The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro’s new mosque on Veals Road.

Fight against Islam stretches beyond Murfreesboro mosque

From zoning issues to school prayer, this looks like a battle with no end

Tom Wilemon contributed to this report.
Contact Bob Smietana at 615-259-8228 or bsmietana@tennessean.com.

Hate? Islamophobia? Oh no, it doesn’t exist! This Imam had it coming because he dared to be a Mooslim!

Two men accused in subway imam attack hit with hate crime charges

(NYDailyNews)

Two men accused of attacking a Muslim religious leader in a Manhattan subway station were the targets Thursday of a hate-crimes investigation.

The unidentified imam claimed the two men called him a “terrorist” and yelled ethnic and religious slurs when they assaulted him at the Canal  Street station early Wednesday, sources said.

Eddie Crespo, 28, of Staten Island, was charged with third degree assault as a hate crime and two counts of second degree robbery, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said.

Albert Melendez, 30, of Manhattan, is expected to be arraigned later Thursday.

The incident happened at 3:25 a.m. on the northbound A-train platform, prosecutors said.

csiemaszko@nydailynews.com

(Read the whole piece at WhatIfTheyWereMuslim.com)

On Sunday November 7th at 3:30 pm, followers and supporters of Rabbi Meir Kahane from Canada and America will gather at Ground Zero ostensibly to rally against “political Islam.” Why is this important news for many Americans who consider Ground Zero a sacred site? Because Rabbi Kahane is the founder of the villainous Kach Israeli political party, a group on the U.S. State Department’s official list of terrorist organizations.

A little background on Mr. Kahane: he was a hardline ordained Jewish Rabbi who advocated the removal of Arabs from Palestine in order to create a homogeneous “Greater Israel” modeled upon Jewish religious law. His slogan is “every Jew a .22.”

Widely denounced by other Jews as a racist, he gained worldwide infamy when one of his followers, the notorious Baruch Goldstein, perpetrated the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, wherein Mr. Goldstein brutally gunned down dozens of Palestinian Muslim worshippers who were praying inside the Abraham Mosque. Another one of Mr. Kahane’s followers is on trial in Michigan for shooting an Arab man in an act of road rage.

And British activists in the Kahane-inspired Jewish Defense League have cozied up, ironically enough, with the thuggish English Defense League despite their attachment to the violent neo-nazi outfit Combat 18. In short, Mr. Kahane is something of a folk-hero for extremists bent on Jewish domination of the Holy Land at the expense of indigenous Arabs and Muslims, including Arab Christians. In a few weeks, Mr. Kahane’s followers are bringing their message of hate and racial supremacy to Ground Zero.

I repeat: supporters of an officially designated terrorist organization that advocates an unforgiving expansionist religious-political ideology are meeting to honor their racist terrorist leader on the site of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

Stereotyping Jews or any group because of the actions of an extremist fringe is deeply wrong. But this situation begs the question: what if they were Muslim?

Imagine, if you can, the thunderous firestorm that would be unleashed if supporters of Al-Qaeda gathered at Ground Zero to honor Osama Bin Laden. The scene would be too ghastly for words, with 24 hour cable news coverage, politicians on both sides of the aisle lining up to score points for condemnation, and Muslim-bashing bloggers having a field day. All of Islam and all Muslims would bear collective guilt for their actions. Muslim leaders across the country would denounce terrorism only to be told that they have not denounced terrorism enough or that they are secret stealth jihadists. It would be said, “Where are the moderate Muslims? Why do they not condemn terrorism?” And Steve Emerson’s fear-mongering-for-profit operation would continue to rake in millions. You get the picture.

But as for Mr. Kahane’s followers, we aren’t going to hear a peep out of Newt, Palin, Spencer, or Geller. We will not hear Bill O’Reilly speaking down to Jews on his show about their “Jewish problem.” And we will not hear the same chorus of outrage about the holiness of Ground Zero or the sensitivities of 9/11 victims’ families.

Why? Because these particular terrorists are not Muslims. It is as simple as that.

