Tonight a cold front has moved through the Northeast, and suddenly it feels like fall outside, which is always just fine with me. If there’s one thing I detest (and longtime readers will know that’s something of a lowball estimate), it’s a hot September. But right now there’s a cool, crisp breeze coming through the open window, and after the beastly summer we’ve all been through, it is very refreshing indeed.
Meanwhile, the little clash-of-civilizations drama that has had everyone all wound up of late has descended into low comedy. Terry Jones, the tinpot Florida preacher who absurdly set the world on fire by threatening to do the same to a few leaves of paper, is now jerking his captive world-wide audience back and forth like a yo-yo as he waffles about whether he’s actually going to Do the Deed or not. As I understand the latest dispatches, he either did, or did not, make some sort of arrangement with Feisal “Good Cop” Rauf about the location of that triumphal mosque, in consideration of which he might, or might not, be willing to stay his hand, thereby sparing the world further (yawn) Muslim ire. World leaders, media titans, and the commanders of the world’s mightiest army tremble with helpless anxiety as an utterly insignificant little pisher from Gainesville toys with a book of matches.
I don’t think I have ever seen anything like it in my 54 years.
The latest update seems to be that the august Mr. Rauf, saintly builder of bridges, uniter of riven cultures, America’s official knight-errant of tolerance, and a man without an ulterior bone in his body, isn’t about to let this malignant little mountebank, this upstart farceur, this small-bore sky-pilot, upset his protection racket — in which the “deeply sensitive” Imam, though yearning with all his heart to move his triumphal 9/11 victory mosque somewhere else to ease America’s spiritual anguish, must sadly keep it right where it is for the sake of “national security”. Mr. Jones, therefore, seems likely once again to be making his incendiary statement on Saturday.
I know what you are thinking: this has really gone beyond absurdity; it is a disgraceful media and political circus. What we need is a wise and sober figure, some universally respected solon of unimpeachable sagacity and gravitas, to discipline these squabbling children, and bring this whole embarrassing mess to a swift and dignified conclusion.
Wait! Our prayers may have been answered. We have just learned that Donald Trump has waded into the fray, and will soon put things to rights.
29 Comments
It’s actually loonier than you make it out to be. The good folks in Kansas who make up the congregation of the Westboro Baptist Church are vowing should their erstwhile ally from Florida (I say “ally” because the Florida congregation from time to time joins the Kansas congregation to protest the funerals of US servicemen killed in Afghanistan) anyway, should the Florida guy not whip out his Bic, the Kansas guys will.
I have the feeling you’re gonna love the way the Kansans make use of the English language:
http://www.ocala.com/article/20100909/ARTICLES/100909743/1412?Title=Westboro-Baptish-Church-to-burn-Qurans-if-Dove-doesn-t
I’m scanning the skies for asteroids.
What was it that John Lennon said again? Oh yes —
“Imagine no religion…”
And then there is the ground zero Muslim gay bar…
http://theweek.com/article/index/205938/a-muslim-gay-bar-near-ground-zero
Ah yes Frederik, and we read, “Eric Boehlert saying, “but it would only work “if Islamic Center supporters react as insanely as those who view their proposal as an act of war….pointing out that Gutfeld’s provocative jab wouldn’t build any bridges…”
I’d actually heard this before, at least a version of it. And if it’s “bridge-building” (or the lack of) then the friend who initially mentioned something similar, rather than a bar, make it a BBQ joint that just happens to serve alcohol and which might hire gays as waiters.
That way NYC would get American Southerners, Islamic ping-pong players, and Mayor Bloomberg to all cross the bridge together to the community center. Imagine, ESPN could then broadcast a truly international Table Tennis competition which would then obviously encourage the Taliban to drop their AKs and pick up paddles.
No wait. The Taliban already from time to time pick up paddles. As do Texan educators. See! The foundation is already in place.
Now, about those asteroids…
I have a completely opposite viewpoint on the proposal for Cordoba House and the hysteria which ensued, but find it pointless to debate the matter. I would simply point to a front page article in the New York Times today on a Muslim woman who lost her husband on 9/11, and whose stoicism under continued sorrow speaks much more eloquently than any of the actors in this sorry mess.
