Obama's support for Ground Zero Mosque

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by Danzig

william saletan on the proposed center, from slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2264754/

Sensitive Conservatism
Is a mosque near Ground Zero "insensitive"?
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, Aug. 23, 2010, at 8:11 AM ET


One by one, the arguments against the proposed Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero have collapsed. A "13-story mosque"? No such plan. "At Ground Zero"? Wrong again. The imam's radical politics? A myth. His shadowy jihadist financiers? Imagined. His failure to denounce terrorism? Debunked. The "angry battle" he's "stoking"? Please. The guy isn't even returning phone calls. The anger and stoking have come from the other side.

So the mosque's opponents have fallen back on one last argument: sensitivity.



love this line:

With the exception of Palin, these are not stupid people.

an excerpt:

It's natural to be angry at Muslims for 9/11. In fact, it's natural to want to kill them. We've hated and killed each other for centuries. You kill us; we kill you. The "you" is collective. You aren't exactly the infidel who slew my grandfather. But you're close enough.

Seen against this backdrop, the mosque fight represents enormous progress. We aren't talking about killing Muslims or banning their religion. We're just asking them not to build a mosque near the place where they murdered thousands of our people. "Putting the mosque at a different site would demonstrate the uncommon courtesy sometimes required for us to get along," Hughes suggests. In turn, "this gesture of goodwill could lead us to a more thoughtful conversation to address some of the ugliness this controversy has engendered."

But if our revulsion at the idea of a mosque near Ground Zero is irrational—if it's based on group blame and a failure to distinguish Islam from terrorism—then maybe it isn't the mosque's planners who need to rise above their emotions. Maybe it's the rest of us.

Once we recognize the sensitivity argument for what it is—an appeal to feelings we can't morally justify—there's no good reason why the Islamic center shouldn't be built at its planned site, in the neighborhood where its imam already preaches and its members work and congregate. Asking them to reorder their lives to accommodate our instinctive reaction is wrong. We can transcend that reaction, and we should.

the last paragraph, which i agree should be the real talking points:

By all means, let's have a thoughtful conversation about Islam and its place in the United States. Let's ask the imam what he means when he says sharia is compatible with the U.S. Constitution. Let's confront the reluctance of Muslim clerics, including this one, to denounce Hamas. And let's demand transparency in the fundraising process so extremists don't finance the new building. Moving the building farther away from Ground Zero won't advance any of these discussions. It's the wrong fight. Let it go.

In that last paragraph, the author brought up the imam's assessment that sharia law is compatible with the Constitution. There is one poster here that probably thinks the author must be a racist, bigot, and islamophobe since he dared to be even slightly critical of the imam. Anyone who has any questions or concerns about Islam is a bigot. Do you know how I know? Because one of the posters here has basically said that.