(via. IslamophobiaToday)

Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar got so angry with Bill O’Reilly while discussing the Ground Zero mosque that they both walked off the set. They later returned after Bill apologized.

From The View, Thursday 10/14/10.

The more Geller gets attention, the more her looniness is exposed

The New York Times ran a feature on anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller. The Times feature also mentioned LoonWatch! While it’s noteworthy for our site to be mentioned by the New York Times, we won’t let it get to our collective head. There’s too much work in exposing right-wing nuts like Geller to allow for that.

Outraged, and Outrageous (New York Times) h/t Rob

PAMELA GELLER’S apartment, in the fashion of the blogosphere, doubles as her office. It is a modern full-floor unit in a high-rise on the East Side of Manhattan that could belong to a socialite or the editor of a lifestyle magazine. There is ample light and a tasteful lack of clutter. The kitchen appliances are made of brushed steel; the countertops are slate. In the earth-toned living room hangs a painting, in vibrant colors, of a woman in a swimsuit.

It is in this genteel setting that Ms. Geller, 52 and a single mother of four, wakes each morning shortly after 7, switches on her laptop and wages a form of holy war throughAtlas Shrugs, a Web site that attacks Islam with a rhetoric venomous enough that PayPal at one point branded it a hate site. Working here — often in fuzzy slippers — she has called for the removal of the Dome of the Rock from atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet; suggested the State Department was run by “Islamic supremacists”; and referred to health care reform as an act of national rape.

Ms. Geller has been writing since 2005, but this summer she skyrocketed to national prominence as the firebrand in chief opposing Park51, the planned Muslim community center she denounces as “the ground zero mega-mosque.”

Operating largely outside traditional Washington power centers — and, for better or worse, without traditional academic, public-policy or journalism credentials — Ms. Geller, with a coterie of allies, has helped set the tone and shape the narrative for a divisive national debate over Park51 (she calls the developer a “thug” and a “lowlife”). In the process, she has helped bring into the mainstream a concept that after 9/11 percolated mainly on the fringes of American politics: that terrorism by Muslims springs not from perversions of Islam but from the religion itself. Her writings, rallies and television appearances have both offended and inspired, transforming Ms. Geller from an Internet obscurity, who once videotaped herself in a bikini as she denounced “Islamofascism,” into a media commodity who has been profiled on “60 Minutes” and whose phraseology has been adopted by Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

FOR Ms. Geller, the battle against Park51 is only part of a much larger crusade in which she is joined by an influential if decentralized coalition that includes formergenerals, new-media polemicists, researchers and evangelicals who view Islam as a politically driven religion, barbaric at its core and expansionist by nature. Her closest partner is Robert Spencer, the proprietor of Jihadwatch.org. Incorporation papers for their American Freedom Defense Initiative list as founding members Anders Gravers, a Danish “anti-Islamization” activist (“Jihad is the knife slicing the salami of freedom”) and John Joseph Jay (“There are no innocents in Islam”). Their lawyer, David Yerushalmi, has sought to criminalize the practice of Islam, when defined as adherence to Shariah, Islamic religious law.

This loose-knit cadre’s vision of Islam in an age of terror is not unlike a cold war view of Communism: a stealthy global threat creeping into nodes of power that must be opposed at all cost. “In the war between the savage and the civilized man,” Ms. Geller says, “you side with the civilized man.”

It remains unclear how much Ms. Geller is driving opposition to the Islamic center and how much she reflects it — polls suggest most Americans oppose the project — but her involvement can hardly be ignored. Atlas Shrugs, which gets about one million unique visitors a month, helped draw thousands to protests against Park51 on June 6 and Sept. 11. Ms. Geller, supported by a divorce settlement and blog advertisements, also played an important role in winning the resignation in 2007 of Debbie Almontaser, a Muslim principal who started an Arabic-language public school in Brooklyn; brought 200 people to Ohio last year to support Rifqa Bary, a Muslim girl who accused her parents of abuse; and helped draw vociferous objectors to a hearing this summer on a since-scrapped proposal for a mosque on Staten Island.