I read that article this morning. It’s wrenchingly sad, and my heart goes out to the poor woman, but the story has little relevance to the debate about this mosque, or to the more general debate now intensifying in the West regarding Islamism.
An old African saying seems appropriate:
“When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”
Indeed, even the name “Cordoba House” is seen in very different ways by people on opposite sides of this debate. To hear Imam Rauf tell it, we should understand the name as referring to:
To be sure, there was a grand Muslim presence in Spain before the Reconquista. But to many in the West who are familiar with the history of its ancient struggle with Islam, the name “Cordoba” refers to the city that was the high-water mark of Islam’s conquest of Western Europe, where subjugated Christians and Jews lived under stifling religious, financial, and cultural oppression as dhimmi, and where the Umayyad caliphs converted a captured Christian cathedral into a triumphal Great Mosque.
I doubt that the real symbolism behind this onomastic flourish is lost on many Muslims.
The relevance to the Cordoba House mess is that she, like the other survivors of the sixty or so Muslims who died on 9/11, deserves a place to mourn and remember her loved one. The most fitting place would be a mosque which is proximate to Ground Zero. Their wishes, along with the other ten percent of New Yorkers who practice Islam — not to mention the non-Muslim survivor families who also support the idea of Cordoba House — are ignored and dismissed.
“Ignored and dismissed”? Hardly. They have the outspoken support of the Mayor, the President, the Times, media figures all over, and of course, Muslims everywhere.
Their wishes are ignored and dismissed by Rick Lazio, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and the rest of those who profess concern about 9/11 survivors. They act as though Muslim survivors of 9/11, as well as non-Muslim survivors who support Cordoba House, don’t exist. Nor do they acknowledge that there is a straight line between their histrionics and the guy who knifed a Muslim cab-driver, the crackpot in Florida, the arsonists in Tennessee, and so forth.
Of course these wishes are recognized by Bloomberg, the Times, and (some) others in the media. These are people who have an understanding of what America is (or ought to be) all about.
I’d qualify that “Muslims everywhere,” Malcolm. About a week or so ago I was involved in “debate” on one of the local newspaper threads and this one (of among a fairly surprising number) article drew my attention:
http://www.wavy.com/dpps/news/us_news/northeast/9-11-family-members-divided-over-mosque-near-wtc-nt10-jgr_3556186
Whether their voices deserve attention or not, perhaps Peter could respond. Something else about the ‘symbolism’ not being lost. “About” 700CE Islam invades the Iberian. 700 years later a successful ReConquista, and about 700 years after Cordoba rises like the Phoenix. All admittedly, perhaps, simple coincidence.
Nobody, Peter, is acting as if those who support the building of this mosque “don’t exist”. How could we? They are in our faces constantly, lecturing us about our disgusting moral failings. What we are doing is called “disagreeing with them about what ought to be done”.
70% of Americans see planting a mosque at the place where thousands of people were slaughtered in the name of Islam as unbelievably arrogant and grossly insensitive — yet the elite political classes, rather than engaging their concerns, instead sneeringly and dismissively insult this broad and heterogeneous majority (which even includes, as JK points out, many American Muslims) as ignorant, un-American imbeciles.
And blaming acts of violence by deranged individuals on those who, for a variety of perfectly sensible reasons, peaceably oppose this effrontery is no better than blaming cartoonists for murderous riots. (That knife attacker, by the way, worked for an organization that supported the mosque, and that crackpot in Florida is only proposing violence to a book.) I recall, wistfully, that there was a time in America when we held adults responsible for their own behavior.
Do you really want to get into a debate about what group is most prone to ideologically motivated violence intentionally directed against innocent civilians?
But your initial impulse was right — there’s probably little point to the two of us arguing about this one. Last word to you, if you like.
