Tuesday, August 17, 2010

That mosque issue (sigh)

Joe Sudbay over on AMERICAblog says the following:

I have to admit, I'm embarrassed. That building the mosque in Lower Manhattan has become the dominant issue in this country is just disturbing. It sounds like the kind of fight people might have had in the Middle Ages, not in the 21st century in a country that purports to espouse religious freedom and tolerance.
...
Many of our so-called "leaders" are stepping right into Bin Laden's propaganda again. They've turned this into an attack on Islam. Well played, Sarah and Newt, among others. Those two would have fit right in during the Crusades.

He also quotes Richard Clarke (security expert):

Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.' He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda.

So what did we do after 9/11? We invade an oil-rich and occupy an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us. In other words, we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda. And the result of that is that al Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al Qaeda have been greatly strengthened.

I'm just not up to commenting on this except to say that it's very disheartening.
~~~

4 comments:

  1. "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

    Albert Einstein

    ReplyDelete
  2. Me, chiming in again. I just ran across this on "Slacktivist" on this same subject.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh, my, Tom. That post on Slacktivsit is outstanding! And did you read the comments? Incredibly funny, snarky and creative.

    Thanks for sending it on.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Elizabeth6:54 AM

    Ny times reports one muslim New Yorker as saying this about the mosque: “No one wants a center in downtown Manhattan that stands as a permanent fixture of this terrible tension.”
    It reminds me of the slayings of the Amish school children. The Amish razed the school not to bury the past but because it would be too painful to continue to look on it every day, to be reminded of the atrocity every day. I wonder if the mosque, with its placement so close to the WTC, would be a too-painful reminder. I think all the inflammatory rhetoric about religious rights and the constitution surrounding this debate is off-target. It misses the point and confuses the issue, which is to move toward healing and tolerance, not toward yet another divisive issue

    ReplyDelete

New policy: Anonymous posts must be signed or they will be deleted. Pick a name, any name (it could be Paperclip or Doorknob), but identify yourself in some way. Thank you.