From Salon: A bigoted pastor who has assailed gays and Muslims is launching the "9-11 Christian Center at Ground Zero" a mere two blocks from the World Trade Center site this Sunday, but so far the project hasn't drawn a peep of protest from those who are outraged by the "ground zero mosque."
Pastor Bill Keller of Florida said today he will begin preaching Sunday at the Marriott at 85 West Street (see proximity to ground zero here). A weekly service is planned at the hotel until the $8 million 9/11 Christian Center finds a permanent space. (Fundraising is going well, Keller told Salon today.)
To get a sense of where Keller is coming from, consider his project's website, which calls Islam a religion of "hate and death" whose adherents will go to hell. It also says: "Islam is a wonderful religion... for PEDOPHILES!"
Keller is the same pastor who hosted a birther infomercial that encouraged viewers to send him and a partner donations to advance the birther cause. His Internet ministry explicitly calls President Obama the new Hitler. He calls homosexuality a perversion. And in 2008, he targeted presidential contender Mitt Romney for being Mormon with a campaign called "voting for Satan."
In short, if critics of the Park51 Islamic community center, which is explicitly welcoming of all faiths, truly believe that there is a "zone of solemnity" around ground zero (as Gov. Pat Quinn put it), they should be horrified at Keller's 9/11 Christian Center.
Ditto for those who believe that religious leaders should not build "deliberately provocative" projects around ground zero, as another mosque opponent put it.
Taliban officials say they're looking forward to a new wave of terrorist trainees from the West like this year's Times Square car bomber.
(I'm reminded of the pattern I've noticed in Palestinian-Israel confrontations where the only interests that seem to be served are the extremists on either side. - Salaam)
From Newsweek: America's enemies in Afghanistan are delighted by the vehement public opposition to the proposed "Ground Zero mosque." The backlash against the project has drawn the heaviest e-mail response ever on jihadi Web sites, [Taliban spokesman] Zabihullah claims-far bigger even than France's ban on burqas earlier this year. (That was big, he recalls: "We received many e-mails asking for advice on how Muslims should react to the hijab ban, and how they can punish France.") This time the target is America itself. "We are getting even more messages of support and solidarity on the mosque issue and questions about how to fight back against this outrage."
Zabihullah also claims that the issue is such a propaganda windfall-so tailor-made to show how "anti-Islamic" America is-that it now heads the list of talking points in Taliban meetings with fighters, villagers, and potential recruits. "We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks-and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York," Zabihullah says. "Showing reality always makes the best propaganda."
Taliban officials say they're looking forward to a new wave of terrorist trainees from the West like this year's Times Square car bomber. "I expect we will soon be receiving more American Muslims like Faisal Shahzad who are looking for help in how to express their rage," says a Taliban official who was a senior minister when the group ruled Afghanistan and who remains active in the insurgency. As an indication of the anger that is growing among some Muslims in the West, this official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, mentions the arrest of three Canadian Muslims in Ontario last week on charges of plotting to build and detonate improvised explosive devices. (A fourth individual was arrested in Ottawa last Friday in connection with the case.) The Ground Zero furor will likely add to that anger. "The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get," Zabihullah predicts.
While the issue is unlikely to resonate much by November's elections, it's forced Democrats off their economic message...
From McClatchy: WASHINGTON - The New York Islamic cultural center debate has given a boost to Republicans, but most of them aren't eager to talk about it.
They don't have to, because ever since President Barack Obama injected himself into the flap, Democrats and the media have kept the issue alive.
While the issue is unlikely to resonate much by November's elections, it's forced Democrats off their economic message - the issue erupted on the same day as Social Security's 75th anniversary, a day that Democrats had hoped to boast about their sponsorship of the program.
Republicans have another reason to keep quiet. If they appear too eager to use the issue for political gain by stridently opposing the Islamic center, they risk looking intolerant - and that could be a huge liability for them as their party woos the independent swing voters who likely will decide dozens of congressional and gubernatorial elections this fall.
"They only need to say, 'They have the right to build it, but let's find another place to do it. We respect Muslims and their religion, and there's no need for this to become a controversy,''' said Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.
Polls illustrate how delicately politicians must tread on this question. An August 19-22 Pew Research Center survey found that people agreed more with those who object to building the center by 51 percent to 34 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Independents agreed 50 percent to 37 percent.
However, people support tolerance too, as 62 percent said that Muslims should have the same right as other religious groups to build houses of worship, while 25 percent said that local communities have the right to bar mosques if they're not wanted.
