I support the WTC Mosque

[Brooklyns_Finest]

While I understand the anger that many people feel toward building a mosque so close to ground zero, I do believe that it will do more good than harm. More than likely, the opponents of this mosque are right, and it will attract people who spout vehement anti-American/West/Christian rhetoric. That is fine in my book. This is America, where we prize freedom of expression. However, the one thing I am absolutely sure of is this: From the day the mosque is open until the day that we eventually tear it down, there will be a litany of undercover FBI agents and NYPD cops as well as a slew of paid informants ready and able to reveal any potential terrorist plots that are being planned at the mosque. This I think is a good thing, because when we do find out about said plan, we can arrest the who lott of them.

Bloomberg is a genius.

[aquart]

1. A community center where there is no community.

A hundred million dollar community/cultural center where there are no Muslim families and precious few children of any religion.

Not one halal grocery in the area.

Who, precisely, is supposed to be using this edifice, other than FBI informants?

[Maru Kitteh]

2. why do you care?

ETA: Should Christian and Catholic churches be required to provide proof of a certain number of documented children of X denomination before they are allowed to build?

Seriously, does nobody understand the concept behind separation of church and state anymore?

Religion needs to stay the hell out of Govt. and when individual churches or denominations systematically ignore that they should be stripped of their tax-free status.

Govt. needs to stay the hell out of the religion business other that collecting taxing aforementioned offending churches.

[Brooklyns_Finest]

3. Very good questions.

[Mz Pip]

5. People manage to get

down to lower Manhattan for the shopping and their jobs. I think they will do the same for the center.

[Withywindle]

8. Precious few children? Really?

No children in TriBeCa? Last time I was there, you needed traffic cops on the sidewalk to direct the stroller traffic. No children in SoHo or Chinatown, who are close enough to use this? Really? No Muslim businesspeople working nearby? Really?

And what part of THIS COMMUNITY CENTER IS NOT ONLY FOR MUSLIMS do you not understand?

[Forkboy]

12. You really hate them Muslims.

[saltpoint]

17. I heard they were going to put in some subways

and maybe run some buses on Manhattan Island.

People could, like, ride them to the Center.

[Withywindle]

19. Subways in New York?

That'll never happen. They're REAL AMERICANS there, they love their cars too much.

[saltpoint]

20. : )

[Withywindle]

25. Trufax!

Even Fox News said New Yorkers were REAL AMERICANS -- as recently as September 14, 2001! I remember it like it was yesterday.

[saltpoint]

27. "...as recently as September 14 2001.."

!

[Withywindle]

29. That validation obviously meant a lot to some people.

[saltpoint]

31. I thought Bloomberg's public address on the

Center was spot-on. I'm not usually hogwild about Michael Bloomberg, but I will give credit where it's due.

A lot of the people squawking about a "mosque" at Ground Zero live in Dayton and Omaha.

[Withywindle]

32. Yeah, I liked it too.

And that surprised me, I'm usually NOT a fan. (For the record: former off-and-on New Yorker who currently lives in Chicago but still visits often and has close friends there. I've lived in Tribeca, Fort Greene, Greenpoint, and Astoria in the 80s and 90s).

I thought he really did hit on what makes NYC great, sometimes kicking and screaming: the fact that people from all over the world have always lived in close proximity and so had to come to neighborly terms with each other in one way or another. Over the centuries, NYC has figured out --not without its hiccups, the conflicts never really stop, they just shift--that learning to live next door to "the Other" peacefully has done way more good than harm. 'Cause everyone is just trying to get the rent paid, and that is never easy.

You'd think that would be a 'no shit, Sherlock' moment, but even on a progressive site sometimes we have some ugly-as-sin Issues floating up to the top.

[saltpoint]

34. Good points. It's a lift to have an exchange with

someone who knocked around the real city and who still has friends there.

I get homesick for New York a lot. And it's been a long time since I was a resident.

The people who will come to this Center and grow to belong to it will form their own community. Yankees fans in far Brooklyn still make the D-line ride to the Bronx for home games. This is a reasonable proposal and has a strong likelihood of success.

And it's nice to say something nice once in a rare while about Bloomberg, since I've spent other posts trashing the guy.

Great post, Withywindle. You've got me in a New York state of mind.

[Withywindle]

38. I miss it too. I'd move back there in a heartbeat if I got the right opportunity.

It's just one of the worst places in the world to live paycheck-to-paycheck.

That's what people who've never lived in a great big city don't get about great big cities. No matter how huge the city is, people tend to knit themselves into smaller tribes. And in a diverse city, your "tribe" isn't always people who have the same ethnic/religious background as you. It's people who live near you, work near you, go to the same community center/music club/bar/house-of-worship/BEST BOOKSTORE EVER OMG!1!/sex club/book club/AA meetings/schools/etcetera, and that etcetera is SO much bigger in NYC than in most places in the US. I mean, New Yorkers have tiny apartments, for the most part, agreed, so lots of them consider their apartment their bedroom and the whole rest of the city their living room.

