New York Mosque Controversy Echoes Anti-Catholicism of Another Era [CN-USA]

[ERose]

It is exactly on point but with the added benefit of historical hindsight. After the Lincoln assassination, Catholics in the DC area were subject to brutal discrimination and denial of due process. The oral tradition in my family who has lived here since the 1800s has numerous stories about those days. History on the other hand only remembers the narcissistic Booth who wanted to become famous and picked shooting Lincoln as the way to do it.

The attack on 9/1/1 was carried out by Al Qiada. These were gorilla warriors Ronald Reagan’s administration trained and armed to make life miserable for the USSR. After the Iran Contra scandle, he abandoned them. Why not, communism was imploding at the time.

John Paul the Great warned the world about this. He said that evil would eventually destroy itself but that if the good people in the world failed to fill that void with Charity, an even greater evil would fill that void. On 9/1/1 his prophecy came true.

It has been 9 years since the attack. The time has come to stop punishing muslims for 9/1/1. It is time for us to stop the destruction and look for the Christian message we are being called to live here.

It is 9/11/01 that the attack happened. But I like how you guys on that side of the argument like blaming people in the past. Now it is Reagan’ss fault that 9/11/01 occurred? Are you really being serious? Come on now that is really stretching it.

Our government gave these people the weapons and know how to fight for their country’s freedom against the communist nation of the USSR. Yet what they did was evil and our “chickens have come back to roost”? Unbelievable. Really unbelievable.

No one, except maybe some far something people, have said they should not be able to build a mosque, even on that sight. What they have asked these people to do is show some compassion for those who lost lives on that sight. If the Muslims that are involved with this mosque, want to build bridges as they claim then they are showing a poor method of building bridges. 3000 lives were taken on 9/11 by a Islamic group that hates this country and all that it stands for.

Yet we are bigots because we are asking for this amum to show a little bit of respect for the men and women that died that day. How evil of us.

Let us put the shoe on the other foot for a second. Let us say that a bunch of Jews blew up a mosque in New York killing 200-300 muslims and after lets say 10 years a Jewish group wants to be a synagogue on that sight or just across the street. What do you think would happen? Hummm?

Yet the only violence since this uproar has been on a Muslim taxi driver by a liberal trying to create the uproar. Yet he truly failed because he got caught and now we know who he is.

So much for the bigotry in this country.

 

[estesbob]

These were gorilla warriors Ronald Reagan’s administration trained and armed to make life miserable for the USSR. After the Iran Contra scandle, he abandoned them. .

Wow! How did they train them? Banana’s?

 

[estesbob]

By that reasoning, every single Catholic is responsible for the murder of President Lincoln because it was the Catholic Mudd Family and other Catholic southern Marylanders and Virginians that aided and abetted his escape and may have even been co-conspirators. How insensitive of us to have a Washington ArchDiocese so close to that sacred area where President Lincoln gave his life. We have so many churches, we can just have our Basilica of the Immaculate Conception somewhere in the boondocks, but not near our ground zero where Lincolns blood was shed-by Catholics.

.

After Booth shot Lincoln he declared “Sic Temeper Tyranis”(Thus always to tyrants) not "Hail Mary full of Grace

As the Muslims drove planes into the twin towers theydeclared Akbar Allah(God is great) -not" I hate America ". To try and dismiss the religious element of these attacks is specious

 

[Ridgerunner]

It is exactly on point but with the added benefit of historical hindsight. After the Lincoln assassination, Catholics in the DC area were subject to brutal discrimination and denial of due process. The oral tradition in my family who has lived here since the 1800s has numerous stories about those days. History on the other hand only remembers the narcissistic Booth who wanted to become famous and picked shooting Lincoln as the way to do it.