In conversation, Ms. Geller habitually refers to herself as a “racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim-bigot” — all one word in her pronunciation — which hints at her sense of humor and her evident frustration at her public persona. She wields a similarly broad brush against opponents, using terms like “diabolical” and “stealth jihadist” even for people like the journalist Christiane Amanpour and the Republican operative Grover Norquist.

The outrageous and the solemn are deeply intertwined in her character. Ms. Geller admits to using Atlas Shrugs to test topics significant (the conflict in Sudan) and outlandish (that a young Barack Obama slept with “a crack whore”). She has taken up arms against “honor killings” as well as against a Disneyland employee who fought to wear a head scarf. She inspires laughs at sites like Loonwatch, but critics say her influence is serious: a spreading fear of Islam and a dehumanization of Muslims comparable to the sometimes-violent anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism of earlier eras. Even some of her former right-wing allies say she has gone too far.

“I think she’s enabling a real bigotry — a lot of people are convinced by the propaganda she repeats like a mantra,” said Charles Johnson, who runs the blog Little Green Footballs, where Ms. Geller got her start as a frequent commenter. “Nine-eleven didn’t happen in a vacuum — it came from a long history. But when people like Pam Geller are the loudest voices out there talking about it, it drowns out everything else and makes everyone look crazy.”

Like many writers, Ms. Geller is fond of what she calls her “little darlings” — rhetorical flourishes, such as accusing the imam behind Park51 of “totalitarian Khomeinism.”Asked during an interview on Sept. 28 whether these extreme constructions undermine her credibility, Ms. Geller spontaneously erupted into song. “I gotta be me,” she sang, sounding not too bad, though not at all like someone who has opined extensively about the Mufti of Jerusalem and the Iranian revolution. “I gotta be free.”

“I’m serious,” she added, returning to her Long Island-accented voice. “I haven’t thought about that song in a million years. But it’s really true.”

THE day last December when The New York Times first reported plans to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, Atlas Shrugs immediately objected. “I don’t know which is more grotesque,” Ms. Geller wrote, “jihad or the NY Times preening of it.”

She dropped the topic until May 5, when the project — including a mosque, sports facilities and cultural programs to promote understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims — won unanimous approval from a committee of Community Board 1.

The next day, Atlas bristled with outrage. It was a “monster mosque.” It was “sort of like a victory lap” — analogous to Muslims’ reconsecrating the iconic Hagia Sophia cathedral as a mosque after conquering Constantinople in 1453. “Insulting and humiliating.” “A stab in the eye of America.”

“This is Islamic domination and expansionism,” Ms. Geller declared. The only Muslim center appropriate near ground zero, she said, would be devoted to “expunging the Koran” of “incitement to violence.” (Though, she added, such a center “probably wouldn’t last two minutes without being bombed by devout Muslims.”)

Two days later, Ms. Geller invited readers to protest the “9/11 monster mosque being built on hallowed ground zero,” in a post that was among the first to spread the misimpressions that the project was at the World Trade Center site and would solely house a prayer space. The next week, The New York Post took up the cause (“Mosque Madness at Ground Zero”). Fox News booked Ms. Geller on Mike Huckabee’s television program. Sean Hannity hosted her on the radio.

The community board received hundreds of letters and calls from across the country; Ms. Geller had posted its contact information. She advertised its May 25 hearing, which was packed and marked by heckling (“You’re building on a Christian cemetery!”).

Next, the organization she and Mr. Spencer took over in April, Stop Islamization of America, held a rally on the anniversary of D-Day, which Ms. Geller marks as the moment Park51 became a national sensation. A post about it by El Marco, a conservative blogger, “went viral,” she said, a rare instance of a big debate’s bursting on the scene without “the mainstream media telling people what to think.”