Actually, I don’t see the point of getting into an argument about who is more prone to ideologically motivated violence, considering that we are now ending a war where 100,000 Muslims died as a direct result of our misguided invasion. Nor do I find anything arrogant or insensitive about building a mosque near Ground Zero. If it were an Al Qaeda or Taliban office, yes; but it’s a mosque. (Actually, it’s not even a mosque, as it is modeled after the 92nd Street Y, which few people refer to as a synagogue.) There simply is no equivalence of a religion which spans the globe and those at its extreme who expropriate its name and symbols. Even George Bush was aware that our quarrel is not with a religion of 1.5 billion adherents, but with nineteen individuals and those who supported them. It is no more arrogant or insensitive than building a church at Oklahoma City or Columbine because the murderers there were Christian. The reason why Michael Bloomberg is the greatest political leader in America today (besides the fact that he gets things done) is that he not only eloquently supported Cordoba House as the exemplification of the core American principle of religious diversity, but he also supported the right of the Florida crackpot to burn the Koran, which exemplifies the core principle of free speech. Both principles are to be applied universally, to the unpopular and the despised as well as those who hold the levers of power. This is what America is all about. He is a true profile in courage, as opposed to people like Gingrich and Lazio who exploit bigotry and ignorance to advance their own agenda.
However, since we are so far apart on this issue, this will be my last word on the subject. So instead I will relate a story about my friend George.
George and I were friends when I lived in New York. We were golfing buddies and once I joined him at the Harvard Club along with his fellow alumni to play in their annual chess tournament. I am proud to say that I won my match and defeated Yale.
I hadn’t seen him in a number of years, so when George was out here in 2008, we played golf. Around the eighth hole I asked him: “by the way, George, where were you on 9/11?”
“I was on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center.” Not the answer I expected.
It took George an hour and a half to get out of the building; had it taken ten minutes more, he would be dead. However, George is a live-and-let-live guy, and he has no animus against Islam. He figures he lived through a black swan event, and does not look at the experience through a political lens.
I had to ask him: “So George, what was your take-away from that experience?”
His answer: “I feel like my life started on that day, and I’m seven years old now.” He had a third child and moved on with his life (and continues to work in lower Manhattan). This is not only a far more enlightened view of the world than one commonly hears, but shares something in common with the woman profiled in the Times today. She also realizes that the actions of a lunatic fringe has about as much to do with Islam as Baruch Goldstein (the Jewish extremist who shot a few dozen worshippers in a Jerusalem mosque) has to do with Judaism. Unlike Lazio or Gingrich, this is a woman who truly suffers because of the events of that day, and who bears this suffering with a grace and a stoicism which will always elude people like them.
Just an observation, not picking at a bone Peter, but something about your friend George’s experience and follow-on. I know two people who told me they’d had a similar “re-birth” the only difference was they’d been struck by lightning.
I’ve never been in a situation remotely like George or the two people you know. My idea of extreme stress is having a bran muffin and two cups of coffee, and then being stuck in heavy traffic. So I could well imagine that extreme circumstances lead to spiritual rebirth. My guess is that one’s reaction to these things is emblematic of who that person is, so someone like George could go about his life without being consumed by anger or hatred, while others would have the opposite reaction.
While I will abide by my promise to keep my pie-hole shut, I think the editorial from this week’s Economist has a number of interesting observations, although its concerns are much broader than the Cordoba House issue.
http://www.economist.com/node/16990682
Yes, that’s a thoughtful article, though I strongly disagree that those who see the proposed mosque as being much more than Mr. Rauf would have Westerners believe are making a “ludicrous misreading” of its purpose.
Western leaders have tried to pal up to the ummah for centuries. It never works; it just makes them look foolish, weak, and patronizing (latest example being the NASA director telling al-Jazeera that Obama’s new mission for NASA was to make Muslims feel good about their contributions to science), and usually makes obvious their ignorance of Islam. (Napoleon made a particularly embarrassing go of it in Egypt.)
Mr. Obama has similar issues at home, as explained by James Taranto on August 23rd:
It’s also easy to see why many Americans think he might be more Muslim in his sympathies than Christian (personally, I think he’s just not really religious at all.) He had (at least according to the official story of his lineage) a Muslim father, spent his early years immersed in Muslim culture, and since achieving the Presidency he doesn’t bother to make any show of overt participation in any Christian church. It is also not unreasonable to suspect that his longstanding attendance at Rev. Wright’s place was just a matter of political expediency in service of his career in Chicago’s black community.
