Alright, dial it back. This kind of thing belongs in the Pit, not Great Debates.
I didn’t see any real arguments you made. What opinions would you like rebuffed?
Actually, this is not a debate of any sort. It is one more of your Pit rants that you have slipped into the wrong forum.
Your initial alleged premise was that the U.S. mainstream media “ignored” the staged rally and that you wished to discuss why that happened. What we have since discovered has been that the rally was covered by several news outlets and that the rally was not large enough to justify even that coverage.
Having gotten your nose into the forum, you have not even bothered to provide any rebuttal to the facts that undermined your purported premise and have simply used the thread as one more opportunity to bash Muslims.
You may do that with equal fervor in the BBQ Pit without the need to restrain your language, so I am going to provide you that opportunity.
Off to the Pit.
[ /Modding ]
…ees luxuriously apportioned with reech Coreenthian leather…
[/ricardo montalban]
What kind of idiot wants to build a mosque near the WTC site? What, they want to get firebombed? Is that the plan? Stir shit up? Good job!
Some idiots who bought the building legally and have already been praying there for months, but are tired of saying their prayers in an abandoned warehouse with a big hole in the roof that was made by the landing gear of one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center.
Also Christians and Anglos.
And, being a Canadian, I find that regrettable.
Here is the salon.com story mentioned earlier
Yes the racists protest turned against itself and chased down fellow protesters.
I’d say the media didn’t cover this protest for the same reason they don’t cover neo-nazi marches and KKK rallies. Such things make local news but the national media doesn’t have much interest in showing how ugly Americans can be.
OK, since no one else has stepped up to the plate, how far away is far enough, in your view? Five blocks? Ten? Over in Jersey?
Charming to see your response to perceived bigotry is to engage in outright sweeping hatred.
I don’t know what the hell your malfunction is, but do you actually KNOW any North American Muslims? I mean, personally?
I do. They’re exactly the same as the damn Protestants down the street or the Jews. Some of 'em do the traditional garb thing and the head scarves (but so what, my Jewish wife does the same damn thing many days), some don’t, but they don’t wear their “Muslim” on their sleeves. They’re people who pray differently than you on their weekly prayer day, and who have different ritual daily prayers (my Catholic parents pray four times a day in various formulas, after all–blessings on each meal, nightly rosary) which some of them don’t even do or do silently so you wouldn’t even need to know or care. And then they go to their jobs and their homes and watch football and whatever. Even the alcohol prohibition is usually around the same as the way Baptists do it (If you must invite a Baptist or Muslim fishing with you, invite two–if you invite one, he’ll drink all your beer. :D)
Islam does have an extremism problem that’s aided and abetted by the extremists being in control of a few fairly large countries. However, that doesn’t say jack and/or shit about the vast teeming millions of Muslims any more than the perpetrators of the Omagh bombing reflect on all Catholics or Tim McVeigh reflects on all right-wingers.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the muslim on the street who was an extremist, but when you have leaders of countries with such hostile views, therein lies the main problem. Individuals can band together, but they aren’t very effective at getting things done without an influential leader.
This still isn’t an indictment of Muslims who are currently resident in North America, who are overwhelmingly liberalized and modern.
Valteron, since we’re in the Pit and I don’t have to worry about getting a warning, I am going to make your fucking day. Don’t be shy, man, I know this is what you’ve been angling for since you posted the OP.
You’re a racist.
Happy now?
No, but PZ Myers and Webster Cook did.
I’d loooooove a headcount of that 1000-member group to see how many of them live here. They can fuck right off, far as I’m concerned. I’m sick to death of non-NYers co-opting the WTC tragedy for their own political and/or racist hobby horses. (Not that the WTC tragedy wasn’t a tragedy for all the U.S. and world; and let’s not forget the other 9/11 targets in PA and DC. But it’s amazing how many people who normally don’t consider NY part of the “Real America” will wrap themselves up in the Statue of Liberty and pretend to give a rat’s ass about what happens here.)
Of course I can’t speak for the entirety of New York, but everyone [i\]I* know here, except my arch-Zionist-right-wing/Muslim-hating Aunt and her son, thinks having a mosque a couple of blocks from the WTC site is a positive and encouraging effort. The general thinking is that the message it sends is powerful. What better way to counter an anti-American agenda than by showing a thriving pluralism and multiculturalism?
I seem to recall that most of the people bitching about trying terror suspects in criminal court in New York were Republican Congresscritters from places which were patently not in or near NYC.
Seriously, Valteron, have you ever actually met a Muslim? Because your over-the-top ravings make you look like a crazy person to those of us who have.
I’ve been an expat three different times, all in countries with large Muslim minorities (and all in countries with different majority religions). I’ve also traveled in five majority Muslim countries, some in the Middle East, some in the Balkans. And I live in SE Michigan, which has a large Muslim population, made up of Middle Easterners and non-Middle Easterners. So I’ve met a lot of Muslims. Many of my students when I was a teacher were Muslim. Here’s a picture of me and my seventh graders back when I was a teacher in the Balkans. There are twenty kids in that picture: eight are Muslims and twelve are Orthodox Christians. Can you guess which are which? Yeah, I doubt it, because there’s nothing particularly unusual about them. Even I could only tell because the Muslim kids are ethnically Turkish and have distinctively Turkish names.
They’re just…ordinary folk. You’re pooh-poohing the “myth” that most Muslims aren’t radicals or extremists, but it isn’t a myth. I have met hundreds, maybe thousands of self-identified Muslims. Unless there’s something really crazy going on, and all of these people I’ve met, who speak different languages and are from different countries and are from different traditions of Islam are all engaging in some wild cover-up to hide their dastardly plan to destroy “our way of life” (which isn’t notably different from their way of life, best as I can tell), well, I’d personally be more afraid of you than I am of them. Because you’re coming off like an unhinged nutter in this thread.
Ethnically Turkish? Or Turkic? 