Those who can legally purchase firearms should keep high-powered rifles in their homes and train their wives and children on how to use them
Really Umar? My father was what you would call a 'gun enthusiast' (I'm not) so I have a passing acquaintance from my youth. Discharge a high-powered rifle in your average American urban/suburban neighborhood and the round will probably punch through about 10 of your neighbors' homes before losing enough speed to stop. That's sure going to keep us all safe in our Muslim communities while winning friends and influencing people among our non-Muslim neighbors. Not that I'm endorsing firearms, but if you feel you must exercise your rights as an American and own a gun, get a shotgun instead (short range) to reduce the innocent bystander body count.
I don't know who has been giving you advice Umar, but a high-powered long-range rifle is an offensive weapon, the kind of thing you take with you when you're hunting deer, rambling through the Hindu Kush on a quixotic military excursion, or climbing into the clocktower after you've completely lost your religion and your mind...
Geller has declared herself a proud supporter of EDL mouth breathers.
EDL supporters Guramit Singh and Charlie Flowers. Photo source: Posted in comments at UK Indymedia.
From Salon: One of the chief organizers of the upcoming Sept. 11 "anti-mosque" rally at ground zero has denounced Sunday's protest, which nearly degenerated into a mob attack on an African-American carpenter, as "half-assed," "careless, unprepared, shooting from the hip and harmful to the cause of freedom and compassion" and an "ill-conceived botched mess."
Pamela Geller furiously rejects any responsibility for the threatening, racially charged tenor of yesterday's incident. But should anti-Muslim protesters here emulate her thuggish allies in the United Kingdom, nobody should be surprised when disorder and even bloodshed follow.
Geller has declared herself a proud supporter of the English Defence League, a far-right street movement that sprang up in the United Kingdom earlier this year to protest planned construction of mosques and to stoke fear of Islam more broadly. She isn't troubled by the EDL's shadowy leadership, nor by its connections with English fascist organizations and propensity for violence against bystanders, counter-protesters and the police. Last May she wrote:
Free people should support the English Defence League in its efforts to stand for England and the West against the belligerent invaders and Islamic imperialists.
The EDL is routinely smeared in the British media, as the Tea Party activists are smeared in the U.S. media. The corrupt, biased media defames any group, person, or organization standing against Islamic supremacism. They tar, feather, and destroy the good name of good people who stand for life, liberty, and individual rights. Libel and slander like "racist," "fascist," "bigot," etc. color every news report of every counter-jihad action. The quisling media is the propaganda arm of jihad. It's despicable. There is nothing racist, fascist, or bigoted about the EDL.
The brutal bigotry of the EDL and its leaders was thoroughly documented by the Guardian in an undercover investigation conducted over four months and published last May with copious video footage. The Guardian report includes the voice of an EDL leader boasting about what might happen when his followers overpower the police and confront counter-protesters. "If them barriers break one day and our lads get through," he said, "they will murder them all."
While laying siege to the city of Dudley last month -- in a successful effort to stop construction of a mosque there -- EDL hooligans stormed through town, smashing shop windows and vehicles and fighting riot police. The Birmingham Mail newspaper reported on July 19 that "violence flared as police attempted to get the [EDL] protesters back onto buses at the end of the demonstration, with EDL supporters throwing bricks and metal security fences at riot police.
The groups' ideology is reminiscent of the reckless demagoguery of Joe McCarthy.
From Alternet: Pamela Geller, the once-obscure right-wing blogger known for peddling hateful, wildly over-the-top rhetoric (she once claimed that Barack Obama was the bastard stepchild of Malcom X) and for pulling stunts like taping a harangue against Muslims while clad in a bikini, has parlayed the anti-mosque hysteria sweeping across America into mainstream media attention just in time to promote her new book, The Post-American Presidency.
Geller and co-author Robert Spencer have been relentlessly promoting the "nontroversy" over the Park 51 project. According to a profile in the Guardian, the pair have "been at the forefront of drumming up opposition to the center, two blocks from Ground Zero, through an array" of organizations like the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamisation of America (SIOA). The groups "have become increasingly influential as conservative politicians exploit anti-Muslim sentiment before November's congressional and state elections."
The groups' ideology is reminiscent of the reckless demagoguery of Joe McCarthy. According to the Guardian, AFDI "says it is fighting 'specific Islamic supremacist initiatives in American cities' and hunting down 'infiltrators of our federal agencies'." SIOA, which bills itself as a human rights organization "is tied to a similar group, Stop Islamisation of Europe, which goes by the motto: 'Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.'"
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg calls Geller a "lunatic racist," and laments the "very depressing" fact that despite being "a marginal nutbag... it seems as if she's setting the national agenda now on matters related to Islam and religious freedom." Spencer previously penned several books advancing dark conspiracy theories about Islam, including Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs. He's also the proprietor of Jihad Watch, a wingnut Web site that helped raise thousands of dollars to pay for a controversial ad campaign smearing the Park 51 project on New York City buses.
