All right. Its been quite a while since I worked this site. So much has happened in the world and in my personal life over the summer; situations that both needed attention and simultaneously prevented me from attending that I suppose the relatively large size of this post sabbatical exchange was inevitable.
People are talking about the plans by a moslem organization to build an Islamic Cultural Center and mosque in downtown Manhattan, two blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood. Let's have a listen . . .
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Posted by Demitri (the Welshman) on August 28,2010:
This just came from a good friend, a gentle and caring friend. She is definitely not a political activist. Like her, I think we should all hear this very important message.
It takes a Brit to put into words what we should be saying.
Wow...this is good.
Condell is a British stand-up comedian, but this video isn't comic, it's pure truth, and utterly brilliant.
It says everything, every American should be saying. - Bob
-------------------------- and Demitri's entreaty:
I am not asking you to accept this as DOGMA. Nor to embrace my obviously to-the-right politics. I only beg your attention with a sincerely open mind.
PLEASE LISTEN; THINK, and MEDITATE!!!
Cariad.
(To those not blessed with fluency in the WELSH language, "Cariad" translates as "LOVE" in English.)
Ol' Dimitri
Now, to see what Pat Condell has to say on the subject, I suggest you cut and paste the site address below. The whole of his thesis will take just over six minutes of your time. I promise that you will remember this exercise for the rest of your life.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html
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and here is the first response to Pat Condell and his meditating supporters:
Wow. This is the most fallacious argument against the mosque I have ever heard. Of course, it's not a mosque, but we'll skip that for now.
The speaker says, "Any religion that endorses violence is incapable of offering spiritual enlightenment...."
Have we forgotten about all of the violence done in the name of Christianity? The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, murder of doctors that offer abortions, are just a few that spring to mind. In fact, didn't George Bush say he prayed about invading Iraq? Sarah Palin said something similiar.
Condell also talks about the building of mosques as a sign of conquest, such as the Cordoba mosque in Spain. Well, a lot of people during that time were conquering and reconquering parts of countries all over Europe, including Christians. (Refer to my first point.) Keith Olbermann said it best when he said that every church, and synagogue in the US is built on sacred ground-ground where Native Americans were eradicated in order to make room for European Christians. Why are their graves any less sacred than those who died on 9/11?
As for his claim that Islam rejects individual liberties, may I remind some of you tea partyers that England is a Socialist country. So the fact that England's popular opinion prevented a mosque from being built should not be our inspiration to do the same, unless we want to go down that Socialist road, which apparently, we are already on with Obama in the White House.
This rant is so blantantly racist and ethnocentric that it is an insult to say that it's what Americans should be saying. Comparing Islam to Nazi ideology? Referring to the Islamization of Europe? Judging an entire group of people (millions of Muslims) on the actions of a few? Telling people if and where they can build their houses of worship?It sounds to me like Condell took a page out of the Nazi playbook, not the Muslims.
If we give into this fear and hate, we are letting the terrorists win. They will have eroded the very values that Americans say we are defending. For him to sign off with a peace sign, and Harry to sign off with "love," makes me sick to my stomach. This vitriolic call to arms just confirms my support for the center. And for all those who care about this sacred ground: go there, take a look at the neighborhood 9 years after 9/11. Shops are closed, business is slow, but you can go to a strip club or look at the hallowed ground of a hollowed-out Burlington Coat factory. We haven't been able to build and revitalize this area in almost a decade. The city council approved the project (unanimously) because it will bring much needed revenue and jobs to this blighted area.
I am afraid for this country, but not from attacks by Muslim extremists, but by right wing extremist cloaking their bigotry and greed in the American flag. I am reminded of Voltaire's words in his Essay on Tolerance: "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too." -- http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/V02.html
Jen Thomas
and a response to Ms. J:
Jen,
You pose an almost convincing argument were it not for its contraderived conclusions.
I reduce the oratory of religious freedom and so forth and agree that anyone of any faith is protected by our Constitution to establish and worship cum libertatus.
Were this Mosque erected anywhere, Ground Zero notwithstanding, our Constitution preserves the right so to do.
BUT; to plan its dedication by those deeply identified with philosophies strongly associated with 09/11/01 on the exacty 10th anniversary of the American Heartbreak demands logical defence. I am sure if they wanted to, they could refrain from rubbing our noses in their excrement.
Maybe now, you might understand the majority sense of INSULT.
Cariad,
Ol' Dimitri
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and my first response to Pat:
This is a reply to Pat Condell, British comedian and political pundit, and all those inclined to agree with his video presentation outlining the case against a proposal to build a large Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque in downtown Manhattan, two blocks away from the site where the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed, killing close to 3000 innocent Americans and injuring thousands more on September 11, 2001. So let’s examine the June 4, 2010 video posting of Pat Condell, as he attempts to clarify the distinction between tolerance and gullibility in a post 911 world.
The most striking aspect of the video’s introduction is the authority with which he engages the viewer to join him on a six minute pleasure ride through his self-styled love-tunnel of misinformation and hate, disguised as “commonly understood facts” and his menacing predilection for the superiority of Western values and Christianity. He dispenses with negotiation from the outset, assuming a fraternal relationship with his audience, already disgusted by the “Islam-o-zation” of Europe. This melodramatic introduction was more than enough to spot him as just another lousy microphone with suspicious references; and right here, in the opening comments was the soft spot for any free thinking individual to cram his intellectual crow-bar to pry apart the tight seal he keeps on his unconvincing perspective of the whole Islamic debate. I have so far failed to find one reputable, authoritative acknowledgement or analysis of an “Islam-o-zation” effect or strategy being waged by anything less than a fanatical Islamic micro-fringe against our European cousins.
