Building a "13-story mega-mosque" on the site of Ground Zero would indeed be a provocative move, if the building in question weren't already constructed 600 feet away, and if it weren't already owned by the Muslim outreach group the Cordoba Initiative, and if it weren't under theoretical plans to be reconstructed as a community center, and if the United States was ever planning on getting around to erecting so much as a house of cards on Ground Zero, yes. It's not so much that we want to build anything ourselves, it's just that we can't stand to let THEM build THEIR stuff so close to what THEY did to US. It's just insulting.
A slap in the face, you might say-- which is really more our prerogative than theirs. In case you hadn't noticed, we've been raining retribution and spitting blood and thunder every fucking which way now for years, with no signs of stopping. If we really had a problem with constructing religious facades on the sites of mass slaughter, I'm guessing Europe would be severely lacking in cathedrals.
Okay, but a mosque is a bit much-- advertising the same religion as the attackers. But I'm going to go ahead and claim that the people who organized the whole catastrophe and flew the planes into the buildings were about as "Muslim" as I am a fish. They weren't any more adherents of any kind of sane religion than the Nazi's were truly Christian. So whether they build a mosque or a Buddhist sanctuary or a kiosk where the adherents of the Right Reverend Sun Myung Moon could hand out pamphlets is really missing the point.
Anyone who brings rampant pain and destruction isn't religious so much anymore as they are a Total Fucking Looney. Anyone relinquishes their right to any kind of respectable spiritual banner as soon as they cause a building to explode (that's kind of my rule of thumb). And no one's proposing to build a monument to Total Fucking Looniness. Mostly because we have scads of them already, in lots of places... Wall Street springs to mind.
Actually, that brings me to my last point, which is to ask What are you Afraid Of? And I can understand where a lot of the anger and vitriol and resistance is coming from. Lots of people are afraid of The Other. Those Strange People, who are so damn sneaky and violent and untrustworthy, who want to stop you from doing what you want to do and force you to do what they want you to do. They already hurt us plenty, and now it looks like they want to hurt us some more.
But you might want to consider how well that last paragraph describes Pfizer, or Enron, or BP. And I'll be honest-- I am far, far more afraid of white men in suits than I am of scruffy men with AK-47's half a world away. One of them could actually hurt me.
A slap in the face, you might say-- which is really more our prerogative than theirs. In case you hadn't noticed, we've been raining retribution and spitting blood and thunder every fucking which way now for years, with no signs of stopping. If we really had a problem with constructing religious facades on the sites of mass slaughter, I'm guessing Europe would be severely lacking in cathedrals.
Okay, but a mosque is a bit much-- advertising the same religion as the attackers. But I'm going to go ahead and claim that the people who organized the whole catastrophe and flew the planes into the buildings were about as "Muslim" as I am a fish. They weren't any more adherents of any kind of sane religion than the Nazi's were truly Christian. So whether they build a mosque or a Buddhist sanctuary or a kiosk where the adherents of the Right Reverend Sun Myung Moon could hand out pamphlets is really missing the point.
Anyone who brings rampant pain and destruction isn't religious so much anymore as they are a Total Fucking Looney. Anyone relinquishes their right to any kind of respectable spiritual banner as soon as they cause a building to explode (that's kind of my rule of thumb). And no one's proposing to build a monument to Total Fucking Looniness. Mostly because we have scads of them already, in lots of places... Wall Street springs to mind.
Actually, that brings me to my last point, which is to ask What are you Afraid Of? And I can understand where a lot of the anger and vitriol and resistance is coming from. Lots of people are afraid of The Other. Those Strange People, who are so damn sneaky and violent and untrustworthy, who want to stop you from doing what you want to do and force you to do what they want you to do. They already hurt us plenty, and now it looks like they want to hurt us some more.
But you might want to consider how well that last paragraph describes Pfizer, or Enron, or BP. And I'll be honest-- I am far, far more afraid of white men in suits than I am of scruffy men with AK-47's half a world away. One of them could actually hurt me.
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