I suspect this is “rain dance causation”. Following the Civil War, Catholics were subjected to severe persecution in my state. Some have theorized that it was because a fair number of Confederates were Catholic. But so were a fair number of Unionists. Some have theorized that it was because there were Catholic chaplains among the Confederate troops. But that was true of Union units too. Some have theorized (probably rightly) that the New England Protestant Yankees who ran the Reconstructionist government, along with locals of like mind, simply found that their now virtually limitless power allowed them to do what they wanted to do for a long time anyway.

I really don’t think the comparison is apt. Until the Islamist attacks on the U.S., most Americans were pretty much oblivious to Islam and terrorist organizations that operated in its name.

 

[Major_Tom]

I know they’re Sufis, from the mystical side of that religion, but they’re still part of that religion, and there’s nothing to guarantee that people from the anti-American side of that religion will not use that facility for nefarious purposes.

Dave, there’s no guarantee that they won’t plan something nefarious from the McDonald’s…! I take solace in the fact that we do actually have law enforcement in this country; not just the locals, but the FBI, who have already broken up rings like the one that concerns you.

I can tell that you don’t get it, and I’m trying to say this as nicely as I can, but if you don’t get it, than you just don’t get it. The last eight years of my professional life in a certain agency of the U.S. government I retrained into the Arabic language and was a Middle East analyst. That involved spending a lot of time studying, working and living (7 1/2 months in the Middle East) with Arabs (Muslim and Christian) and Muslims (Arab and non-Arab). What I learned from all that experience is that there is precious little in common between the Muslim religion and the American way of life, as first codified in the U.S. Constitution. Thousands of people learned that the hard way on 9/11/01. It is obvious that others who live in this country have yet to learn that lesson. It is my prayer, Major Tom, that you do not have to learn it as harshly as those thousands did.

DaveBj

Fair enough, but I’m confident that I do, indeed, get it.
Since you consider this a teachable moment, by all means, edify me…

First off, perhaps you could start with this. If Muslims seem to be intrinsically contrary to America, please define what actions should be taken. Shall we raze the mosques that currently exist in New York? Is that not far enough, or too far…?

 

[Major_Tom]

The clarification is this. Is it on ground zero and the answer is yes it is. Ground zero is the area that was impacted by either the planes that were used or the buildings that collapsed directly or indirectly due to the planes hitting the towers. Part of the plane went through the roof of this building and as such it is part of ground zero.

The question I have for you is do you agree or disagree with the article that this thread is about. I say I disagree.

Regarding the definition of “ground zero”: I’ll accept this definition as a literal one, though I do not think that it is germane to the discussion. I suppose that the entire continent of Europe can be considered ground zero from the wars over the last 100 years… does this help Europeans determine where or where not to build?

SO, as a compromise, could they build the center two doors down, if no debris landed there? This line of reasoning seems overly legalistic to me…

In response to the original post: I agree with you. The comparison is so broad as to be not relevant.

 

[Major_Tom]

Yet we are bigots because we are asking for this amum to show a little bit of respect for the men and women that died that day. How evil of us.

Let us put the shoe on the other foot for a second. Let us say that a bunch of Jews blew up a mosque in New York killing 200-300 muslims and after lets say 10 years a Jewish group wants to be a synagogue on that sight or just across the street. What do you think would happen? Hummm?

Yet the only violence since this uproar has been on a Muslim taxi driver by a liberal trying to create the uproar. Yet he truly failed because he got caught and now we know who he is.

So much for the bigotry in this country.

TO be clear, I don’t think that people who oppose this project are bigots. I dislike the idea that there are only two answers to this problem, one answer for the bigots and one for the non. It really diminishes the discussion. There are plenty of facets here to discuss, and I bet people can agree with some but not others…

Broadly speaking, I’m ok with the project. I trust that the local New Yorkers can best decide what to do in their own neighborhoods. I do worry over sharia law; from what I know of it (and I don’t claim to know a ton), it seems incompatible with the basic tenets of our law. By just like every other nationality/religious tenet, etc. that has crossed onto our shore, it may or may not survive intact.