The migration of a predominant majority of moderate, peaceful Moslems into Europe was both a reflex condition of the world’s economic mess and Yusef the Plumber’s preference of an emigration choice more conducive to an anonymous and stress-free assimilation; a new start in a vast, prosperous territory; absorbed into a culture whose colonial ambitions and imperialistic violations relieve the awkwardness of the introduction ritual. British, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese and Italian visionaries tamed the farthest reaches of the planet, uninvited, from the soft end of the whip for over five hundred years. We might refer to this as the “Christian-I-zation” of the Middle East, India, Indo-China, Africa, Australia, North America and South America. During such time, these exotic “savages” had their indefensible societies torn to pieces; ancient and sophisticated civilizations introduced not only to the interloping explorers and merchants condescending upon their villages and homes but concurrently exposed to the fact that somewhere far off in the west, a people had been extremely busy; some far away land of industrially advanced, conquering Christians.
Hell, wasn’t your great, great grandfather who told my great, great grandfather to look him up if I ever came to town? Well, I’m here.
Wealthy Moslems from the Middle East, India and the other remaining reaches of the former British Empire, and their descendants, have been lured to Universities in England, France and Germany for the better part of two centuries now, refining their new scholastic muscle and social-integration techniques, a key to cultural savvy and market worth. This is the accelerant behind Cordell’s bigoted, alarmist and irresponsible shout of fire.
And in this context he declares that “the moment of truth has arrived”. The only truth about this situation, namely the legitimacy of one group’s proposal to build an Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque within some indeterminate proximity to the site of the September 11 attacks, is that a stage has materialized in its place; a forum for the clash of polarized attitudes toward Christian attitudes toward Islam. On the one hand, the argument proceeds along the lines that the site of the disaster is desecrated by the mere suggestion of such a plan. It was a horrible attack by an organization who found spiritual endorsement within the Koran to stab the Old and New Testaments in the ribs. The fact that all worshippers of the teachings of Mohammad are equally to blame is a just tantalizing yet insignificant adjustment of the foul line; an inevitable conclusion no Christian or Jew with an ounce of common sense need wait until after the next 911 to embrace.
On the other hand, the infuriating liberals, agents of tolerance stand like deer in the headlights of progress, or worse, support the enemy by obstructing our swift national consensus and response. The politicians abusing their office in support of the Cultural Center are dismissed as ignoring the voice of their constituency for personal satisfaction. These are the ones who defend Islam as a legitimate, peaceful religion whose reputation was hijacked by a fanatical lunatic fringe, who no more represent the world’s Moslems than Charles Manson represented the state of California.
The way I see it, our major differences come from a predisposed caricature of the Islamic religion and most times independently, the people themselves. I began my public education in the middles 1960’s, when our nation was in critical need of a public relations overhaul. We were deep into an unpopular conflict in Vietnam and the Beatles were telling the world that “love was all you need(ed)”. The topic of the Middle and Far East was not addressed until a decade later, during my freshman year of high school, when a brief nine months was dedicated to finally exposing my generation to the trivial matters of the Middle East, Asia and Africa against the block-buster backdrop of our deep indoctrination of American capitalist dominance over the Soviet communist threat. This third team, the fez wearing, harem feeding, camel jockeys, had no legitimate place on the field to begin with, so let’s slog through a year of obligatory nonsense and get back to the good stuff next year. We learned all the rest we needed to know about shifty Islam from Hollywood and cartoons.
The Arabs of ninth grade public school were desert wandering Bedouins with sun baked faces crenelated with deep wrinkle lines, metaphorically mirrored in the parched soil of the hostile world they called home. The Pakistani Moslems washed their clothes in the local river, rubbing piles of sarongs against the rocks while sharing a laugh with their neighbors doing likewise. These were ancient, backward people living in an ancient, backward tradition. Ten years of indoctrination, the story of my own ancestry preceded our discovery of these unfortunate people; ten years of memorizing dates of Western milestones:
the Greeks; the Romans; the monks and medieval science; Leonardo, Columbus, the Pope, Henry the Eighth, Newton, Louis XIV, and of course the American Revolution.
I cannot fathom the maturity, the enlightenment required of a fourteen year old kid to watch the films, read the books and hear the lectures we were issued during that school year without concluding that our culture was superior to those adopted by Islamic societies. Who would learn about these discoveries and achievements yet prefer to live beating their wet robes against the smooth river stone? My own mother had no fewer than twelve, electric-motor driven household appliances, a washing machine chief among them. There was little evidence to support the notion that there was even one motor driven apparatus in the entire Pakistani village, much less the electricity or technology to supply it. This was simply a world that turned its back to progress, so it is only natural to assume their spirituality was as backward a system as their technology and politics. Christianity brought the West a form of Capitalism that inspired greatness; Islam was simply the voodoo of a primitive people. And just as greed was understood to be the radioactive rod of Capitalist power, Jihad was assumed to be the fuel of Islamic fanaticism; an important distinction between the two economies which simply stretched the masks of Christ and Mohammad over the opponents politics to energize their respective people. How can one fault Mr. Cordell for getting lost in this complex plot line?
I would like to now borrow from one of Pat’s own countryman, a certain bloke with whom I suspect he shares some particular degree of pride in homeland:
"If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the straight-jacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history." ,Prince Charles, lecture at Oxford University.
The context of the 70’s “zeitgeist” curriculum was a grievous miscarriage of national education, one I fear that foreshadowed the current reactionary fiasco now taking place in the Texas textbook debates; one that shaped the minds of generations of my own countrymen; honest, patriotic Americans preoccupied building businesses and careers, starting families and sending kids to college; people just too focused on the family and the neighborhood to bother with details like polishing up after ninth grade social studies. I hold no malice for all the Joe-the-Plumbers who despise my view of the issue. I simply chose to waste free time doing just that; reading and writing to repair the curtain of my over-stressed neighborhood, torn by irresponsible, influential loud mouths like Pat Condell. No greater case for the cause of a Cultural Center in downtown Tribeca can be made than by sloppy scholarship against it. Thank you Mr. Cordell; your effort was so poorly corroborated that I simply smile at the suspicion you are perhaps more calculating than I initially believed. Perhaps your “hair-trigger sensitivity to the slightest imagined” suggestion of the Islamic cultural center should have been a clue.