Since Jimmy Carter, Americans seem to want their Presidents to wear their religious faith ostentatiously. Except for JFK’s Catholicism, the President’s religious beliefs never seemed to be an issue. Obama talks about his faith from time to time (although there isn’t much reporting on it) and he seems to be a religious person, although I can’t imagine why the intensity of one’s religious beliefs has anything to do with the qualifications to be President. Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing an atheist in the Oval Office, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. I take Obama’s words on religion at face value. There is no reason not to.
However, I think there is a lot more to it than this. In my view, the misperception of Obama as something other than he is — a native born American Christian — is the direct result of Republicans and their allies in the right wing media deliberately perpetuating these myths.
This week’s example is Haley Barbour, who said that he takes President Obama at his word that he is a Christian (as though there was a controversy here) and that, “as far as” he “knew,” Obama was born in the United States (ditto). He further said that “this is a president that we know less about than any other president in history” and “we don’t know if he chopped down a cherry tree. We don’t know any of the childhood things we know about Ronald Reagan.”
This is nonsense. Obama wrote a book about his childhood. There isn’t much, if anything, which isn’t known about his background. Americans like their President to look like them, talk like them, and do things like clear brush and ride horses. By suggesting that maybe he really wasn’t born in America (these Democrats must have been awfully smart to put a phony birth announcement in a local paper, knowing that 49 years later he would be President) or isn’t really a Christian (after incessantly lambasting him for being in Reverend James Wright’s congregation for twenty years, you’d think they know that by now), Obama’s opponents are able to portray him as The Other. This isn’t just Haley Barbour; it goes on week after week. It’s race-baiting with a thin veneer of deniability.
Nicholas Kristof’s piece in the Times today quotes a Newsweek poll which states that 52% of Republicans think that it is definitely or probably true that “Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” This is absolutely astounding: most Republicans think the President is out to establish Sharia law. Let’s forget about the facts that Obama has been much more aggressive in using predator aircraft to kill Al Qaeda than his predecessor; that he escalated the war in Afghanistan; that he has continued many of the most disagreeable parts of Bush’s detention and secrecy policies; or that initiatives against Islamic terrorism have expanded in places like Pakistan and Yemen. You will rarely, if ever, see this acknowledged by top Republicans, Fox News, or the neocons (although the Wall Street Journal editorial page is an occasional exception). Instead, what you hear is this coquettish is-he-or-isn’t-he scurrility on a steady basis.
The reason so many Republicans believe this nonsense is that they are fed a steady diet of misinformation and deliberate distortions by party leaders and their allies in the media. If people want to oppose Obama because of his policies, that’s fine. However, to deliberately perpetuate myths which are conclusively known to be untrue, in an attempt to appeal to (some) voters’ instinctual distrust of those who are different from them, is the worst debasement of political dialogue I’ve ever seen.
Isn’t that what Haley Barbour said? But I quite agree with you — I really do — that a great many Republicans are complete idiots. That cherry-tree comment is a good example. (A great many Democrats are complete idiots too, of course.)
I have no dog in the is-Obama-really-Christian fight. I was merely explaining why some folks might be wondering.
I’ve heard your point made elsewhere, I think: conservatives are racists. Good thing there’s no racism on the Left!
Here’s some more idiocy I’ve run across lately: some people actually imagine that all jihad takes the form of violent terrorism, and that anyone who isn’t an overt, bomb-totin’ terrorist clearly must not share the terrorists’ goal of the expansion of Islam and sharia. In the minds of many well-intentioned Americans it would never happen, for example, that an enormously influential movement might exist within Islam that sees terrorism as making jihad more difficult, that thinks a much smarter way to fight a stronger enemy is to work quietly and covertly from within Western societies — using those societies’ supreme commitment to non-discrimination and tolerance against them — rather than trying violently to topple them from without, which only provokes a violent and obstructive counter-reaction.
If you have a subscription to The New Republic, I think this article is the last word on the subject of the GZM:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/77384/letter-to-imam-rauf-my-friend-if-you-build-it
If you don’t subscribe, the author’s main point is that the Mosque will take on a significance in the Moslem world that the Rauf does not intend. I’m not sure that he doesn’t intend it, and his solution — to build a generic place of worship for all the Abrahamic faiths — seems like nonsense to me — weren’t Buddhists killed in 9/11 also? But the article is worth reading.