Ms. Geller, though, had some suggestions. She and other bloggers quoted selectively from the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, stressing his description of United States policy as partly responsible for 9/11. They branded him a “radical Islamist.” They declared that his talks against extremism and violence were “taqiyya” — the hiding of true beliefs, religiously sanctioned for Muslims, usually minority Shiites, under hostile rule. And Ms. Geller said, without evidence, that the center’s financing might be tied to terrorists.

Her assertions became common talking points for Republican leaders and other opponents. Soon, Rick A. Lazio, running for governor of New York, was calling the imam a “terrorist sympathizer.” Rush Limbaugh was describing Park51 as a “victory mosque.” Mr. Gingrich was talking about fighting “stealth jihad,” a favorite Geller phrase and the title of a book by Mr. Spencer.

Over the summer, Ms. Geller, irresistibly appealing to television bookers, appeared on programs across the political spectrum as the face of opposition to the Muslim center. Her claims were disputed often enough that the liberal media-tracking group Media Matters called on stations (ineffectually) to stop presenting her as an expert.

Opposition to Park51 grew — and with it, antipathy for Islam. A New York Times poll last month found that two-thirds of city residents thought the project should be relocated. A Quinnipiac University poll of likely New York State voters showed that 90 percent of Republicans — compared to 34 percent of Democrats — thought that a mosque near ground zero was wrong. And the portion of Americans with a favorable view of Islam reached its lowest ebb since 9/11 — 37 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Ms. Geller said in the interview that it was “insulting to the American people” to suggest that she and her allies inspired the anger over the project. But if many people have a general unease over the idea of a mosque downtown, Ms. Geller has provided a vocabulary to express it and a framework to understand it: worries about Islam.

“I have an interesting play on words sometimes,” she said. “If people like it, I think that’s great.”

Mr. Spencer says Ms. Geller’s “genius” is translating his sometimes-obscure concepts into vernacular, plus a “charm and appeal” that motivates people to take action. Rich Davis, a founding member of their group, likened her to the lead singer who made the Who’s challenging music popular.

“I think of her like Roger Daltry,” said Mr. Davis, a Navy veteran from Pennsylvania. “He had a good look, a strong personality, and that’s how I think of her. She’s the front man for so many of us who feel the same way.”

PAMELA GELLER was born in 1958, the third of four girls. She grew up in Hewlett Harbor, one of Long Island’s Five Towns, an affluent, heavily Jewish enclave that spawned notables like the fashion designer Donna Karan. Her father, Reuben, owned a textile mill in Brooklyn and often worked 16 hours a day; he died in 1996. “I was closer to my dad than anyone,” Ms. Geller has written. “There was no one like him. He came up the hard way and made a success of his life the hard way.”

Her mother, Lillian, who died in 2006, was often in the kitchen when Pamela and her sisters — two became doctors, one a teacher — returned from school for lunch. Pamela was the most adventuresome and the most enthralled by New York, said Jessica Geller, the eldest. “She was the girl who couldn’t wait to drive,” Jessica added. “She loved everything about the city, the buzz, the excitement, the vibrancy.”

Theirs was, Jessica Geller said, an “unremarkable” postwar suburban household — mom, dad, school, work, cars, boys. The sisters went to Hebrew school, but attended synagogue mainly on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. (“It was more of a fashion show in many respects,” Jessica Geller recalled.)

Israel, which now forms a crucial piece of Pamela Geller’s politics, was not frequently discussed. Both parents were Democrats, but, in Jessica Geller’s view, “the liberal moms and dads of the ’60s and ’70s would be considered right-wing nuts by today’s standards.”

Pamela Geller said her early years were imbued with a sense of American power and rectitude, so pervasive that it need not be articulated. Many of her current concerns — political correctness, media cowardice, changing national identity, eroding individual rights — can be connected to those times.

“Growing up as the sort of tail end of the baby boomers, there was this feeling of invincibility in America,” she said. “We were free. The good guys won. The good cop is on the beat. I certainly don’t get a sense of that anymore.” (Jessica Geller put it this way: “What my sister really wants is for everything to get back to normal in America.”)

