When American citizens are discussing the rights of American citizens on American soil there’s no good reason for us to give a flying fuck about what people who already hate us think.
It’s just as easy and equally meaningless to claim denying equal rights to Muslims will only give them ammo to claim we are the enemy.
I prefer Jon Stewarts analogy. It’s like giving a crap about how your ex feels about the drapes you picked out with your wife. They’re crazy, they’re not Americans. We don’t make decisions about what happens on American soil between Americans, based of what they fucking may or may not think.
Victory Monument, what a slanted ,bigoted right wing phrase. You should be ashamed for saying anything that dumb and dishonest. It is not in ground zero, which would not matter at all. It is 2 1/2 blocks away. There is a mosque 4 blocks away. Your arguments are poorly disguised hatred of Muslims. You do embarrass even the tighty righties.This is strictly a political ploy for the elections. I hope it fails miserably.
Except it’s not a victory monument. People say it’s a victory monument in a failed attempt to justify their anti-muslim sentiments, but they’re wrong. I understand a community center in an old Coat Factory store makes you sad, but your opinion doesn’t matter. Building permits and leases and such matter.
Good God man!!You realize we can go back and read your previous posts in this thread and the other right??
How can you expect your argument to have any credibility when you contadict your own posts so blatantly.
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This is exactly the point you were making that you are now contradicting.
The sentence even contradicts itself. We don’t care what they think, but it will be a victory monument. To whom exactly? The “they” whose opinions we don’t care about?
I’d say tripping over your own argument indicates this thread is close to done.
IMO the victory is when our enemies have scared us enough to give up our principles and start fighting our fellow Americans and denying their civil liberties.
Giving a rats ass what terrorists think of your country is different than acknowledging they see the Mosque as a victory monument.
I’ve given a direct analogy to a Japanese cultural center in Pearl Harbor. If you don’t care about how other people feel then that’s fine but don’t pretend the sentiment isn’t there or is unjustified.
Fair enough. I don’t see any immediate refutation to that, other than the idea that civil rights should not be put up for a vote.
And when you give that as the reason that the mosque should not be, you are allowing their opinion to shape your beliefs. That’s giving a rat’s ass.
One, a nation like Japan and a religion like Islam are not really analogous. Two, if a Japanese group wanted to build some kind of cultural outreach center in Pearl Harbor, and their sentiment seemed genuine, why the fuck not? Sounds like a good idea, a way to make amends.
But going back to point one: the Muslim Americans who want to build the mosque had nothing to do with 9/11. They have as much relation to Al Qaeda as your neighborhood church has to Westboro.
The sentiment may be there, but it is wholly, completely, undeniably, without reservation, totally unjustified, groundless, and dare I say it, unAmerican.
And just to make it clear, because it apparently must be:
While I would not have a problem with said Japanese center, if there is a difference to be made then it is that your analogy involves Japanese citizens coming to United States soil.
The community center’s location was chosen because it was an available building in the part of town where the group has operated for more than two decades. After the site was found, as an effort to extend their message of cooperation, (as reported on Fox News last winter, before the haters changed the rules), the organizers tried to draw a connection to the damage inflicted by the haters on their side of the religious divide in contrast to their own healing efforts.
The name only “screams insensitity” to the historically ignorant whose understanding of Islam on the Iberian peninsula ends with Roncevalles or (the much exaggerated) Tours. Years after the Berber invasion brought Islam to Spain, the city of Cordoba became a center of enlightenment and tolerance, a position it maintained for centuries, permitting Jews and Christians to live and work with Muslims without oppression.
No it sure isn’t. You get a couple of opinions claiming radical Muslims will think of Park 51 as a victory monument and use what they might think to justify opposing a building on American soil for Americans by Americans.
rephrasing it slightly isn’t going to erase the stunning contradiction.
And what’s the connection that means they will think that?
Well, it’s a Mosque, {no it isn’t} and it’s at Ground Zero {no it isn’t} and just for Muslim’s, not infidels {no it isn’t} and it’s about our conquest {no it isn’t}
The only connection is the one that leads us right back to bigotry.
Hell, even if Rauf turns out to be secretly planning something nefarious, we don’t condemn people and their private property dealings for what they might do maybe possibly somewhere down the road.
By that I mean, in this new age of war I accept the likely hood of sleeper cells of radical Muslims in America. Maybe some will go into Park 51 and use the pool and talk about how they hate America and what they can do to strike a blow for Islam against the white devil. We might even find a picture of them greeting Imam Rauf.
NONE OF THAT, makes a difference when being true to our own principles and upholding our laws. We don’t abandon them because of what someone might do, or what someone might think, based on irrational fear.
Let’s fill out your analogy to make it very similar.
Japanese Americans who have lived in the area for 20 years buy property two blocks away from Pearl Harbor. From either location you can’t even see the other.
They use the property and the existing buildings for months without any objections. They have a considerable time and money investment in the building and have plans on big improvements and making it open to the entire community. They decide to call it Rising Sun Community house. When someone points out that might be a tad objectionable this close to Pearl they agree on a Hawaiian name.
They haven’t hidden anything and their operations are open. Everyone involved so far approves. A couple of positive stories about their plans appear in local media.
Some group gets a wild hair and decides that this is an insult to good Americans {meaning non Japanese} A media outlet picks it up and decides to to now reverse their prior approval and make money by distorting the facts to highlight the insult angle. Sadly, Americans buy into it.
Are you catching my drift here? All these analogies look much different once you fill in pertinent detail rather than leave them with a distorted over simplified view. That’s exactly what Fox did to gin up this story.
I do care about how other people feel but their feelings are not justification for surrendering civil liberties. I understand the sentiment is there and it concerns me that my fellow citizens are so easily manipulated by the media to let emotions and latent bigotry rise above their principles and reason.
One more comment about your analogy
If we wanted to make it more accurate we’d say it was nine years after the Pearl Harbor attack. If that was the case then those Japanese Americans recently got out of an internment camp.
an article listing some incidents that didn’t get national coverage.
You may be correct that we could find examples of violence against gays , or Jews, or Latinos of other minorities that are just as numerous but gunfire and a pipe bomb and arson are fairly serious examples of violence. Without panicking, I think in our current atmosphere , it needs to be addressed.
It went on for months because nobody new about it. That’s not an argument at all.
I don’t see how you care about the majority of people who object to this, even when it’s pointed out by Muslims around the world that it will be seen as a big FUCK YOU to Americans. The people who feel this way will kill you for sport and you’re too politically correct to understand this. The Catholic Church managed to figure it out with the Auschwitz convent but this “cultural bridge building” Imam could care less.
It was reported on a show on Fox News last December–and commeted upon favorably on that show.
Before the demagogues of hatred got involved, intially by publishing multiple direct lies that someone wanted to build “a mosque” (Lie #1), on Ground Zero (Lie #2), and dedicate it on the tenth anniversary of the WTC/Pentagon attacks (Lie #3), there was plenty of news about it in Manhattan and the NYC area.
All we do by opposing the community center is announce to the world that any lie about Islam is sufficient reason for Americans to demonsatrate bigotry and hatred.
If anyone wants them to relocate to a different location, let them offer to buy the building so that the Cordoba Initiative has the funds to move their plans. They have already announced that they are willing to move, but, of course, telling them to move while their funds are tied up in a bulding that one would not let them use is simply a nasty way to destroying the funds of an innocent group by sending them into foreclosure. Good, moral bigots making that proposal.