There's a little bit of this in Chicago too. Not to the same extent, but still...yes, I have co-workers who are Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, you name it. It's a phone job so bilinguality is a plus, so my co-workers freely use whatever Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, French, German, Arabic, Japanese, and Mandarin they may have (I am working on my Portuguese, which is my mom's first language, because there are opportunities where it comes up.)

One of the greatest opportunities I ever had in my life was that when I was there as a college intern in '88 working minimum wage for a textbook publishing company, a friend hooked me up with an evening/weekend volunteer gig at the South Street Seaport Museum. We were deckhands on the 19th-century schooner the 'Pioneer.' It was fucking hard brutal work, but getting the opportunity to take a beautiful ship like that out on the harbor at night once the yuppie office parties and wedding receptions were done was....I can only say spiritual.

In later stints living there, whenever I had had a stressful day at work (which was often) I'd wait until twilight and go take the free roundtrip ride on the Staten Island Ferry. Much the same. Pure joy.

[saltpoint]

40. Now THAT is a testimony to a great urban landscape.

Agree that Chicago has some of the same urban poetry and punch (well, actually a LOT of the punch...) and also that a ship out on the sea like that would be 'spiritual,' in the very best sense of that word.

Films and music opened New York to me. I was a midwest boy trying to make sense of a political landscape which included at the time rightwing nutbags like Donald "Buzz" Lukens in Ohio and Earl "I Love Nixon" Landgrieb in Indiana. My family ping-ponged between those two Congressional districts volunteering for Democrats. It was a doomed commitment every two years.

Simon and Garfunkel recorded "The Boxer" specifically for me, I believe, to slap my midwestern sensibility into realizing that there were many other Americas and I didn't know very much about any of them. A little later came MIDNIGHT COWBOY, and I took notice that Dustin Hoffman's winter coat was far thinner than mine and the city he inhabited was far vaster and more complex -- and beautiful. Hard-edged, but gleaming.

The Staten Island Ferry? Very hard to beat among the city's pleasures.

[Withywindle]

41. Oooh, I can relate to that to a scary degree.

I was a small-town Appalachian kid. My biggest dream EVER was to live in the city that the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith came from. (How did I know about them? Punk mail-order-zine culture of the early/mid-80s and a dad who was into his own intense music-by-mail-order. He chose rural isolation as a park ranger...because that was what his hero Jack Kerouac did.) I came from Southwest Virginia--my dad got transferred to the Blue Ridge Parkway when I was about one. I loved the Velvet Underground especially because, in his own way, John Cale was a fucking amazing old-time fiddler, so their sound fused my upbringing and my ambitions on a level I would never have imagined until I heard it!

And, you know, the first time one visits a city you've dreamed about for years, you expect it to disappoint you...but New York didn't. I love its ways and its byways and if I could afford to keep exploring it, I would have done...but alas, it just got too fucking expensive and all the seedy old streets full of history still existing are getting further and further between...

I do recommend this pub, though.

http://earinn.com /

When I lived in Tribeca in 88 I used to go here all the time. Why did I get to live in Tribeca in the first place? Because a 22-year-old musician dude I banged in college who broke my heart felt guilty and hooked 19-year-old me with a friend of the 40something avant-garde music magazine editor he dumped me for. The loft was affordable at the time because my roommate was a lady who was 50-something at the time and she'd had this not-very-legal loft since the 70s.

It was three blocks away from this place. I am SO FUCKING GLAD it's still there.

[saltpoint]

42. Cale must have lasered into your skull and your soul

like a cosmic angel. You knew the Velvet Underground before you ever got to New York -- that's amazing in and of itself. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on, and strangely, just as long to figure out what had gone on in the recent past.

Your father's respect for Kerouac is a real good thing. Kerouac would never have impressed Dwight and Mamie but then again Dwight and Mamie never impressed Kerouac. And your father must have figured the truer America was in the car with Jack Kerouac and his pals and not wearing 'I Like Ike' buttons all over SW Virginia. Eisenhower was the celebrated general and president but Jack knew the first names of the waiters and waitresses from the mid-Atlantic states all the way west.

Sir, you better be thinking about writing some of your history down. It's sure workin' for me tonight.

[Kalyke]

39. Other than the fact that I think you're bigoted, I have a positive comment.

Halel.

YUM!

I am allergic to pork and love the warm, not hot, spice of the Middle East. Cardamon is awesome on just about anything - meat or veggies or fruit.