Pamela went to Lynbrook High School and Hofstra University, but left without a degree. She worked on the business side of The New York Daily News through the 1980s, then became the associate publisher at The New York Observer.

Colleagues at The Observer remembered her as brassy and vulgar — not an easy fit with the salmon-colored broadsheet’s effete ethos. Ms. Geller recalled pushing the publisher to endorse Rudolph W. Giuliani in his first mayoral bid, and being satisfied when the paper issued no endorsement. Married in 1990 to Michael H. Oshry, a wealthy car dealer from the Five Towns who was himself the son of a wealthy car dealer from the Five Towns, she quit in 1994 to stay home with her daughters.

Ms. Geller got nearly $4 million when the couple divorced in 2007, and when Mr. Oshry died in 2008, there was a $5 million life-insurance policy benefiting her four daughters, said Alex Potruch, Mr. Oshry’s lawyer. She also kept some proceeds from the sale of Mr. Oshry’s $1.8 million house in Hewlett Harbor.

“Pamela wanted to live in the city,” Mr. Potruch said. “He made certain that she had sufficient support to buy a co-op in the city and survive there without having to work.

“He supported her blogging,” the lawyer added, “even though he didn’t always agree with what she was saying.”

IT was 9/11 that drove Ms. Geller to her keyboard. She had barely heard of Osama bin Laden, she said, and “felt guilty that I didn’t know who had attacked my country.”

She spent the next year educating herself about Islam, reading Bat Ye’or, a French writer who focuses on tensions over Muslim immigrants in Europe; Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym for a Pakistani who writes about his rejection of Islam; and Daniel Pipes, whom she ultimately rejected because he believes in the existence of a moderate Islam.

Ms. Geller commented prolifically on Web sites focused on Islamic militancy, like Little Green Footballs. “She was always one of the first ones to start going way out there,” said Mr. Johnson. (Ms. Geller, in turn, dismissed him as “a reviled figure” who had abandoned his principles.) A fellow commenter called Pookleblinky urged Ms. Geller to start her own blog. She named it in homage to Ayn Rand’s championing of individual rights — Ms. Geller, unlike some of her allies, favors abortion rights — and, perhaps, to conjure the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Readership grew steadily, and spiked whenever she took on hot-button issues. In early 2006, when Muslims rioted over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad printed in a Danish newspaper, Atlas — unlike much of the news media — posted the cartoons, and hits leaped from scores to tens of thousands.

During the Lebanon-Israel war later that year, Ms. Geller video-blogged from an Israeli beach, flicking water at the camera, arching her bikini-bared back provocatively and equating Palestinians with Hamas.

In 2007, she wrote often about Ms. Almontaser, the teacher who founded the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn — Ms. Geller called Arabic-language instruction a front for Islamist indoctrination. She joined Stop the Madrassa, an organization formed to fight the school, which later thanked her for speeding Ms. Almontaser’s ouster. It was this victory, critics say, that emboldened Ms. Geller’s circle and set it on a path to national influence.

“New York is the cosmopolitan city of the world,” Ms. Almontaser said last week. “They figured that if they could do it here, they could do it anywhere. And sadly, they did.”

The next turning point for Ms. Geller, a few months later, was a “counter-jihad” conference in Brussels. It threw her — and Mr. Spencer of Jihad Watch — together with anti-Islamic Europeans whom even some allies considered too extreme, like Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, an offshoot of a Belgian party banned that was for racism and was allegedly founded by Nazi sympathizers.

Mr. Johnson of Little Green Footballs, a former comrade, attacked Ms. Geller and Mr. Spencer — whose interest in Islam began with family lore about a Greek great-grandfather killed by Turks — for meeting with “neo-Nazis.” They insisted they were not responsible for the views of everyone who stands in a room with them (though they have lobbed similar guilt-by-association accusations at Muslims, including the people behind Park51).

Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.) And she formed a lasting partnership with Mr. Spencer.

It is partly philosophical: They and the anti-Islam movement in Europe share a fear of Muslim takeover. And it is partly practical: He helps her raise money and source some assertions; she helps him spread his ideas and, he said, “get results.”