The popular mystery of the Cultural Center’s funding source, at this time in the public discussion, is simply too ironic to ridicule in light of recent findings. I’m curious whether he simply felt it unconscionable to let an opportunity to implicate the Saudi’s, void of evidence, slip through his fabricated web of a diabolic Islamic scheme to overthrow Tribeca. This might explain his swapping an implication of Saudi collaboration for an actual case involving them while still capitalizing on the dramatic emphasis of a dark, Islamic conspiracy. So I’ll spare him the shame of dwelling on way things turned out. He was on a roll; no absence of fact was going to put the brakes on his tasteless, pontificating momentum.
In fact a significant percentage of the plan is backed by finances from a certain Kingdom Foundation, created and run by Real Estate Investor and Philanthropist Alwaleed bin Talal, with major holdings in American corporations like Apple, Pepsico and a little media dynamo called News Corp., which also happens to be the parent company of FOX news. This, one may recall, is the same Kingdom foundation which offered ten million dollars to the city of New York as aide after the events of 911. Then-Mayor Guilani gained political points by showing all evil Arabs from the outset, that New York and America’s view of Islam was uncompromising in its resentment of the crime and singular in its focus on the guilty. He sent the money right back where it came from: Wall Street. It gives pause to speculate on both how much collateral damage was done in the area of America’s matured understanding of the Islamic equation and whether there would have even been a Guiliani campaign for the Presidency in 2008. And don’t simply take my word for it. As a matter of fact, I specifically adopted Mr. Cordell’s use of conjecture to frame the question. The implication that Moslem terrorists are involved in the planning or construction of the Islamic Cultural Center is near the core of this entire issue.
Further along in his tirade, Cordell proposes the statement that without the specific teachings of Islam, and specifically those passages outlining “jihad”, that a catastrophe like 911 could not have even existed. One hesitates to choose which part of his enlightenment to address first, the corruption by conservative, western pundits of the Koran’s definition of jihad or the false concept that terrorist tactics are the exclusive domain of the Islamic tool box. We are so conditioned by the media and men like Condell to fear the word “jihad”, that only a minority are left who actually know its true meaning and authority. In our mistrust of the religion, we’ve come to understand “jihad” to be some kind of mob hit or “contract” put out by some Imam on some infidel Jew or Christian. Don’t let the TV or Newspapers make a fool out of you; learn what it is so you can tell the difference between real Islam and a tiny mob calling itself Islam.
Mohammad speaks of three forms of jihadist expression and discipline. The first is concerned with an individual’s personal relationship with Allah. Mohammad struggled himself with this exercise, having a sense of personal dissatisfaction until the day of his death. Of the three faces of jihad, this first one holds the place of highest, spiritual regard. I for one cannot remember learning of any religion or philosophy which does not hold an equivalent gauntlet for its disciples. The Catholic registry of saints is full of them.
The second state of jihad is the written word. A couple of examples that immediately come to mind are St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and the Confessions of St. Augustine. Writing essays to defend the principles of your morality against slanderous accusations is nothing new and nothing we don’t call the work of hero-intellects in our history books. People like William Penn, Chief Joseph, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, eloquent individuals speaking truth to power, or more often, to mob sensibilities. Which one of you doesn’t see the universal principle of this expression; this “Jihad”?
This brings me to the third and most co-opted form of Jihad, the “Physical” jihad. At this point in the discussion, a caricature of the garden variety Muslim as a foreign, dormant, fanatical cell, equally capable of murder and murder-suicide simply awaiting instruction to engage. We all know by now these instructions are dispensed upon order of an Islamic decree or “jihad”. Once such a Jihad is pronounced, no Allah fearing Moslem will dare to disobey. Every Moslem in every neighborhood in every county in every state in the country is a sleeper cell awaiting orders. The Mosque in question is designed, without question, to serve as some kind of evil laboratory for Operation Jihad: Infidel Overthrow. Mr. Condell would like to have everyone here in the states subscribe to this nonsense and I’m speaking today to let him know that we here in America distrust all loudmouths equally and reserve the right to discredit a lunatic from Britain with the same brush we use on his enemies under the bed, because here in America, all fanatics are humiliated equally.
Like the personal and written forms of Jihad, the physical remains a very strong and misunderstood flash point in any defense of the religion over one and a half billion Islamists subscribe to. Once again, I want to unravel the confusion by drawing on a corresponding principle used by worshippers and patriots of every faith and nationality to defend themselves against the aggressions of a predatory force which failed to respond to the first two jihadist appeals. In presenting it this way I am intentionally emphasizing the point that any claim to unleash offensive, violent strategies in the name of jihad is not prescribed by the Koran and represents a fundamental break with the teachings followed by our peaceful and patriotic Muslim countrymen.
You see, a time usually comes in the history of a people or congregation where the spiritual principles of the worshipping body contradict the larger social situation to which they belong. Whether or not we are talking about specific laws or cultural practices, an inevitable line is drawn to demarcate the trusted from the suspicious. For the Jews, something of a conflict could be illustrated in the seemingly trivial desire or need to handle money on the Sabbath or recognize Christ in a manner befitting the humor of the Pope de jour. For many American Christians the struggle to incorporate a sense of selfless charity, a principle for which the teachings of Christ define no specific extreme, within the parameters of a Capitalist sensibility have repeatedly proven the influence of business over the ideals of the church. History is rich with Monarchic rulers, Fascist dictators and Totalitarian oligarchies, herding the compliant masses while confounded by the strict objection of a small yet exasperating minority. The Egyptians and the Nazis had their run in with the Jews, the Romans fattened their lions on Christians and Gauls; the Aztecs were annihilated by the Spanish, the Buddhists wrestle with their Communists and centuries earlier, European global expansion encountered Islam.
