Muslims want to build a mosque close to Ground Zero.
My daughter is nineteen, I assume most of her friends are of-age. I have the right to try to seduce them. I share a joint account with my wife, we both have credit cards we can use in our partner's name. I have the right to spend our money as if it is mine. I have the right to run up debt in our joint name. I have the right. But it is not right.
The Muslims have the right to build a mosque on land they have purchased. They have a right to give that mosque an offensive name. They have the right to make a disgusting spectacle and to insult the memories of those who died on the 11th September 2001. They have that right. But it is not right.
We all have the right to do things which are not right. I could spend my wife's money trying to bed one of my daughter's friends. I am an adult. I can make these decisions. I have the right to give up my job tomorrow without knowing how I will pay my bills or what effect that will have on my family. I have that right, but it is not right.
It is about time that politicians in America, from the mayor of New York through to president Obama stopped talking about the rights of Muslims and instead stood up for what is right and what is wrong. Even if they do not have the power to block the evil mosque they do have the power to offer their opinions on what is right, and this planned mosque is not right. It is evil. It doesn't need to be so close to that hallowed ground. It will be a permanent marker of the strained relationship between Americans and Islam poisoning the relationship between the west and Islam for all time. I can see pickets standing outside the mosque, or its bombed out shell, twenty four hours a day for the next fifty years.
Yes Muslims, you do have the right to do this, America is the land of the free and religious tolerance is at the heart of its constitution and the essence of the American republic but it is deeply wrong and a very bad idea to make such a provocative move designed to spit on the graves of the fallen.
Many leftists are falling over themselves to appear reasonable, and those behind this mosque will let them. It isn't a mosque at all apparently. It's a community centre, and it has prayer rooms for Jews and Christians! How can you stand up against that? It's a plan. It's a drawing. Once construction has started I can predict that somebody will say
You know, thinking about this... Park 51 is a bit generic. What was wrong with Cordoba House? And these prayer rooms. You know we need a prayer room for the men and a prayer room for the women. I don't think any Jews will want to come here anyway, so let's not bother, OK? So the top floor will just be prayer rooms for Muslim men and Muslim women, overlooking Ground Zero.
Of course once the building has started construction nobody could possibly come up with any legal objection to them doing what they like with their building, in 'Merica.
It's a very simple plan. Act dumb, pretend to be surprised and offended when people see the sinister side of your plot. Bend over backwards to do whatever it takes to get the building approved, apart from building it somewhere else which will not offend non-Muslim Americans because that is its primary purpose. Then once it is under construction it is a fait accompli, nothing will be able to stop them renaming it or changing the use of the prayer rooms from several religions to one.
I have challenged several people to show me one example, anywhere on Planet Earth, where Muslims and Muslims alone have financed a building in which several different faiths pray together under the same roof. So far, not surprisingly, I have had no takers. This Park 51 place seems to be entirely unprecedented. Muslims have not built any multicultural centres in Mecca or Baghdad or Cairo or Istanbul or Paris or London or Bradford or Malmö or Oldham or Beirut or Kuala Lumpur or Copenhagen or Jakarta. Why do you think they chose that particular site to be the first such site in the entire world?
Another red herring that gets tossed at me is the Japanese Cultural center of Hawai'i, “just a few miles from Pearl Harbor”. How does that compare? It is several miles away, not just a few hundred yards. It does not overlook Pearl Harbor and it was not deliberately sited on the closest available plot to Pearl Harbor and built tall enough to give a view across the scene of the Japanese victory. It exists to serve Hawaii's large Japanese community and to show the people of Hawaii something about Japanese culture. It is not designed to help turn Hawaii Japanese or to mark the “inevitable” triumph of Japanese culture over America!
There was a Japanese Shinto shrine five miles from Pearl Harbor which was closed down during the war and re-opened shortly afterwards. It was not sited close to the site of the Japanese attack, it was there before, just as there is a mosque about three blocks from Ground Zero which was there before the attack and has continued to operate without major incident ever since. There is no reason for Americans to be outraged by a pre-existing mosque, but a new mosque of mega-mosque proportions built on the site of a building that was hit by aircraft debris on that day is highly insensitive and they know it.
They have been very clever about the whole project by getting leftists and Jews on board. Many Jews are fearful of what might happen with their minority religion if the Christian right gets its tail up and decides to push its weight around. This has made it absurdly easy for the Muslims to recruit them as allies for the Victory Mosque. Under the banner of religious freedom they have been obliged to demonstrate their support. Seeing Jews and Muslims in common cause naturally has the soft-headed left creaming its jeans in raptures of delight and so they too unite alongside the homophobic, misogynistic, backward green fascists and their victory dance on the graves of America's fallen.
No, we can't and should not try to stop it, but we should say that it seriously pisses us off, as does the suggestion that caring about the future of our own culture makes us bigots.
It is entirely outrageous that those pushing minority culture (Jews, Muslims, gays) are seen as heroes of multiculturalism whose efforts and motives should always be praised and those who even seem to be just enjoying the culture of the anglophone majority in our own countries are seen automatically as villains of cultural imperialism.