 

[ERose]

Regarding the definition of “ground zero”: I’ll accept this definition as a literal one, though I do not think that it is germane to the discussion. I suppose that the entire continent of Europe can be considered ground zero from the wars over the last 100 years… does this help Europeans determine where or where not to build?

SO, as a compromise, could they build the center two doors down, if no debris landed there? This line of reasoning seems overly legalistic to me…

In response to the original post: I agree with you. The comparison is so broad as to be not relevant.

Yes, let them move it a block away or something like that. I am ok with that. The biggest thing this issue has done is pulled the bandaid off of the wound left over from these attacks. That is not building bridges.

 

[estesbob]

I personally do not believe this mosque will ever be builtI believe the developers have tax problems and that thus far the mosque development has not gone beyond the bare planning stages. One must wonder if this whole thing was just a PR stunt to cause the controversy it has.

 

[Kaeleara]

I think it is just like salt being rubbed in a raw wound that a mosque might be built on Ground Zero. How dare them even think of that! It’s not discrimination to not want a worship center of the religion that caused the death and injury of so many Americans. It’s just plain common decency. If some people want to “build bridges” then why isn’t there a Japanese worship center at Pearl Harbor? Why doesn’t Germany build a commemoration to all the German soldiers who died in WWII at a concentration camp? I mean the Nazis did terrible things, but not all of them were bad. Not building a memorial to the good ones is condemning them with the bad, right?

No! The Nazis killed and brutalized millions of people in a war. They shouldn’t get a memorial on the grounds where all those people suffered and died! There should be memorials to the people that died just like there are! There were some good Germans that had to go with the flow or be killed, but doing nothing allows for the triumph of evil.

America is at war with the Islamic terrorists! We should not let a mosque, a temple that glorifies Allah, who they say will bless them in heaven with all sorts of things like virgins if they kill infidels, be built on the site that so many Americans died and suffered on. Never forget 9/11. Well, never means never, and nine years sure is not beyond never.

 

[Major_Tom]

America is at war with the Islamic terrorists! We should not let a mosque, a temple that glorifies Allah, who they say will bless them in heaven with all sorts of things like virgins if they kill infidels, be built on the site that so many Americans died and suffered on. Never forget 9/11. Well, never means never, and nine years sure is not beyond never.

Please educate me on what other acts that I should be executing, since we are at war. Shall I place the next Muslim I see under house arrest? Shall I burn the mosque on the shelf of my local library? Shall we collectively throw out all the Muslims currently in this country? Since we are at war, do we have authoirty to kill them? Please enlighten me.

Sorry for the sarcasm; you play with fire when you throw around words like war.

 

[Kaeleara]

I’m not saying we should do anything whatsoever to Muslims. They are Americans too, and so they have those unbelievably wonderful rights that so many Americans had died for in every “conflict” we’ve ever been involved with. Discrimination does more harm and causes more hatred and problems than it could EVER solve, and to even suggest it would be un-Christian and un-Catholic. However, I do think that a memorial to the American people that lost their lives on the day that started what I believe to be an actual war with Iraq and the Al Quaida would be loads more appropriate. America is all about majority rules and minority rights correct? Well, if Ground Zero was turned into a memorial, a place to remember the dead and the injured, then more people would feel drawn to and comfortable in the area. It would be a place of memory for the majority.

Someone might say that people will feel just fine with the mosque around. Well, I don’t think lots of people would. Worship centers are geared toward that specific religion. I don’t feel comfortable in areas with lots of Mason temples (I think that’s the name for them) or when I enter churches of other religions, such as Lutheran. Let mosques be built wherever is appropriate. It’s a right to do so, but I think that building a mosque on Ground Zero would seem like we are brushing the past under the rug when a memorial could be built there instead.

p.s.
I don’t mind the sarcasm just so long as you explain it (as you did), because, hey, this is a discussion forum. People are going to disagree, and just because you do with me, doesn’t constitute a reason to be mad. Just don’t start insulting me personally, though.