I’d like to point out that Rauf recently claimed that if the Mosque is built elsewhere, Moslems around the world will react in violence. News, right? It shows that, already, the Mosque is an Arch of Triumph to some.
Don’t build it. Put a monument there with the names of the dead. Everyone, even the Moslem survivors of 9/11, can find peace at such a monument.
I most certainly do not believe that all conservatives are racists. For example, I don’t think the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is racist in the slightest. However, I think the leadership of the Republican party uses covert appeals to racism to further their agenda, and has done so since Nixon’s Southern strategy.
I think that there is a broad distinction to be made between conservatism and the Republican Party, and that true conservatives are rare within its top ranks. After all, true conservatives are principled. With few exceptions, the leadership of the Republican party is comprised of craven and unprincipled actors whose sole concern is their own self-interest. This week’s example: tax incentives to small business is a bedrock Republican objective, at least until the day Obama proposed it. If they truly believed in their professed principle of low taxes helping small business, they would embrace the legislation in a hurry. However, the GOP practices the see-saw approach to American politics (if my opponent goes down, I go up), and abandons its putatively core beliefs in an instant if there is a perceived political advantage. I don’t think a true conservative — such as Buckley, Perot, Goldwater, or Reagan — would do that. They also (except Buckley) never used appeals to racism in their thinking or their public statements.
Peter, I completely agree with you about the rarity of principled conservatives in the Republican Party. The only good most of them do currently is to act as a brake on the runaway train of Democratic government expansion. But during the Bush administration Republicans were arguably just as fiscally irresponsible as the Democrats in their own way, and didn’t really act like conservatives at all. A pox on both their houses.
I will say, though, that minority leader John Boehner is glad to get the small-business concession that Mr. Obama has proposed. He’d like to get the tax increase delayed for incomes over $250K as well, but he’s not about to block the rest of it if that’s the best that can be done.
I will bet you a milkshake that Boehner will block the legislation at least until after the election.
Dom,
Right. This is a classic good-cop-bad-cop game.
If Muslim “radicals” will react violently if the mosque is moved, then that means, in other words, that planting it at Ground Zero is exactly what they want. So Mr. Rauf’s argument boils down to “you’d better do what Muslim radicals want, or somebody’s going to get hurt.”
As for the significance of the mosque in the Muslim world, I think it impossible that Mr. Rauf does not intend it, because I think it is impossible that he did not foresee it.
The Times has an article today about the Republican tactic of using Obama’s otherness for partisan advantage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/us/politics/16bai.html?_r=1&hp
I read it. The author takes it as given that Mr. Obama isn’t in fact different from mainstream America in the ways that people naturally worry about.
The article contains this gem:
Never mind that Mr. Obama wrote an entire book called Dreams From My Father (a book whose subtitle, by the way — A Story of Race and Inheritance — explicitly calls the reader to focus on race. It’s always all about race and group identity with the Left when it suits their purpose, and always utterly vile when mentioned by the Right, even if it isn’t mentioned at all).
Given that, it is reasonable enough to look at exactly what Barak Sr.’s dreams were, and what Barack Jr. might have “inherited”. In the early days of the Kenyatta government Obama pÁ¨re was deeply involved in the infighting between the hard-core-Communist, Soviet-aligned Odinga and the Western-leaning Mboya/Kenyatta factions, and wrote an influential article, called Problems Facing Our Socialism, strongly arguing in favor of the Marxist approach. For example, he wrote:
Yes, some people might be blowing Barak Sr.’s influence on his son out of proportion, but such concerns certainly are more than just a lot of hot air.
Bill Clinton’s father was an alcoholic and JFK’s father was a Nazi-sympathizing stock manipulator. They turned out OK.
Right, but then they weren’t exactly saints, either. Much more to the point, they didn’t write books specifically talking about following on their fathers’ dreams! And the current President’s father had some very fervent, very socialistic dreams.
The point is that all this shocked incredulity about the idea that anyone could even imagine that Barack Obama might have been influenced in some way by his father’s political views is a bit thick, to say the least.