In each case a caveat was composed into the holiest texts, wherein the peaceful survival of the subservient creed was to withstand any and all enterprises bent on its annihilation; was excused to rise in its own protection to meet the enemy’s offense with a reasonable and legitimate defense. The Jews had Abraham who held every life sacred, yet acknowledged ones man’s eye accountable for the loss of another’s. David met and slayed Goliath under the auspices of the same Jewish God. The Christians have their Revelations, wherein a compassionate Christ lies peaceful throughout the Gospels like the arrow, sleeping in the crossbow’s bed, until the day of reconciliation. Here Michelangelo in his Day of Judgment dispenses with our Lord’s halycon countenance; paints him with an athlete’s frame, a hangman’s face and purple robe thrown violently across his shoulder like the arrow, suddenly awake and bent on swift, surgical vengeance. “Onward Christian soldiers’ goes the hymn, “marching as to war”. Tyrants beware of your lust, the Day of Judgment will be your torment. It is an old saying, “There are no athiests in a fox-hole”.
The Islamic take on self-preservation is no aberration of the same concept we Americans accept as either patriots or Christians or something other. Physical jihad, or “jihad with the hand” actually precludes violence with an option to relocate beyond the influence of tyranny (Quran 2:218), and only then defend themselves against those who wage upon them, (Quran 22:39). The whole idea that Islam is a religious organization of 1,657,600,000 followers of a common mind bent on slicing American throats in our sleep is uninformed and juvenile. Most of you share a belief in an afterlife which eclipses your present earthly struggle with pleasures and powers in accordance to the seductive hints or suggestions of your respective religious organizations and is then enhanced to reflect contemporary cultural values. The Judeo-Christians envision weightless clouds and radiant skies from which the chorus of the Host rains down in perpetual orgasmic reward for a life time of sincere sacrifice or some battery of liturgically-sanctioned, sophisticated compromises .It would no doubt shock you to realize the number of Americans expecting an eternity of perfect powder on the slopes or tranquil naps beside some sacred fishing hole. The Moslems? A culture that prizes sexual abstinence before marriage, choosing seventy virgins and a waterbed as a romanticized after-life is logically consistent to me. Let them have it; sounds more practical to me than an eternity of choral Bach anyway.
His deeper insistence that the Koran endorses provocative assaults on Western targets is a thorough misrepresentation of the defensive nature of the jihad, further alienating the ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaeda from the vast mainstream Islam and exposing his tirade as the sniveling, divisive propaganda it is and nothing more. When he insists “any religion that endorses violence is incapable of delivering spiritual enlightenment” I am reminded of Truman Capote’s remark upon reading Kerouac’s “On the Road”, (albeit for a subtly different reason): “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Perhaps Mr. Cordell has some unique, un-contradictory take on the century of terrorist activity between the Catholics and Protestants on the Emerald Island right next door. What does he make of Prime Minister Menachim Begin’s affiliation with Irgun, responsible for numerous provocative assaults on Arab targets, such as Deir Yassin, in which ten percent of the Arabs killed were Christian. As a matter of point, a number of recent studies have concluded that there is a striking disconnect between actual religion and the activities of organizations commonly referred to as Religious terrorists. A distinguished professor of political science, Robert Pape, founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, was the first to document a comprehensive study on the phenomenon of suicide bombings from the period following the Iranian Hostage situation through the years immediately following the September 11 attacks. In his book, Dying to win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, he insists “There is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions.” This conclusion was reached after examining over 300 such assaults, wherein he concludes that these individuals gave their lives not for Islam, but in the cause of political activism. “Without Deir Yassin” remarked Begin, “there would have been no Israel.”
For claiming Islam to be a bigger threat to our freedom than Nazism ever was, Mr. Cordell must be either terribly ignorant of the past or pathologically insensitive to the truth. His fear and contempt for the world’s Moslem population makes him more of a bigot than I would normally dignify with such a lengthy response. Were it not for the potential grievous harm of the media resources at his disposal, I would have simply dismissed him as the insipid skin-head he truly is. No one labors to divide the world more industriously than al -Qaeda’s friends, right here in the West like Mr. Cordell, who incarcerate our society’s tolerance for diversity at the first hint of opportunity. Contradictions simply ooze from either side of his face, depending on his calculated sense of rhetorical timing. One can hardly maintain one’s equilibrium, with his dismissive contempt, on the one hand, for the those elected officials who demonstrate respect of tolerance and diversity and his equivalent condemnation of Islam’s intolerance for tolerance and diversity. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways. If his European precedent for diversity depresses him so, I ask him to please concentrate his efforts where he pays his taxes and stay out of American affairs; we are plainly far too complex and enlightened for his medieval sensibilities.
In keeping with the stylistic need to periodically engage his audience at the mercy of historical integrity, Mr. Cordell can hardly pull his tongue from our American boots long enough to regurgitate the sanitized recital of America’s triumphant prosperity in the unblemished glow of diversity and “respect for the individual liberties that make (us) what we are.” I for one am that unremarkable American who acknowledges my debt to the centuries of disrespect and oppression of those diverse cultures, the black slaves, the displaced, slaughtered Native Americans, the Chinese “coolies”, the marginalized women, the child laborers and every remaining civil rights struggle his White, Anglo-Christian sensibilities unjustifiably dismiss from the “larger picture”. I just want him to roll his tongue back into his face and find another pair of boots to clean.
