Here’s another reason to be angry with the amoral subhumans who are ginning up the “mosque” business to fire up the right wing bigot demographic. That “debate” is pointless unless you’re a Republican tapping into the directionless tide of tea party anger.
But then there’s this, which I heard while trying to enjoy my coffee this morning:
All this controversy and vitriol are not only encouraged [by radical Islamists]; they’re welcomed. Extremists and radical clerics posted a stream of “I told you so” messages: After years of telling followers that Islam was under attack by the West, the harsh reaction to a simple community center seemed to prove it.
That message, transmitted in a multitude of chat rooms and websites, has law enforcement worried. There have been a record number of homegrown terrorist plots in this country since late last year, and the conventional wisdom has been that the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have moved some young Muslims — many of whom came of age watching U.S. forces fighting in two wars on television — to join the fight.
It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that does indeed benefit a very particular subset of Americans, the very few who feed on a state of permanent war. If we ever learn to ignore them instead of dancing when they break out the fiddle, we’ll get somewhere. It’s worth asking why the right wing didn’t go into freakout mode when the Muslim community center project was announced on the front page of the New York Times, back in Dec. of 2009. Why wait nine months?
Still.
I’m staying. I’m finishing my coffee. Enjoying my coffee.
ADDITIONAL: Interesting point from Frank Rich.
Think Progress brings us Laura Ingraham in Dec. 2009, speaking to Daisy Khan, co-founder of the Muslim community center project and wife of Imam Abdul Rauf:
INGRAHAM: I can’t find many people who really have a problem with [the project]. [Mayor] Bloomberg is for it. Rabbis are saying they don’t have a problem with it. …I like what you’re trying to do and Ms. Khan we appreciate it and come on my radio show some time.
Laura Ingraham now: “Well, I say the terrorists have won with how this has gone down. 600 feet from where thousands of our fellow Americans were incinerated in the name of political Islam, and we’re supposed to be cheering this?!”
What accounts for this change? Or more exactly, who accounts for this change?
Winning this “debate” is not the point. Engage it at all, and Grover Norquist and friends win their war, no matter the outcome of the skirmish. He can collect his paycheck, secure in a job well done. Yet too many reasonable people take his bait, over and over.
Meanwhile, the demographic conservative strategists are priming for a fall of outrage are playing their role perfectly. Here’s what happened when a black man with a skullcap (who said he is not Muslim) walked through an anti-Islamic Ground Zero protest. Listen closely, and you can hear a genius around 3:30 saying “Mohammed’s a pig. Mohammed’s a pig. Look, he’s a pig.”
Makes you proud!
So that’s enough about that for pretty much forever. On to ilks or something.
Or maybe the real scourge of New York City: freakin’ alligators, waiting to carjack you.
UPDATE: What they said.
