In regards to my post yesterday, I get WHY people are upset. I can easily see how the Cordoba House could be built as a giant poke in the chest at America. However, I can also easily see how it can be a place to show that mainstream American Muslims are a different breed from the mainstream Middle East Muslims, and a completely different animal from the violent radicals. The guy building it might not be the nicest person, but he is just one man, and the Muslims of NYC could very well find his rhetoric to be wholly undesirable. Regardless, we can not abandon core principles because feelings might get hurt. We’ve already abandoned the 4th amendment, and all that’s has gotten us is Big Brother.
Growing up, I was raised in the United Church of Christ. I remember church as being a nice place, full of friendly faces and thoughtful sermons about respecting your fellow man and trying to live in peace with them through Christ. Then our minister left, and the new guy that replaced her came to the pulpit with sermons of sin & hell & damnation. I’ve never seen a congregation abandon a church so completely. Within 6 months, the place went from being packed every Sunday, to having just enough people to fill the first three pews. People generally want to be good & live in peace. They won’t always flock to someone preaching hate & violence. The Imam may want a place to radicalize people, but he may not get it even if he builds it.
Now, my personal hope is that they build Cordoba House, and the people of NYC take it as a poke in the chest, and instead of bombing the place, they do something better. Something that show’s just how great this country is. They can build something big & new & shiny in that stinking hole in the ground where the towers once stood, instead of the ego masturbations they’ve been doing for the past nine years or so. I mean, I just can not believe it’s taken this long! That site should have a bustling gleaming tower of glass, steel, and concrete, a symbol of the massive industrial might this country can muster, and that tower should have 4 smaller towers all facing East & designed & arranged such that it looks we are giving those radicals a giant goddamn middle finger!
But no, we have to bitch about a Mosque while we go broke.
The Muslims never conquered a thriving Western society, Mad Rocket.
To answer several of your questions, the reason that the “gleaming” re-build is going slowly is that various forces that act on this society have put our economy in a tailspin. Some of those forces are traceable to socialist-wannabes, and some are traceable to Mammon and greed, but they have surely wrecked our “gleaming” economy for a long time.
The imam is not an idiot. He knows that we are weak now, and reading his Quran, he knows we are ripe for conquest.
Being weak, we must try ever harder to put some spine in resisting the Sword of Islam, and that means that we don’t have the luxury of cutting this imam any slack.
If we have to comprise the Bill of Rights in order to prevent a lone Imam from having a pulpit, then this experiment in liberty is dead, and we deserve to be conquered.
Hell, we’ve already comprimised the BOR just to buy some paper thin security.
OK, Mad Rocket, that’s a proper topic for debate: the emasculation of our Bill of Rights.
Write it up and we’ll look at it.
Islam will not be swayed by gleaming civilization.
Just ask the Viennese.
Islam will be swayed by violence. Because as Muslims know, violence is power. Why else do they behead journalists and cartoonists?
So yes, I am advocating violence. Carefully controlled and targeted violence, but violence all the same.
Rivrdog – I think I just might
Jim – I got no problem with meeting violence with violence, as long as it is, as you say, very targeted violence. It does us no good to kill folks who just want to be left alone just because the violent ones got close to them & the blast radius was just big enough.
Nothing inspires hatred and violent retailiation faster than having your loved ones maimed or killed as collateral damage.
I agree that the mosque isn’t the biggest concern. I think I blogged something to the extent that a voting majority of new yorkers seem to love crap like the mosque, just like the voting majority (with respect to the high-level thinkers like Mr. Whitewolf that California produces..) of Californians seem to love breaking the bank.
If you understand the long-term jihad and short-term jihad (not their terms) of Islam it is a threat to our society.
Your point is well-taken about priorities. If you’re on a sinking ship that hit an iceberg and you’re trying to find a way to survive in icy waters, and the lookout calls out that an enemy sub is visible on the horizon, how much attention would you pay to it?
BTW, the freedom tower is progressing. I got to drive by a few weeks ago. It’ll be 1776′ high and is scheduled for completion in ’13. There’s a webcam of it somewhere.