And as if this all was not enough to get you to clean your rifle, suspicion is drawn to the name of the building, “Cordoba House”. I always thought the name was never pronounced better than when Ricardo Mantelban said it, but that’s an old Chrysler reference and better left asleep I guess. When the moors conquered most of the Iberian peninsula from the Visigoths who took it from the Romans who themselves conquered it a half millennium earlier, they established Cordoba as the provincial capital. That was 711AD. Like the Romans and the Visigoths before them they built many buildings, among them the world’s largest library and a Mosque, begun 73 years later on an abandoned construction site where the prior Visigothic church of St. Vincent was left abandoned. The erection of temples was nothing new. Cordoba during this time was a sophisticated city of 500,000 citizens who represented the vanguard of Christian, Jewish and Islamic culture. On June 29, 1236, it was again captured, this time by King Ferdinand III of Castile, during the Spanish Reconquista. The suggestion by Mr. Cordell that the Moslems have captured Manhattan and plan to build their Mosque headquarters on top of an old coat factory in accordance to their standard, thousand year old exemplar M.O., in light of the numerous points of clarification presented thus far, reminds one that he is first and foremost, a comedian.
And just as an ironic side note: I have on many occasions had the pleasure to attend music shows at a nearby arena, built in the 1970’s by construction crews represented by a significant number of tool belted Italians, former citizens or descendants of those same people responsible for the death of thousands of American GI’s only thirty years earlier during the Second World War. They named this arena “the Nassau Coliseum” or Coliseum for short. Isn’t this the same name as that immense round building in Rome, where over 700,000 men women and children; Christians, Jews and foreign prisoners; tigers, bears, dogs and elephants were slaughtered for the blood thirst/entertainment of the citizens of that enigmatic city so many years ago? Was it simply enough for my community to recognize the Italian dimension for its shocking inclusion of a brief period where unspeakable trespasses came to be and were subsequently forgiven. Or are we just replaying the ancient tapes; the un-reconciled feud between Brown skin and White; Moslem and Christian; Moslem and Jew; Western sensibilities and the rest of the world?
No my friends, we need this Cultural Center and Mosque just so people don’t have to come crawling back to Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, John Birch, Pat Roberts, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Terry Jones and the whole lot of them! Nothing would hurt Al Qaeda more than proof in America’s resolve to defend our tolerance. A shoot-out with Islam is not the solution Mr. Cordell. It may disgust you to stand in a supermarket line with neighbors who place a greater significance on the life of Mohammad than that of Jesus,; who spell God with an “A”; who sport large, black untrimmed beards or who might even conform to a code of fashion you find peculiar; don’t sanitize your reality with propaganda bearing false witness against the juvenile goblins of your own, bigoted social development.
Islam was hurt deeply on September 11th. I was in New York City that day the planes struck; six hundred feet above the sidewalk, outside the Merrill Lynch building on 47th St. between Park and Lexington Avenue, hanging off a hod hoist scaffold in a jump harness and hard hat. I spent the next few days down at Ground zero trying to help. A few close friends of mine are permanently disabled from helping make something of the cursed crater. We’re not only Americans Pat, but more to the point, we’re New Yorkers who work, shop and mess around with the same Moslems you so vehemently hate. My recommendation is that you don’t drive an unreliable car through the Arizona desert or Death valley. The car that blows past you in the intolerable heat might be me, saving my gas and passenger seat for the first “sane” hitchhiker I find; Moslem or not.
This message has been recorded and is available on YouTube. Simply cut and paste the five parts listed in order:
part 1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On5GhtHq44w&feature=channel
part 2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7O-4rlIGtk&feature=channel
part 3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJs3sgwHCK0&feature=channel
part 4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6PknDko6po&feature=channel
and part 5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0nbFsxYEvM&feature=channel
People are talking about the plans by a moslem organization to build an Islamic Cultural Center and mosque in downtown Manhattan, two blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood. Let's have a listen . . .
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Posted by Demitri (the Welshman) on August 28,2010:
This just came from a good friend, a gentle and caring friend. She is definitely not a political activist. Like her, I think we should all hear this very important message.
It takes a Brit to put into words what we should be saying.
Wow...this is good.
Condell is a British stand-up comedian, but this video isn't comic, it's pure truth, and utterly brilliant.
It says everything, every American should be saying. - Bob
-------------------------- and Demitri's entreaty:
I am not asking you to accept this as DOGMA. Nor to embrace my obviously to-the-right politics. I only beg your attention with a sincerely open mind.
PLEASE LISTEN; THINK, and MEDITATE!!!
Cariad.
(To those not blessed with fluency in the WELSH language, "Cariad" translates as "LOVE" in English.)
Ol' Dimitri
Now, to see what Pat Condell has to say on the subject, I suggest you cut and paste the site address below. The whole of his thesis will take just over six minutes of your time. I promise that you will remember this exercise for the rest of your life.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html
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and here is the first response to Pat Condell and his meditating supporters:
Wow. This is the most fallacious argument against the mosque I have ever heard. Of course, it's not a mosque, but we'll skip that for now.
The speaker says, "Any religion that endorses violence is incapable of offering spiritual enlightenment...."
Have we forgotten about all of the violence done in the name of Christianity? The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, murder of doctors that offer abortions, are just a few that spring to mind. In fact, didn't George Bush say he prayed about invading Iraq? Sarah Palin said something similiar.
Condell also talks about the building of mosques as a sign of conquest, such as the Cordoba mosque in Spain. Well, a lot of people during that time were conquering and reconquering parts of countries all over Europe, including Christians. (Refer to my first point.) Keith Olbermann said it best when he said that every church, and synagogue in the US is built on sacred ground-ground where Native Americans were eradicated in order to make room for European Christians. Why are their graves any less sacred than those who died on 9/11?
As for his claim that Islam rejects individual liberties, may I remind some of you tea partyers that England is a Socialist country. So the fact that England's popular opinion prevented a mosque from being built should not be our inspiration to do the same, unless we want to go down that Socialist road, which apparently, we are already on with Obama in the White House.
