No. I think victory is attached in part to what it is you believe your’re standing up for and defending. Then you have to consider if your beleifs and principles are based in facts and some form of reasonable judgement or simply emotional.
I think I understand your point. If the location and project are demonized as a victory for terrorists then terrorists might claim it as such. I think the far greater danger is a victory for fear mongering dishonesty and religious intolerence. We can turn a multicultural community center into a victory for peaceful and respectful coexistance.
Fear has nothing to do with it. Whether you wish to believe Muslims in the Middle East have a better handle on how radical muslims will view this is your opinion.
To an extent, we agree, but I would modify it to victory being attached in part to the appearance of what it is you believe you’re standing up for and defending. Even if you have made no concrete victory so far as your beliefs go, if your opponents *appear *defeated, then you may well assume a victory, even if there really wasn’t one. A victory requires a defeated foe; the correct response to avoid that perception isn’t to act defeated, it’s to act entirely unbothered. The message shouldn’t be “You celebrate these acts committed against us, and we were so wounded and hurt by them that we will be very suspicious of people only slightly like you”, it should be “You celebrate these acts committed against us. They had no lasting effect on how we run our country. You are of little concern.”
The problem, too, is that it isn’t a concrete victory for those fear mongerers or the religious intolerant. It may well have the appearance of it for them, but it will have the opposite effect, as such things often do. So yes, it’s a pretty big danger.
That’s unreasonable. By the same standard, Christian Americans in America have a better handle on how Christian Americans will behave. So it would be only correct to take, say, Fred Phelp’s views on how issues will affect Christians in the US over me as a Briton, right?
Simply being a member of a group does not imply knowledge.
I disagree with your premise entirely. American Christians would best be able to verify the state of mind of Fred Phelps’s church to someone in another country. His opinions are well documented.
And yes, being a member of a group implies a greater level of knowledge than someone who is not a member of the group. A Muslim media Director in Dubai is going to have a better grasp of Islam in the Middle East.
There is no question that the Middle East harbors an extremist form of Islam. It goes way beyond anti-Western religious dogma, it is a battle for a perceived purist form of the religion within Islam itself.
Correction: “Does” include (or, even better, “will” include.) This thing WILL be built. When the residents of lower Manhattan, as represented by their zoning board, feel the need for input from dumbasses in rural white America, they’ll ask for it. But I somehow doubt they will, nor should they.
You seem to have entirely reversed my question, which, arguably, shows the point (For the record, the question was whether Phelps was a better judge than me of American Christians, not whether American Christians were a better judge than me of Phelps). Some members of a group are good at understanding others. Some are not. Simply being a member alone does not imply knowledge.
Than? In each and every case? You’re talking likelihoods, and non-quantifiable likelihoods at that.
And? Simply pointing out that a group believes on thing is not guarantee that they will believe a subset of that overall opinion.
Don’t say Muslims in the middle east as if you got a consensus of opinion. You surely didn’t. I don’t give a crap what radical Muslims may or may not believe about this issue. It isn’t important in weighing this issue. The far more important issue is what we believe in and how our actions promote or betray those beliefs. Will we embrace bogotry and religious intolerence and then try to justify it by what radical Muslims might believe. It’s far more important that we promote the kind of atmosphere and society that will foster multiculteral unity rather than interloerence and the kind of poisenous racial division that leads to more violence.
The people I quoted live or lived in the region. They are closer to the mentality that spawned 9/11. Osama Bin Laden and those with his mindset still exist. They are not a small group of people and they are not all hiding in caves.
There seems to be a politically correct attitude that we cannot acknowledge their existence without lumping all Muslims together. We are at war with these people whether we choose to participate or not. Abu Hamza al-Masri spent years in your country talking about turning it into an Islamic State. To infer he isn’t a threat because his brand of Islam is small in number belays the reality of the worldwide security issues that exist.
I haven’t seen anything like that in this thread. IMO the problem isn’t in acknowledging their existence. We do. We can even recognize that some Muslims in this country imcluding American Muslims might agree with and support them. KNowing that we take reasonable steps to protect ourselves. What we shouldn’t be doing is over reacting to that reality and fostering intolerence and fear toward all things Muslim.
Nobody is saying anything like that in this thread. The point here is to not let fear and those who use it to manipulate turn us into irrational fools who view all Muslims as if they are the bad guys. We shouldn’t cater to irrational fears and knee jerk emotions based on falsehoods and dishonest hype.
Who cares what terrorists think? To make that an important point, much less one we base decisions off of, is to hand them credibility on a golden platter. By even acknowledging their opinion, we are legitimizing it. We are saying they are a legit force, and their opinions have a place on the world stage. Screw their opinion. Let them think whatever they want as long as they stay away from us.
The role that Middle Eastern extremists play in New York city planning should be zero. Their opinions don’t count. They don’t live here, they weren’t elected for office, they don’t get a voice in this. Why are you so eager to give them a voice?
If the terrorists suddenly decide, in all seriousness, that the Statue of Liberty is a terrorist victory monument, should we tear it down?
I think we have. Certain precautions - definitely securing the cockpit, possibly the idea of air marshals, were prudent. But we’ve gone way way overboard with populating the TSA with uneducated thugs masquerading as law enforcement, violating civil rights, taking naked pictures of passengers, and creating no fly lists of an arbitrarily large percentage of the population with a high error rate.
Why would they care? Clearly terrorists are violent extremist criminals with mental issues. Generally I don’t take too much stock in what they think. A crazy person I don’t like could pick some random legal action to perform and claim it is against me, but unless the same action performed by a non crazy person would bother me, it’s not going to make any difference to me. I’ll just say “go you! you really got me that time! :rolleyes:”
It may have been sensible to so succumb but succumb you certainly have.
Chalk that up to a victory for the terrorists.
Just all tarred with the same brush.
If this Mosque is not built then you can chalk up another win for the terrorists (who probably don’t want Muslims living peacefully and happily with infidels).
I’d ask for a cite but it doesn’t natter. If the people of NYC think that{and you haven’t convinced me it’s true} it’s because they have been misled by BS publicity. Tey need to understand that irresponsible fear mongering that causes us to urrationally abandon our principles is a greater threat to us as a society than what radical Islamists think about a building. We have much more chance of encouraging terrorism by continuing to create division and foster resentment with Muslims as a whole than by the location of a community center.
If you keep waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 like it’s the Ace of Trumps that wins every argument and leaves us all in Shock and Awe that you played it, and then use that memory of 9/11 to justify any bigoted, xenophobic, Islamophobic disgusting thought in your head, then you are doing more disservice to the memory of the victims than anything any terrorist could ever dream of. If remembering 9/11 means abandoning all that the US stands for, then it’s high fucking time that we FORGET 9/11.
Has anyone seen estimates of how many votes this little brouhaha will net Republican candidates come november?
They just can’t get enough of that base stirring, can they?