In response to Jim's meditation on electing a Muslim as president, we recall Colin Powell's comments when he endorsed Obama:
Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that [Obama] is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel particularly strong about this because of a picture I saw in a
magazine [the New Yorker]. It was a photo essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay, was of a mother at Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone, and it gave his awards - Purple Heart, Bronze Star - showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death, he was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the head stone, it didn't have a Christian cross. It didn't have a Star of David. It has a crescent and star of the Islamic faith.And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was fourteen years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he could serve his country and he gave his life.
I was never a fan of the war in Iraq, but it seems to me that if Muslims are willing to go overseas and die for their country, the least we could do is let them build a mosque where they want.
3 comments:
The president waffles and now Dean weighes in against the mosque. I'm just not getting it, and I'm also getting just a little annoyed. How hard is it to see that the people who want to build this Islamic Center have nothing more in common with al-Qaeda than the Girl Scouts? If a Christian terrorist group like the Christian Identity movement -- which was behind the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics, bombings of abortion clinics and the bombing of a lesbian bar -- had flown planes into the World Trade Center, would people now be opposing the building of a Methodist Church near ground zero. I doubt it.
The world is full of crazy, hateful people. They come from every religious and ethnic background. Let's focus on the real culprits.
Very true. It's often forgotten that some hundreds of Muslims were also victims of the 9/11 attacks.
NEWTONIAN TRIUMPHULOSITY
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg
The Republican moral philosopher, Monday on “Fox [where else?] & Friends”:
The folks who want to build this mosque, who are really radical Islamists, who want to triumphfully prove they can build a mosque next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists. Those folks don’t have any interest in reaching out to the community. They’re trying to make a case about supremacy…. Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.
Let’s “do the math” here, shall we?
Premise: Park51 sponsors = radical Islamists
Premise: 9/11 murderers = radical Islamists
Premise: Park51 = Nazi signs next to Holocaust museums
Conclusion: Park51 sponsors = 9/11 murderers + Nazis
Or should I say,
Conclusion: Newt Gingrich = total jerk
’Twas not always thus—not entirely thus, anyway. I miss the Newt of old, the one who was all about goofy futurism and a boyish love of dinosaurs.
But jerks aren’t the only ones suggesting that Park51 is like “the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.” For example, a New Yorker reader (who, by definition, must be a thoughtful, basically kind person) e-mails me, apropos my current Comment:
Mosques symbolize the religion in whose name the heinous deed was done. Would it have been appropriate to erect a Shinto shrine in the vicinity of Pearl Harbor nine years after the attack on our fleet? There are times when sensitivity and decency trump even political correctness.
Here’s how I would put my reader’s question, amended for factual and logical correctness:
Would it have been appropriate for a group of Japanese-Americans to erect, in the vicinity of Pearl Harbor nine years after the attack on our fleet, a cultural center containing a Shinto shrine along with a multifaith prayer room, a display honoring the victims of 12/7/41, and other facilities—assuming, of course, that (a) in 1950 the Second World War was still going on, (b) the war’s progress crucially depended on the attitudes of a divided Japanese diaspora amounting to somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s population, and (c) the sponsors of the cultural center/Shinto shrine were active, public opponents of the Japanese government’s militarism?
With a few exceptions (and there are a few), the behavior of Republican politicians and conservative pundits in this whole ghastly affair grows ever more disgusting and contemptible. And the poltroonery in certain quarters of what ought to be the other side is just sad.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/08/newtonian-triumphulosity.html#ixzz0xJ4Qsuj4
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