This rant is so blantantly racist and ethnocentric that it is an insult to say that it's what Americans should be saying. Comparing Islam to Nazi ideology? Referring to the Islamization of Europe? Judging an entire group of people (millions of Muslims) on the actions of a few? Telling people if and where they can build their houses of worship?It sounds to me like Condell took a page out of the Nazi playbook, not the Muslims.
If we give into this fear and hate, we are letting the terrorists win. They will have eroded the very values that Americans say we are defending. For him to sign off with a peace sign, and Harry to sign off with "love," makes me sick to my stomach. This vitriolic call to arms just confirms my support for the center. And for all those who care about this sacred ground: go there, take a look at the neighborhood 9 years after 9/11. Shops are closed, business is slow, but you can go to a strip club or look at the hallowed ground of a hollowed-out Burlington Coat factory. We haven't been able to build and revitalize this area in almost a decade. The city council approved the project (unanimously) because it will bring much needed revenue and jobs to this blighted area.
I am afraid for this country, but not from attacks by Muslim extremists, but by right wing extremist cloaking their bigotry and greed in the American flag. I am reminded of Voltaire's words in his Essay on Tolerance: "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too." -- http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/V02.html
Jen Thomas
and a response to Ms. J:
Jen,
You pose an almost convincing argument were it not for its contraderived conclusions.
I reduce the oratory of religious freedom and so forth and agree that anyone of any faith is protected by our Constitution to establish and worship cum libertatus.
Were this Mosque erected anywhere, Ground Zero notwithstanding, our Constitution preserves the right so to do.
BUT; to plan its dedication by those deeply identified with philosophies strongly associated with 09/11/01 on the exacty 10th anniversary of the American Heartbreak demands logical defence. I am sure if they wanted to, they could refrain from rubbing our noses in their excrement.
Maybe now, you might understand the majority sense of INSULT.
Cariad,
Ol' Dimitri
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and my first response to Pat:
This is a reply to Pat Condell, British comedian and political pundit, and all those inclined to agree with his video presentation outlining the case against a proposal to build a large Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque in downtown Manhattan, two blocks away from the site where the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed, killing close to 3000 innocent Americans and injuring thousands more on September 11, 2001. So let’s examine the June 4, 2010 video posting of Pat Condell, as he attempts to clarify the distinction between tolerance and gullibility in a post 911 world.
The most striking aspect of the video’s introduction is the authority with which he engages the viewer to join him on a six minute pleasure ride through his self-styled love-tunnel of misinformation and hate, disguised as “commonly understood facts” and his menacing predilection for the superiority of Western values and Christianity. He dispenses with negotiation from the outset, assuming a fraternal relationship with his audience, already disgusted by the “Islam-o-zation” of Europe. This melodramatic introduction was more than enough to spot him as just another lousy microphone with suspicious references; and right here, in the opening comments was the soft spot for any free thinking individual to cram his intellectual crow-bar to pry apart the tight seal he keeps on his unconvincing perspective of the whole Islamic debate. I have so far failed to find one reputable, authoritative acknowledgement or analysis of an “Islam-o-zation” effect or strategy being waged by anything less than a fanatical Islamic micro-fringe against our European cousins.
The migration of a predominant majority of moderate, peaceful Moslems into Europe was both a reflex condition of the world’s economic mess and Yusef the Plumber’s preference of an emigration choice more conducive to an anonymous and stress-free assimilation; a new start in a vast, prosperous territory; absorbed into a culture whose colonial ambitions and imperialistic violations relieve the awkwardness of the introduction ritual. British, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese and Italian visionaries tamed the farthest reaches of the planet, uninvited, from the soft end of the whip for over five hundred years. We might refer to this as the “Christian-I-zation” of the Middle East, India, Indo-China, Africa, Australia, North America and South America. During such time, these exotic “savages” had their indefensible societies torn to pieces; ancient and sophisticated civilizations introduced not only to the interloping explorers and merchants condescending upon their villages and homes but concurrently exposed to the fact that somewhere far off in the west, a people had been extremely busy; some far away land of industrially advanced, conquering Christians.
Hell, wasn’t your great, great grandfather who told my great, great grandfather to look him up if I ever came to town? Well, I’m here.
Wealthy Moslems from the Middle East, India and the other remaining reaches of the former British Empire, and their descendants, have been lured to Universities in England, France and Germany for the better part of two centuries now, refining their new scholastic muscle and social-integration techniques, a key to cultural savvy and market worth. This is the accelerant behind Cordell’s bigoted, alarmist and irresponsible shout of fire.
And in this context he declares that “the moment of truth has arrived”. The only truth about this situation, namely the legitimacy of one group’s proposal to build an Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque within some indeterminate proximity to the site of the September 11 attacks, is that a stage has materialized in its place; a forum for the clash of polarized attitudes toward Christian attitudes toward Islam. On the one hand, the argument proceeds along the lines that the site of the disaster is desecrated by the mere suggestion of such a plan. It was a horrible attack by an organization who found spiritual endorsement within the Koran to stab the Old and New Testaments in the ribs. The fact that all worshippers of the teachings of Mohammad are equally to blame is a just tantalizing yet insignificant adjustment of the foul line; an inevitable conclusion no Christian or Jew with an ounce of common sense need wait until after the next 911 to embrace.
On the other hand, the infuriating liberals, agents of tolerance stand like deer in the headlights of progress, or worse, support the enemy by obstructing our swift national consensus and response. The politicians abusing their office in support of the Cultural Center are dismissed as ignoring the voice of their constituency for personal satisfaction. These are the ones who defend Islam as a legitimate, peaceful religion whose reputation was hijacked by a fanatical lunatic fringe, who no more represent the world’s Moslems than Charles Manson represented the state of California.