THEIR first collaboration was informal. In 2008, Mr. Spencer posted Ms. Geller’s appeal to raise $4,000 for a headstone for Aqsa Parvez, a Muslim-Canadian immigrant killed by her father and brother for not wearing a head scarf. More recently, Mr. Spencer worked with Ms. Geller on her book “The Post-American Presidency,” published this summer by Simon & Schuster for what she described as a six-figure advance. He helped her sober up her tone, she said, by removing those “little darlings,” in hopes of bolstering the credibility of her argument that Mr. Obama is “not only presiding over but actively promoting the decline of America.”

The pair populated the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference with anti-Islam sympathizers by renting a room in the same hotel and hosting a talk by Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Islam activist who has tried to ban the Koran in his country. At this year’s conference, they hosted Mr. Gravers, head of Stop Islamization of Europe, whose motto is “Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.” Mr. Gravers then asked Ms. Geller and Mr. Spencer to take over his group’s American affiliate, and turn it from a staid Web site into a political force.

They delivered. In April, they founded a nonprofit group called American Freedom Defense Initiative, which also uses the name Stop Islamization of America. They took out bus ads offering to help Muslims who wanted to leave the religion but were afraid of violent reprisals — and won in court when cities tried to suppress the ads. They brought crowds to support Rifqa Bary in Ohio and urged people to oppose the mosque on Staten Island.

Then Park51 emerged.

Mr. Spencer and Ms. Geller said they would rather have galvanized the nation with accounts of Muslim girls killed by male relatives over violations of family “honor.” But, Mr. Spencer said, to many Americans the plight of a Muslim immigrant girl is too abstract. “Most people are only concerned with their families and friends and their immediate circle,” he said. “There is a visceral connection that Americans have with 9/11 that is not felt about other issues.”

It is difficult to determine who finances their movement, since their new organization has yet to win tax-free status requiring documentation of donations. Mr. Spencer estimated that since 2009, the two have raised and spent about $150,000 for things like the bus ads and giant television screens for the 9/11 rally, some of it donated through Mr. Spencer’s Jihad Watch, a 501(c)3 nonprofit agency. In recent years, Jihad Watch has been a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which pays him a $132,000 salary and, as Politico.com has reported, has received significant contributions from philanthropists who back the Israeli right.

Asked how much her blog collects in reader donations and advertisements (one promotes a creationist Web site), Ms. Geller said only that it was enough to live on.

She is barreling ahead. Just last week, Atlas called on readers to boycott Campbell’s soup after the company announced that it planned to certify some products as halal — the Muslim equivalent of kosher — with the supervision of a group that Ms. Geller considers a front for terrorists.

“Warhol,” she wrote, “is spinning in his grave.”

Mike Rosen wouldn't mind a terrorist attack, so long as it occurs against Muslims

Mike Rosen either has a very bad sense of humor or is a deranged lunatic. But in the anti-Muslim crowd, he will likely be hailed as a hero for speaking up against the very scary menace that is Islam in Manhattan.

Leading GOP Radio Host Pushes Terrorist Attack on Any Islamic Center Built in Lower Manhattan (Open Left)

On Wednesday night, I debated KHOW’s Peter Boyles and 850 KOA host/Denver Post columnist Mike Rosen in front of a sold out audience in Centennial. During a question about whether an Islamic Center should be allowed to be built in Lower Manhattan, Rosen said that if one is built, he supports terrorists blowing it up. You can listen to the full debate here, or the specific excerpt in question here. After both myself and Boyles said the Islamic Center should be allowed to be built, Rosen said:

“I think they should be allowed to build it, followed by the hijacking of an Iranian plane right into that building and blow it to smithereens.”

Remember, the same Mike Rosen now using his media platform to endorse a new terrorist attack on New York City, was the major voice leading the crusade pressuring University of Colorado to fire professor Ward Churchill. In the clip, you’ll first hear my voice, then Rosen, then conservative host Peter Boyles (who you can hear disagreeing with Rosen and agreeing with me).

