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Category Archives: USA
New York: community board approves ‘Ground Zero mosque’ plan
LOWER MANHATTAN — Community Board 1 approved a plan to build a mosque two blocks from the World Trade Center after a four-hour meeting that drew hundreds of people and emotions ranging from fear and hatred to grief and hope at a public forum in lower Manhattan Tuesday night.
“I’m so proud of the community board,” said Imam Feisal AbdulRauf, shortly after the vote, which was 29 in favor, 1 against, with 9 abstentions. “They recognize us as neighbors.”
The community board’s vote is solely advisory, and the project could have gone forward regardless of the board’s opinion.
Still, supporters and opponents of the plan packed into CB1’s monthly meeting at 3-Legged Dog’s theater Tuesday night. Both uniformed and undercover NYPD officers were present at the meeting to keep the crowd under control.
When Rauf stood to address the crowd, he was shouted down by people yelling, “Murderer!” Dr. Rudina Odeh-Ramadan, who was temporarily buried under rubble twice while she worked to rescue people on 9/11, was booed when she revealed that she was a Muslim.
Tea Party bigot attacks NY political leader as ‘Jewish Uncle Tom’
A Tea Party flamethrower blasted Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer Monday as a “Jewish Uncle Tom” for supporting a proposed mosque near Ground Zero.
Mark Williams, chairman of the Tea Party Express, took to his blog to spew hate at Stringer after the politician compared him to Adolf Hitler at a press conference last week. Williams countered that Stringer is a “sniviling [sic] worm” and “a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank.”
Stringer vowed not to back down from “a thug” like Williams and expressed surprise that the Tea Party hasn’t booted him. “He’s a bigot whose mission in life is to divide society,” Stringer said. “He works at sowing seeds of racial and religious hatred.”
Williams set off a feud last week when he blogged that the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center would be a monument to the 9/11 attackers “for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god.”
New York Daily News, 25 May 2010
See also “Family says Muslim man’s attackers targeted him because of his religion”, New York Daily News, 25 May 2010
CAIR calls for investigation into hate crimes
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on law enforcement authorities to investigate possible bias motives in two recent incidents involving Muslims in New York and Oregon.
CAIR’s New York chapter (CAIR-NY) has asked the NYPD Hate Crimes Taskforce to investigate a possible bias motive in the brutal beating of a Muslim man in East New York on Saturday. According to media reports, the 57-year-old man of Bangladeshi origin was jumped by four assailants who beat but did not rob him. The man’s daughter and nephew reported that the attackers referred to the his being Muslim at the start of the assault.
“Attacks motivated by racial or religious animosity are directed at entire communities,” said CAIR-NY Civil Rights Director Aliya Latif. “Such incidents should be investigated from all angles to serve as both a deterrent and repudiation of intolerance.”
CAIR also called on the FBI to investigate a possible bias motive for a bomb scare at a Muslim family’s home under construction in Oregon.
According to news reports, a 30-year-old Muslim man of Afghan origin was watching the house in Tigard, Ore., while his parents were away. He was woken Sunday night by the smell of gasoline and the sounds of intruders, who ran when the man yelled. He called 911 when he found the floors of the home covered in gasoline and a ticking device in one room.
Jewish club offers to help with repairs to firebombed mosque
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The soot has been washed away but evidence from the May attack on a Jacksonville mosque is still visible. Now, a group of a different faith is offering to repair it. “I simply called Ash (Shaikh) to find out if there was anything to do to help out,” said Ken Organes, who represents the Jacksonville Jewish Center Men’s Club.
Organes said he was dismayed when he heard about the attack and offered the services of some of the Men’s Club members to repair the damage caused by the pipe bomb. “We have a group of guys who like to do carpentry, painting or whoever we can to help out,” he said.
Ash Shaikh, spokesman for the Islamic Center, called the offer heartwarming and said they are grateful for the assistance. “No matter what the extent of the repairs, the very fact that someone of another faith tradition is going to take the time and is so concerned to show his compassion and the compassion of his community,” Shaikh said of the tremendous support they’ve received from the Jewish community.
Tennessee mosque plan withdrawn in face of Islamophobic opposition
The plan to derail a proposed mosque in Brentwood was simple but effective. Through e-mails, blogs and word of mouth, opponents told friends and neighbors they were suspicious of the mosque and feared its leaders had ties to terrorist organizations. They encouraged citizens to write letters to the city commission expressing their concerns, including worries about traffic and flooding.
It worked.