The way I see it, our major differences come from a predisposed caricature of the Islamic religion and most times independently, the people themselves. I began my public education in the middles 1960’s, when our nation was in critical need of a public relations overhaul. We were deep into an unpopular conflict in Vietnam and the Beatles were telling the world that “love was all you need(ed)”. The topic of the Middle and Far East was not addressed until a decade later, during my freshman year of high school, when a brief nine months was dedicated to finally exposing my generation to the trivial matters of the Middle East, Asia and Africa against the block-buster backdrop of our deep indoctrination of American capitalist dominance over the Soviet communist threat. This third team, the fez wearing, harem feeding, camel jockeys, had no legitimate place on the field to begin with, so let’s slog through a year of obligatory nonsense and get back to the good stuff next year. We learned all the rest we needed to know about shifty Islam from Hollywood and cartoons.
The Arabs of ninth grade public school were desert wandering Bedouins with sun baked faces crenelated with deep wrinkle lines, metaphorically mirrored in the parched soil of the hostile world they called home. The Pakistani Moslems washed their clothes in the local river, rubbing piles of sarongs against the rocks while sharing a laugh with their neighbors doing likewise. These were ancient, backward people living in an ancient, backward tradition. Ten years of indoctrination, the story of my own ancestry preceded our discovery of these unfortunate people; ten years of memorizing dates of Western milestones:
the Greeks; the Romans; the monks and medieval science; Leonardo, Columbus, the Pope, Henry the Eighth, Newton, Louis XIV, and of course the American Revolution.
I cannot fathom the maturity, the enlightenment required of a fourteen year old kid to watch the films, read the books and hear the lectures we were issued during that school year without concluding that our culture was superior to those adopted by Islamic societies. Who would learn about these discoveries and achievements yet prefer to live beating their wet robes against the smooth river stone? My own mother had no fewer than twelve, electric-motor driven household appliances, a washing machine chief among them. There was little evidence to support the notion that there was even one motor driven apparatus in the entire Pakistani village, much less the electricity or technology to supply it. This was simply a world that turned its back to progress, so it is only natural to assume their spirituality was as backward a system as their technology and politics. Christianity brought the West a form of Capitalism that inspired greatness; Islam was simply the voodoo of a primitive people. And just as greed was understood to be the radioactive rod of Capitalist power, Jihad was assumed to be the fuel of Islamic fanaticism; an important distinction between the two economies which simply stretched the masks of Christ and Mohammad over the opponents politics to energize their respective people. How can one fault Mr. Cordell for getting lost in this complex plot line?
I would like to now borrow from one of Pat’s own countryman, a certain bloke with whom I suspect he shares some particular degree of pride in homeland:
"If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilisation owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the straight-jacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history." ,Prince Charles, lecture at Oxford University.
The context of the 70’s “zeitgeist” curriculum was a grievous miscarriage of national education, one I fear that foreshadowed the current reactionary fiasco now taking place in the Texas textbook debates; one that shaped the minds of generations of my own countrymen; honest, patriotic Americans preoccupied building businesses and careers, starting families and sending kids to college; people just too focused on the family and the neighborhood to bother with details like polishing up after ninth grade social studies. I hold no malice for all the Joe-the-Plumbers who despise my view of the issue. I simply chose to waste free time doing just that; reading and writing to repair the curtain of my over-stressed neighborhood, torn by irresponsible, influential loud mouths like Pat Condell. No greater case for the cause of a Cultural Center in downtown Tribeca can be made than by sloppy scholarship against it. Thank you Mr. Cordell; your effort was so poorly corroborated that I simply smile at the suspicion you are perhaps more calculating than I initially believed. Perhaps your “hair-trigger sensitivity to the slightest imagined” suggestion of the Islamic cultural center should have been a clue.
The popular mystery of the Cultural Center’s funding source, at this time in the public discussion, is simply too ironic to ridicule in light of recent findings. I’m curious whether he simply felt it unconscionable to let an opportunity to implicate the Saudi’s, void of evidence, slip through his fabricated web of a diabolic Islamic scheme to overthrow Tribeca. This might explain his swapping an implication of Saudi collaboration for an actual case involving them while still capitalizing on the dramatic emphasis of a dark, Islamic conspiracy. So I’ll spare him the shame of dwelling on way things turned out. He was on a roll; no absence of fact was going to put the brakes on his tasteless, pontificating momentum.
In fact a significant percentage of the plan is backed by finances from a certain Kingdom Foundation, created and run by Real Estate Investor and Philanthropist Alwaleed bin Talal, with major holdings in American corporations like Apple, Pepsico and a little media dynamo called News Corp., which also happens to be the parent company of FOX news. This, one may recall, is the same Kingdom foundation which offered ten million dollars to the city of New York as aide after the events of 911. Then-Mayor Guilani gained political points by showing all evil Arabs from the outset, that New York and America’s view of Islam was uncompromising in its resentment of the crime and singular in its focus on the guilty. He sent the money right back where it came from: Wall Street. It gives pause to speculate on both how much collateral damage was done in the area of America’s matured understanding of the Islamic equation and whether there would have even been a Guiliani campaign for the Presidency in 2008. And don’t simply take my word for it. As a matter of fact, I specifically adopted Mr. Cordell’s use of conjecture to frame the question. The implication that Moslem terrorists are involved in the planning or construction of the Islamic Cultural Center is near the core of this entire issue.
Further along in his tirade, Cordell proposes the statement that without the specific teachings of Islam, and specifically those passages outlining “jihad”, that a catastrophe like 911 could not have even existed. One hesitates to choose which part of his enlightenment to address first, the corruption by conservative, western pundits of the Koran’s definition of jihad or the false concept that terrorist tactics are the exclusive domain of the Islamic tool box. We are so conditioned by the media and men like Condell to fear the word “jihad”, that only a minority are left who actually know its true meaning and authority. In our mistrust of the religion, we’ve come to understand “jihad” to be some kind of mob hit or “contract” put out by some Imam on some infidel Jew or Christian. Don’t let the TV or Newspapers make a fool out of you; learn what it is so you can tell the difference between real Islam and a tiny mob calling itself Islam.