(Salon trumpets this video as having 'gone viral,' but with 51,000 hits approximately, I hardly think of that as enough viewers to accurately be described that way. - Salaam)
From Salon: The man who recorded a now-viral video of "ground zero mosque" protesters angrily shouting at an African-American passerby Sunday told Salon this morning that a mob mentality took over the crowd as the confrontation escalated and some protesters apparently assumed -- wrongly -- the African-American man was Muslim.
Anti-Muslim rhetoric in the U.S is different, since jihadists can use Americans' words to make the case that the U.S. is indeed at war with Islam. The violent postings are not just on al Qaeda-linked websites but on prominent, mainstream Muslim chat forums.
From the Wall Street Journal: Islamic radicals are seizing on protests against a planned Islamic community center near Manhattan's Ground Zero and anti-Muslim rhetoric elsewhere as a propaganda opportunity and are stepping up anti-U.S. chatter and threats on their websites.
One jihadist site vowed to conduct suicide bombings in Florida to avenge a threatened Koran burning, while others predicted an increase in terrorist recruits as a result of such actions.
"By Allah, the wars are heated and you Americans are the ones who...enflamed it," says one such posting. "By Allah you will be the first to taste its flames."
White House homeland security adviser John Brennan told reporters Friday that he had seen no evidence that the debate over the proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, other mosque protests or the planned Koran burning had affected U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
A White House official on Sunday stressed that Mr. Brennan was addressing the narrow question of whether the debates in the U.S. over Islam were having an impact on U.S. counterterrorism efforts, and that Mr. Brennan specifically declined to address whether those debates were energizing the jihadists.
A U.S. official on Sunday said the administration was taking the upswing in anti-U.S. chatter seriously. "Terrorists like al-Qaeda and its violent allies are motivated already to try to attack the United States, but when it comes to propaganda, extremists are pure opportunists. They'll use whatever they can," the official said.
Many opponents of the planned Muslim community center say they have no bias against Muslims but that putting the building so close to Ground Zero shows an insensitivity toward the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Controversy over the community center, which will contain a mosque and other facilities, has helped fan anti-Muslim rhetoric in the U.S. far from Lower Manhattan in recent weeks.
Jarret Brachman, director of Cronus Global, a security consulting firm, and author of the book Global Jihadism, said al Qaeda and other groups have long used imagery from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to recruit new members. But the U.S. position has been that those wars are not against Islam and that the U.S. has Muslim allies in the fight.
Anti-Muslim rhetoric in the U.S is different, since jihadists can use Americans' words to make the case that the U.S. is indeed at war with Islam. The violent postings are not just on al Qaeda-linked websites but on prominent, mainstream Muslim chat forums, Mr. Brachman said.
"We are handing al Qaeda a propaganda coup, an absolute propaganda coup," with the Islamic-center controversy, said Evan Kohlmann, an independent terrorism consultant at Flashpoint Partners who monitors jihadist websites.
Critics of the proposed Islamic center said their right to speak out shouldn't be influenced by the possibility of jihadist threats. "We will never win a war when we are afraid to even name our enemies," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an e-mail Sunday.
Mandatory religious dress codes at school and in the workplace have been forbidden. Exclusion of women from sports and cultural activities also challenged.
From Religion Dispatches: The proposal to build Park51, a community center, near Ground Zero has unleashed the beast of Islamophobia. Many people are speaking out against the Islamophobes, but we should not conflate this with support of the center.
The organizers of the proposed Park51 project lacked the vision that could have foreseen both the fabricated "controversy" of the Islamophobes and the discontent of the Muslim community that was not included in the planning process. Because the project's planners failed to foresee the former, the Muslim community has been forced to defend a project about which it is otherwise ambivalent.
Neda Bolourchi: 'I worry that the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center site would not promote tolerance or understanding; I fear it would become a symbol of victory for militant Muslims around the world.'
(This controversy is analogous to the one in the 1980s over Andres Serrano's 'Piss Christ' art. As with the right to expression, the right to religious freedom is guaranteed, and yet to build the Park 51 project as currently planned is il-advised and ultimately nihilistic. It will also be analogous to the 'Piss Christ' exhibit in how it will likely attract vandalism and death threats. - Salaam)
By Neda Bolourchi I have no grave site to visit, no place to bring my mother her favorite yellow flowers, no spot where I can hold my weary heart close to her. All I have is Ground Zero.
On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I watched as terrorists slammed United Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, 18 minutes after their accomplices on another hijacked plane hit the North Tower. My mother was on the flight. I witnessed her murder on live television. I still cannot fully comprehend those images. In that moment, I died as well. I carry a hole in my heart that will never be filled.
