The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, so Muslims should expect to receive the same protection afforded Jews or Christians. In fact, George Washington made a point of recognizing the need to protect Muslims from Christian persecution.
So how come the government deliberately violates its own laws and moral precepts to incite hatred against Muslims, Muslim organizations and Muslim states? There’s no point looking for a rational explanation because there isn’t one. Such perverse behaviour cannot be defended legally, politically or morally within the context of any democratic state.
This behaviour can be explained, though, if we acknowledge that the U.S. democracy is neither rational nor democratic, and that the persecution of Muslims serves the needs of a foreign government–”Israel.
The Lobby’s control over the U.S. is hardly news–”it’s an open secret, just like Israel’s nuclear arsenal–”but the manufactured hysteria over an innocuous Muslim community centre in New York shows that U.S. democratic culture, and I use that term loosely, is essentially despotic and criminal.
As you doubtless know, The Cordoba Society plans to build a community centre two blocks from the World Trade Centre demolition. After the proposal was overwhelmingly approved, the Arab Defamation League and a host of frothing anti-Muslim crusadists began screaming that “a mosque” must not be built so close to the hallowed ground of America’s holocaust. Even if these demented Jews and Christians have their kickers in a twist over the project, their complaints have no basis in fact or reason, and represent the modern face of officially approved U.S. bigotry.
Leaving aside the fact that we now know that Muslims had nothing to do with the Mossad-engineered attack on the WTC, the Cordoba Society owns the land on which the 13-storey centre is to be built. Protection of private property rights is the cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution, so no group has the right to interfere with the society exercising its constitutional right to develop its property as it sees fit. This latter point, though, is drowned out in the din of mainstream 9/11 hysteria. (The best description of the project, now called simply Park51, is Haroon Siddiqui’s column in the Toronto Star.)
Fortunately, many Jewish “heretics,” like New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg and local congressmen Jerry Nadler, have publicly praised the project and condemned the anti-Muslim crusadists. “It’s only a slap in the face if you think that the people in the congregation are responsible for al-Qa’ida,” said Nadler, “Jews, of all people, should know that we have to support religious liberty, because if you can block a mosque you can block a synagogue.”
Here we see the voice of reason–”al-Qa’ida comment notwithstanding–”raised against the broadbrush smear of all Muslims as terrorists, but for all his accuracy Nadler misses the point. He assumes the protesters to be misguided, that they erroneously conflate extreme political Muslims with the average American Muslims. There is no error, here. The protesters are not interested in analogies between mosques and synagogues or upholding concepts like religious liberty. Their sole purpose is to incite hatred and fear of Muslims so that Israel can coerce Americans into believing that Muslims deserve to be mistreated.
Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, also a rationalist on this issue, condemns the protest in even stronger language than Nadler: “There is nothing worse we could be doing to act as an accelerant and lubricant to transforming young Islamic men and women around the world into insurrectionists and jihadists [sic] than to say to a Muslim, ‘you are not entitled to freedom.’ This is the work of fundamentalist Christians and ultra-extreme, right-wing Jews.”
Whereas Nadler focuses on the basic stupidity of the crusadists’ rhetoric, Weinstein makes the serious point that denying Muslims religious freedom endangers national security, whether in the U.S. or anywhere else. He also rightly identified the culprits, and in so doing highlighted the growing alienation of zionists from their co-religionists. It should be pointed out that one of the centre’s founding supporters is the United Jewish Federation of New York.
However, Weinstein also misses the point. He rationally assumes that it is a horrible mistake “to [transform] young Islamic men and women around the world into insurrectionists and jihadists,” yet that is precisely what is supposed to happen. Israel needs Muslims to be resentful and disaffected so that the demonized stereotype of the violent Muslim can be invoked to stampede the U.S. into committing horrific violence in the service of Israel.
The greatest threat to Israel is a world where Muslims are respected as equal members of a community, and enjoy good relations with people of other faiths. This scenario just happens to be the norm in a constitutional democracy, but since Israel is a fascist ethnocracy, democratic protections must be subverted wherever possible.
In the end, I expect that the centre will be built because the crusadists can mount no credible argument against it. The object of their hatred is not Park51 but the U.S. Constitution, which does not discriminate against Muslims as Israel demands. This document is more of a threat to Israel than any bomber, and herein lies the desperate irrationality of the real terrorists in America.
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UPDATE: New York Times cover-up of Park51-related anti-Muslim attack?
Since this piece was posted, a typical, hatred-infused American viciously attacked a Muslim cabbie in New York, an attack that has been linked to the Park51 project. Michael Enright, a 21-year-old film student who had been filming a boosterish documentary on marines in Afghanistan, slashed and stabbed the throat of Ahmed H. Sharif, a 44-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant.
Enright started up a conversation with Sharif, during which Sharif said he was Muslim. The following account comes from the cityroomblog of The New York Times.
After falling silent for a few minutes, the passenger began cursing and screaming, and then yelled, “Assalamu alaikum –” consider this a checkpoint!” and slashed Mr. Sharif across the neck, and then on the face from his nose to his upper lip, the [New York Taxi Workers] alliance said….
An emergency medical technician said that had the cut been any deeper or longer, the driver would have died, prosecutors said…
Mr. Enright sliced the driver’s “neck open halfway across his throat,” [said James Zaleta, an assistant district attorney]
Enright was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on charges of second-degree attempted murder as a hate crime, first-degree assault as a hate crime and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon. The links above describe the details of this extreme example of officially sanctioned American bigotry, but discrepancies between the Times blog and the “fuller account” are disturbing in their own right.
1) There appears to be an active attempt to manipulate this crime and generate public sympathy for Enright by suggesting that he may have been drunk, as if that matters. In the “final fuller version,” an anonymous law enforcement official told the Times that Enright was “very drunk” at the time of the attack. Since no such official was there “at the time of the attack,” and since this person is unnamed, the assertion seems highly manipulative. The blog said the officer would not give his name because of the active nature of the investigation, but if respect for the investigation were a factor, the reporter should not have reported the substance of the comment.
Later we learn that a city official briefed [read: “coached”] on the investigation said there was an empty bottle of scotch in his backpack, though how he could say this with certainty strains credulity.
Last, we learn that police did not administer a Breathalyzer test, even though Enright was said to be “very drunk,” and an empty liquor bottle was found in his backpack. Did these members of New York’s finest [sic] somehow lose their sense of smell?!
Perhaps a more reliable witness is Sharif, who said Enright did not appear inebriated.
2) Neither the emergency medical technician’s comment nor that of James Zaleta, both found in the blog, appear in the final version. These are conspicuous omissions because they speak to the near lethality of the attack. Their absence clearly benefits Enright.
3) This choice piece of mawkish drivel, though, appears in both sources:
“He’s terrified,” said Mr. Enright’s lawyer, Jason A. Martin. “He’s shocked at the allegations. He’s just trying to cope with it right now.”
Note Enright’s Israel-stylei moral posture: “Murder? He was only a Muslim after all. It’s not as though I attacked a real person!”
The best comment on this sordid event comes from Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations:
“As other American minorities have experienced, hate speech often leads to hate crimes. Sadly, we’ve seen how the deliberate public vilification of Islam can lead some individuals to violence against innocent people.” [my emphasis]
What better way to show how zionist hatemongers turned America into the land of the freak and home of the depraved!