On Wednesday night, the mosque’s organizers admitted defeat. They withdrew their application to rezone 14 acres on Wilson Pike for a house of worship. “There comes a time when you have to say, ‘We can’t do this anymore’,” said Jaweed Ansari, a Brentwood physician and spokesman for the Islamic Center of Williamson County. “We started this in very good faith,” he said. “We had a neighborhood meeting, and we thought this would be a friendly thing. Instead of that, it turned out to be a very angry thing.”
Matt Bonner, who lives in Nashville but is a member of Brentwood United Methodist Church, helped organize resistance to the mosque. “Not enough people understand the political doctrine of Islam,” he said in an interview before the mosque project was withdrawn. “The fact is that the mosques are more than just a church. No one can predict what this one will be used for.”
Bonner said his suspicions about Islam were shaped in part by the writings of Bill French, a former physics professor who now runs the Nashville-based Center for the Study of Political Islam. The center is a for-profit book publisher run by French, who writes under the pen name Bill Warner. He argues that Islam is not really a religion. Instead, Warner says that Islam is a dangerous political ideology.
Interfaith support for so-called ‘Ground Zero mosque’
We are three New Yorkers who hail from three different faiths but cherish the religious and cultural pluralism of New York City. We would like to inform Mark Williams of the national Tea Party and all those who strongly object to the proposed Muslim cultural center near the World Trade Center that Islam is a wonderful, faith-filled religion just like Judaism and Christianity.
Islam did not bring down the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. What brought the towers down were 19 men who were deeply misguided and brainwashed by an ideology that is not blessed in the teachings of the prophet Mohammed in the sacred Koran. To believe otherwise is to equate Catholicism with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by Irish American Catholic, Timothy McVeigh, or to connect Judaism with the 1977 Son of Sam murders with a Jewish American, David Berkowitz.
Therefore, please do not condemn Islam due to the crazed, morbid actions of zealots who abused the Koran and the free will given to them by God.
After a careful period of inquiry, we have discovered that the particular proposed development in question is based on the spirit of peaceful co-existence with other faith traditions. (And: It happens not to be a “mosque,” as many are calling it, but a multi-purpose cultural center; even if it were a mosque, however, it would be an institution to welcome, not fear.)
Father Brian Jordan, Richard Shierer and Muhammed Luquman in the New York Daily News, 23 April 2010
Cordoba House: hope from the ashes of tragedy
Sheila Musaji counters the “blizzard of bigotry that paints all Muslims and the entire religion of Islam as being evil” with which the Islamophobic right has responded to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque’.
Clapham Common is a ‘Muslim ghetto’ claims US TV presenter
This exchange between right-wing US TV presenter Bill O’Reilly and political commentator Imogen Lloyd Webber would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of US citizens get their information from Fox News.
Lloyd Webber attacks the proposed French ban on the veil as “a massive mistake”, “an infringement of women’s rights”, “completely counterproductive” and “an act of discrimination” – which is not at all to O’Reilly’s taste. He counters that the French “are really worried about these Muslim ghettos”, which he associates with riots and suicide bombing.
O’ Reilly insists: “The same thing’s going on in London. You have neighbourhoods in London, they’re totally Muslim, they speak Arabic. You walk in those neighbourhoods, you’re not in England – you’re not there, you’re in Kuwait.”
“I can’t actually think of one in London”, Lloyd Webber replies. “Clapham Common”, suggests O’Reilly, bizarrely. Lloyd Webber responds that “Clapham Common is full of posh people with push-chairs”!
New York politicians rally in support of ‘Ground Zero mosque’
New York politicians gathered Thursday afternoon to denounce Tea Party leader Mark Williams and support a mosque and community center planned near ground zero. The politicians were responding to Williams’ blog rant against the mosque Wednesday, in which he said Muslims worshipped a “monkey god.”
“His spewing of racial hatred reminds me … of Adolph Hitler,” Borough President Scott Stringer said at Thursday’s press conference. “We reject him. We reject his bigotry.”
Stringer and other politicians stood together outside the former Burlington Coat Factory building on Park Place, where the Cordoba Initiative hopes to build a $100 million, 13-story community center with Islamic, interfaith and secular programming, similar to the 92nd Street Y.
While the Cordoba House’s location just two blocks north of the World Trade Center has sparked protests from some 9/11 family members and many others, the local politicians said Thursday that the location was fitting. “This is precisely where this kind of center for peace and place of worship should rise up,” City Comptroller John Liusaid.
In addition to Liu and Stringer, State Sen. Daniel Squadron, City Councilwoman Margaret Chin and Councilman Robert Jackson, the Council’s sole Muslim, all spoke in favor of the plans.
Update: See also “Mosque hysteria: All houses of worship are welcome everywhere in New York”, New York Daily News, 21 May 2010