If you listen to the whole debate, in addition to this exchange, you’ll also hear Rosen periodically make sexist and racist jokes.

On Hallowed Ground?

Nothing says “family values” like preferring a strip club in your neighborhood over a place of worship.

Poll: More Republicans Support Strip Club Over Mosque Near Ground Zero (Huffington Post)

A new survey from the Democratic-affiliated firm Public Policy Polling finds that more Republicans support constructing a strip club than a mosque near Ground Zero.

Just four percent of Republican respondents said they support building a mosque two blocks from the site, whereas 21 percent said they would be fine with a strip club. Forty-nine percent of Democrats said they supported the mosque and 33 for the strip club. Among Independents, it was 34 percent for the mosque and 28 percent for the strip club.

“This shows the extent and impact of the recent rise in anti-Islam rhetoric in our society that people would rather have some kind of establishment perpetuating immoral behavior over a house of worship [run] by people who are trying to promote morality and ethics and righteous behavior,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesperson for Council on American-Islamic Relations.

During the debate over whether to build a planned Islamic cultural center near the memorial site, many media outlets noted that the “sacred” ground surrounding the area is home to all sorts of less-than sacred outlets.

“In a walk of the streets within three blocks of Ground Zero, the Daily News counted 17 pizza shops, 18 bank branches, 11 bars, 10 shoe stores and 17 separate salons where a girl can get her lady parts groomed,” reported the paper in August. It also pointed to a strip club called “Pussycat Lounge” just two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood, as well as a place called “Thunder Lingerie.”

A good article from Rabbi Yoffie. He discusses why the analogy of the nuns at Auschwitz doesn’t comport with the mosque near Ground Zero.

Auschwitz and the Mosque Near Ground Zero: The Problems with This Analogy

Jewish Americans have generally been more supportive of the Cordoba House project than other Americans. Jews have been denied religious freedom and been the victims of religious discrimination so frequently that their natural sympathies lie with others who now confront these burdens. Nonetheless, even those most firmly committed to building the community center/mosque in lower Manhattan have struggled with the seemingly powerful argument that what happened at Auschwitz in the 1980s is a reason to rethink their position.

This argument goes as follows: A group of Carmelite nuns attempted to establish a convent on the grounds of Auschwitz in the mid-1980s. Pope John Paul II was sensitive to the concerns of Jews, who saw Auschwitz as sacred ground and the convent as an attempt to obscure the memory of the Jewish slaughter that happened there. In 1989, the Pope ordered the Polish nuns off the grounds of Auschwitz to a different location. Therefore, Imam Feisal Rauf should demonstrate similar sensitivity and move the Cordoba House from its current site.

There are two problems with this argument.

The first is that all Holocaust analogies are profoundly suspect. The Holocaust, with Auschwitz as its central symbol, was an endeavor of pure evil, involving a fanatic, obsessive, and single-minded six-year campaign to exterminate an entire people. Words fail us in attempting to describe or explain the Holocaust. We Jews, therefore, rightly discourage others from making comparisons that must ultimately fall short. The Holocaust is analogous to nothing because it is utterly unique.

The second problem is that if there is a lesson to be learned from John Paul’s actions, it is exactly the opposite of what Cordoba House opponents are now claiming.

I agree that Ground Zero is a sacred place. It is a mass grave, the site of a terrible atrocity. One can reasonably argue that anything that detracts from the memory and the message of the site is out of place there, and that a mosque — or any place of worship — might do that.

But that is where the similarities end. The Jewish community was outraged in the 1980s because the convent was located on the grounds of Auschwitz. At the request of the Pope, the convent was then moved to another building across the street, off the grounds but only 600 yards away. The Jewish community was grateful to the Pope for his actions. Jews saw nothing problematic about the convent being only a third of a mile from Auschwitz. What was important was that it was no longer on the grounds of the camp that had been the place of an unprecedented and unthinkable slaughter of Jews.