From the first memorial ceremonies I attended at Ground Zero, I have always been moved by the site; it means something to be close to where my mother may be buried, it brings some peace. That is why the prospect of a mosque near Ground Zero -- or a church or a synagogue or any religious or nationalistic monument or symbol -- troubles me.
I was born in pre-revolutionary Iran. My family led a largely secular existence -- I did not attend a religious school, I never wore a headscarf -- but for us, as for anyone there, Islam was part of our heritage, our culture, our entire lives. Though I have nothing but contempt for the fanaticism that propelled the terrorists to carry out their murderous attacks on Sept. 11, I still have great respect for the faith. Yet, I worry that the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center site would not promote tolerance or understanding; I fear it would become a symbol of victory for militant Muslims around the world.
Beyond misgivings about the location, some U.S. Muslims have raised concerns about what the mosque could become after Rauf and Khan retire and inevitably turn the center over to new leadership.
From AP: NEW YORK - American Muslims who support the proposed mosque and Islamic center near ground zero are facing skeptics within their own faith - those who argue that the project is insensitive to Sept. 11 victims and needlessly provocative at a time when Muslims are pressing for wider acceptance in the U.S.
"For most Americans, 9/11 remains as an open wound, and anything associated with Islam, even for Americans who want to understand Islam - to have an Islamic center with so much publicity is like rubbing salt in open wounds," said Akbar Ahmed, professor of Islamic studies at American University, a former Pakistani ambassador to Britain and author of "Journey Into America, The Challenge of Islam." He said the space should include a synagogue and a church so it will truly be interfaith.
Abdul Cader Asmal, past president of the Islamic Council of New England, an umbrella group for more than 15 Islamic centers, said some opponents of the $100 million, 13-story project are indeed anti-Muslim. But he said many Americans have genuine, understandable questions about Islam and extremism.
In light of those fears, and the opposition of many relatives of 9/11 victims, Asmal said organizers should dramatically scale back the project to just a simple mosque, despite their legal right to construct what they want.
"Winning in the court of law is not going to help improve the image of Muslims nationwide," said Asmal, a Massachusetts physician. "You have to win the hearts and minds of the ordinary American people."
Weighing his words carefully on a fiery political issue, President Barack Obama said Saturday that Muslims have the right to build a mosque near New York's ground zero, but he did not say whether he believes it is a good idea to do so.
Obama commented during a trip to Florida, where he expanded on a Friday night White House speech asserting that Muslims have the same right to freedom of religion as everyone else in America.
The president's statements thrust him squarely into a debate that he had skirted for weeks and could put Democrats on the spot three months before midterm elections where they already were nervous about holding control of the House and maybe even the Senate. Until Friday, the White House had asserted that it did not want to get involved in local decision-making.
The White House quickly followed up on Obama's latest comments on the matter, with Obama spokesman Bill Burton saying that the president wasn't backing off in any way from the remarks he made Friday.
"What he said last night, and reaffirmed today, is that if a church, a synagogue or a Hindu temple can be built on a site, you simply cannot deny that right to those who want to build a mosque," Burton said.
....
Asked Saturday about the issue during his trip to Florida, Obama said: "I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding."
From the Washington Post ISLAMABAD -- A case of the deadly waterborne disease cholera has been confirmed in Pakistan's flood-ravaged northwest, and aid workers expect there to be more, the U.N. said Saturday. The discovery came as new flood surges hit the south and the prime minister said the deluge has made 20 million people homeless.
The flooding disaster has battered Pakistan's economy and undermined its political stability at a time when the United States needs its steadfast cooperation against Islamist extremism. The U.N. has appealed for an initial $460 million to provide relief to Pakistan but has said the country will need billions to rebuild once the flood recedes.
Because of the crisis, Pakistan canceled celebrations Saturday marking its creation and independence from Britain in 1947. President Asif Ali Zardari met with flood victims in the northwest, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was expected to visit country soon, possibly over the weekend.
The floods have killed about 1,500 people, and aid workers have warned that diseases could raise that toll.
One case of cholera was confirmed in Mingora, the main town in the northwest's Swat Valley, U.N. spokesman Maurizio Giuliano said Saturday. Other cases were suspected, and aid workers are now responding to all those exhibiting acute watery diarrhea as if it is cholera, Giuliano said.
Cholera can lead to severe dehydration and death without prompt treatment, and containing cholera outbreaks is considered a high priority following floods.
From Think Progress: Tonight, President Obama hosted an iftaar dinner at the White House - a feast marking the culmination of a day of fasting for practicing Muslims during the current Islamic calendar month of Ramadan. At remarks delivered at the dinner, Obama spoke out on the controversy surrounding the construction of a new Islamic center near the Ground Zero site, firmly siding in favor of the project:
OBAMA: Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.