[wtmusic]

4. Terrorist plots might be hatched at Ground Zero? Oh please.

Maybe Osama will stop in for tea and we can nab him as well.

[saltpoint]

30. I worry nights that terrorist plots could be hatched

at Blimpie restaurants and JoAnne Fabrics stores.

I feel we should bulldoze every last one of those places, just to be on the safe side.

[MajorChode]

33. I'd start with the Chuck E Cheese

That's where the little terrorist bastards get their start. Have you ever been to that place?

[saltpoint]

35. LOL. I went once in a large group to celebrate

a friend's daughter's birthday party.

The noise was deafening and the pizza was snot on cardboard.

Never again. Never again.

[MajorChode]

6. Are you trying to win some type of award for the most bigoted post of the day?

If so, you have my vote.

[Brooklyns_Finest]

7. Bigoted?

You don't believe we will have informants in this mosque?

[MajorChode]

9. If you need to be drawn a picture, you should probably refrain from the subject

...till you figure it out.

Cheers!

[Rosa Luxemburg]

10. I thought it was a community center

[cherokeeprogressive]

11. I swear to god, ya can't make this shit up. Hollywood couldn't even write stuff this good.

I'm still laughing at what I just read.

[MajorChode]

13. You can find stuff this good...

but you have to know where to find it. I had to check the URL just to make sure I wasn't in freepersville. This is truly crème de la dumb material.

[Brooklyns_Finest]

18. So

You don't beleive we will have undercover law enforcement our informants planted at the mosque?

[MajorChode]

28. Please stop

I'm about to pop a vein from laughing so hard.

[Withywindle]

36. Actually, I believe "we" (whoever that might be) will, you're right.

Because undercover law enforcement people turn up in all sorts of weird places.

You can always spot them at the NORML hemp festivals because they're the ones in the BRAND-NEW tie-dye shirts.

You can always spot them at political actions with a large punk subculture presence because they're the ones in the BRAND-NEW combat boots.

You can always spot them at hip-hop events because they tend to say, 'whatup, dawg?"

You can always spot them on sex-oriented chat rooms online because they always claim to be horny 15-year-old girls right up front.


Of course they'll be there, because spying on "potentially subversive" Americans going about their business is what they do.

Whether that'll justify the taxpayer layout on their salaries, well, that's a whole other animal.

[Brooklyns_Finest]

14. You don't believe we will have informants in the mosque?

or undercover agents?

[MajorChode]

23. Of course there will be.

And why not? It's not as if there's any difference between any Muslims, right? They are all west hating radicals that want nothing less than world domination. Sure they call themselves Sufi and they are supposed to be about intercultural and interreligious harmony, but we know better, yes? There's little doubt they will be making bomb vests in the back rooms of this place. The FBI should be on this during the construction phase so they can get the whole place wired.

Keep it up. Soon there won't be a dry eye in the house.

[Whisp]

15. what do you say about Catholic churches that are in 'sensitive' areas...

like around the fucking whole world and who have terrorized whole civilizations throughout history and terrorizing women and children to this day.

please, spare us your 'concerns' about them evil doer 'Muslins'.

[Brooklyns_Finest]

22. Really?

Catholics are terrosizing women and children around the world today? Well, maybe with the priest abuse scandal you might have a point. What does this have to do with this mosque? Bin Laden came from Saudia Arabia and as far as I know, there are no Catholic churches in that country. Please correct me if I am wrong.

[JI7]

16. the Swimming Pools will be useful when it's as hot as it's been

[Withywindle]

21. I'd go to a Scientologist swimming pool if there were one near my office. n/t

[Bozita]

24. I don't approve of any tax-free structures in areas where prop tax pays for schools, ...

... cops and firefighters.

I'm for every building paying the same rate based on legitimate appraisals.

Now, THAT's democracy.

[saltpoint]

26. No, it isn't.

The laws are clear about sanctions on places of worship.

You and I can choose to go to such a place for such a purpose, or not.

Churches benefit from being tax-exempt but are not required to be tax-exempt. In essence, they have to become "corporations" and apply to special status through the IRS. States then determine whether the application is accepted and most of them won't bargain unless the church applies through the IRS.

The issue in the case of tax-exempt churches, IMO, is whether the First Amendment trumps the regulations by the States and the IRS. It seems to me it does, even if I never step foot in a given house of worship.

[pinboy3niner]

37. You must be with Precrime

Silly me. I thought that was a fictional police unit from a movie based on the imagination of a sci-fi writer.

I should have known someone would pick up on the terrorism vibes emanating from a center that has yet to have its groundbreaking and begin construction.

Very perceptive.

[Moderator]

43. Locking

Insensitive (bigotry, hate, ridicule, stereotyping) toward certain groups of people.