The Cordoba House, of course, was never to be located at Ground Zero. It is to be two and a half blocks away — close by, but still at a respectable distance, as in the case of the convent after the move, and not only that, in a highly congested urban neighborhood where its presence will be barely noticeable. Just as the Jewish community had no problem with a Carmelite convent that was so close to Auschwitz, so too should it have no problem with a community center/mosque that is so close to Ground Zero. If moving the convent a short distance from the death camp was seen as a step to be applauded, why should a community center/mosque a short distance from Ground Zero be seen as troubling?

For Jews, emotions run deep on the Holocaust, which is burned into our consciousness. But we must not let these emotions be exploited. Twenty years ago, by a short move from sacred ground to secular territory, the dispute over the convent at Auschwitz was resolved. Common sense and a spirit of mutual understanding triumphed. In dealing with plans for Cordoba House, to be constructed in a busy and very worldly section of downtown New York, let us hope that they will triumph once again.

Islamophobia? What Islamophobia?

The Hudson Islamic Center was targeted by vandals who spray painted racial slurs and anti-government messages on the mosque, obviously upset over the proximity of Hudson to Ground Zero,

Hudson mosque vandalized

HUDSON — City detectives are searching for the vandals who spray-painted a racial slur on a local mosque and an anti-government obscenity in an alley near the house of worship, according to police.

Hudson Lt. Lynne Finn said the vandalism occurred sometime between midnight and 5 a.m. Wednesday at the Hudson Islamic Center on North 3rd Street. The epithet was left on the rear of the mosque while the anti-government rant was spray painted on a wooden fence in an alleyway adjacent to the mosque at the corner of North 3rd Street and Long Alley, Finn said.

Finn said both were done with red paint.

The building is located downtown in a residential area, Finn added.

And from the city of brotherly love which must be to close to Ground Zero as well,

Thanks, Philadelphia, For At Least Keeping Your Intolerance Peaceful

The cover of the Philadelphia Daily News today promises to explain “Why Islamophobia is Raging Elsewhere in America, but Not in Philly.” Awesome! Apparently we hate Muslims less than other people hate them, which is nice of us. Will Bunch writes:

Here in Philadelphia and the suburbs, Islamic leaders acknowledge that this region has so far been spared major incidents like the others, and they say that the overall climate for Muslims here has not been as negative as elsewhere.

Philadelphia’s Muslim population is relatively large and has been a part of the city for decades, which could partially explain why this year’s nativist panic en vogue hasn’t touched us quite as much. Bunch’s article also points to the diversity of Philly’s Muslim population, which includes a significant segment of African-American Muslims. In other words: Islam in Philadelphia’s collective subconscious is more Freeway and less foreigners+Islam=terrorism. Bunch, of course, is in a unique position to comment on all of this. His new book, Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, Hi-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, is just out, and as it happens, he’s reading from it tonight at Rittenhouse Barnes & Noble.

But Philadelphia apparently does hate Muslims at least a little bit. Bunch tells us about a 25-year-old Muslim who was called a terrorist by a customer at a pharmacy where he worked and was forced to quit his job after he walked off in anger. Bunch also tells us that Moein Khawaja, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Philadelphia office, has seen an increase in that kind of bigotry over the past couple of years. On the plus side, we haven’t set fire to Mosque construction sites or stabbed any Muslim cab drivers, which I guess is a start. But, uh, is that really enough to earn Philadelphia a column patting it on the back for its “Tolerance toward Islam?” The result of low expectations, perhaps?

and don’t forget about Arizona,

Mosque under construction in Phoenix vandalized

by Frank Camacho

azfamily.com

Posted on September 7, 2010 at 9:10 PM

PHOENIX – Staff at a Phoenix mosque is cleaning up broken glass and graffiti after vandals break in.

The mosque has been under construction near Interstate 17 and Glendale for a while now but recently vandals doused floor with paint after breaking a door and several windows, including some near the ceiling.

The damage is not extensive but local Muslim leaders say they see this as a sign of the times, given the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero.

No one has yet been arrested for the crime.