a nation of Christian majority. It’s a slow pitch game of xenophobia for the mouth breathing neanderthals that would have sucked up McCarthyism with a pastel bendy straw.
They are all the same regardless of sect or denomination. Some of them blow themselves up in the market square and some of them shoot abortion doctors in church. The rest of them hate on various levels. Their own insecurities and fears are why they act, never for the right thing but as result of what is wrong with them.
Equally disturbing is how obsessed we’ve become with what just doesn’t matter and should not ever. I realize this is nothing new but just how far back are we gonna slide? The color of skin, ethnicity or religious belief. These fermented under Dumbya but they are exploding under Obama. These things are not and were never intended to make a difference when evaluating character or worth and they suddenly do, more than ever it seems, at least since I started watching television.
The framers of our Constitution went to great lengths to avoid such a mess. They were clear to exacting on this very specific concern and the first amendment is proof of that. This whole thing is stupid on the surface but profoundly important underneath. What pokes out of the water is manufactured controversy. I’m sick and tired of non-issues dominating news cycles and public dialog. What’s underneath is the right of people, whomever they are and wherever they come from, provided for in the very first amendment to our constitution. There is no evidence whatsoever that the people attempting to exercise this right are doing as much for provocation in any way. It is merely an innocent effort to bridge whatever cultural and/or religious gaps that still exist between people from the Middle East and North Americans, between Christians and Muslims. Everyone will be allowed in this proposed COMMUNITY CENTER, to be named "The Park 51 Community Center".
If this project is somehow halted, and it won't be, but if it were, who wins? It is their right under our constitution, not just the law, but our most sacred document, the one the right wing so deliberately cloaks itself in before entering into a conversation about even about basketball. The very document they attempt as we we speak, to mitigate the fourteenth amendment of and consistently exploit it's second amendment. Fifty years ago, these people would burn books and actively covet their own drinking fountains.
It is their right because like it or not, they are us.
They are us and we are them.