Mohammad speaks of three forms of jihadist expression and discipline. The first is concerned with an individual’s personal relationship with Allah. Mohammad struggled himself with this exercise, having a sense of personal dissatisfaction until the day of his death. Of the three faces of jihad, this first one holds the place of highest, spiritual regard. I for one cannot remember learning of any religion or philosophy which does not hold an equivalent gauntlet for its disciples. The Catholic registry of saints is full of them.
The second state of jihad is the written word. A couple of examples that immediately come to mind are St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and the Confessions of St. Augustine. Writing essays to defend the principles of your morality against slanderous accusations is nothing new and nothing we don’t call the work of hero-intellects in our history books. People like William Penn, Chief Joseph, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, eloquent individuals speaking truth to power, or more often, to mob sensibilities. Which one of you doesn’t see the universal principle of this expression; this “Jihad”?
This brings me to the third and most co-opted form of Jihad, the “Physical” jihad. At this point in the discussion, a caricature of the garden variety Muslim as a foreign, dormant, fanatical cell, equally capable of murder and murder-suicide simply awaiting instruction to engage. We all know by now these instructions are dispensed upon order of an Islamic decree or “jihad”. Once such a Jihad is pronounced, no Allah fearing Moslem will dare to disobey. Every Moslem in every neighborhood in every county in every state in the country is a sleeper cell awaiting orders. The Mosque in question is designed, without question, to serve as some kind of evil laboratory for Operation Jihad: Infidel Overthrow. Mr. Condell would like to have everyone here in the states subscribe to this nonsense and I’m speaking today to let him know that we here in America distrust all loudmouths equally and reserve the right to discredit a lunatic from Britain with the same brush we use on his enemies under the bed, because here in America, all fanatics are humiliated equally.
Like the personal and written forms of Jihad, the physical remains a very strong and misunderstood flash point in any defense of the religion over one and a half billion Islamists subscribe to. Once again, I want to unravel the confusion by drawing on a corresponding principle used by worshippers and patriots of every faith and nationality to defend themselves against the aggressions of a predatory force which failed to respond to the first two jihadist appeals. In presenting it this way I am intentionally emphasizing the point that any claim to unleash offensive, violent strategies in the name of jihad is not prescribed by the Koran and represents a fundamental break with the teachings followed by our peaceful and patriotic Muslim countrymen.
You see, a time usually comes in the history of a people or congregation where the spiritual principles of the worshipping body contradict the larger social situation to which they belong. Whether or not we are talking about specific laws or cultural practices, an inevitable line is drawn to demarcate the trusted from the suspicious. For the Jews, something of a conflict could be illustrated in the seemingly trivial desire or need to handle money on the Sabbath or recognize Christ in a manner befitting the humor of the Pope de jour. For many American Christians the struggle to incorporate a sense of selfless charity, a principle for which the teachings of Christ define no specific extreme, within the parameters of a Capitalist sensibility have repeatedly proven the influence of business over the ideals of the church. History is rich with Monarchic rulers, Fascist dictators and Totalitarian oligarchies, herding the compliant masses while confounded by the strict objection of a small yet exasperating minority. The Egyptians and the Nazis had their run in with the Jews, the Romans fattened their lions on Christians and Gauls; the Aztecs were annihilated by the Spanish, the Buddhists wrestle with their Communists and centuries earlier, European global expansion encountered Islam.
In each case a caveat was composed into the holiest texts, wherein the peaceful survival of the subservient creed was to withstand any and all enterprises bent on its annihilation; was excused to rise in its own protection to meet the enemy’s offense with a reasonable and legitimate defense. The Jews had Abraham who held every life sacred, yet acknowledged ones man’s eye accountable for the loss of another’s. David met and slayed Goliath under the auspices of the same Jewish God. The Christians have their Revelations, wherein a compassionate Christ lies peaceful throughout the Gospels like the arrow, sleeping in the crossbow’s bed, until the day of reconciliation. Here Michelangelo in his Day of Judgment dispenses with our Lord’s halycon countenance; paints him with an athlete’s frame, a hangman’s face and purple robe thrown violently across his shoulder like the arrow, suddenly awake and bent on swift, surgical vengeance. “Onward Christian soldiers’ goes the hymn, “marching as to war”. Tyrants beware of your lust, the Day of Judgment will be your torment. It is an old saying, “There are no athiests in a fox-hole”.
The Islamic take on self-preservation is no aberration of the same concept we Americans accept as either patriots or Christians or something other. Physical jihad, or “jihad with the hand” actually precludes violence with an option to relocate beyond the influence of tyranny (Quran 2:218), and only then defend themselves against those who wage upon them, (Quran 22:39). The whole idea that Islam is a religious organization of 1,657,600,000 followers of a common mind bent on slicing American throats in our sleep is uninformed and juvenile. Most of you share a belief in an afterlife which eclipses your present earthly struggle with pleasures and powers in accordance to the seductive hints or suggestions of your respective religious organizations and is then enhanced to reflect contemporary cultural values. The Judeo-Christians envision weightless clouds and radiant skies from which the chorus of the Host rains down in perpetual orgasmic reward for a life time of sincere sacrifice or some battery of liturgically-sanctioned, sophisticated compromises .It would no doubt shock you to realize the number of Americans expecting an eternity of perfect powder on the slopes or tranquil naps beside some sacred fishing hole. The Moslems? A culture that prizes sexual abstinence before marriage, choosing seventy virgins and a waterbed as a romanticized after-life is logically consistent to me. Let them have it; sounds more practical to me than an eternity of choral Bach anyway.
His deeper insistence that the Koran endorses provocative assaults on Western targets is a thorough misrepresentation of the defensive nature of the jihad, further alienating the ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaeda from the vast mainstream Islam and exposing his tirade as the sniveling, divisive propaganda it is and nothing more. When he insists “any religion that endorses violence is incapable of delivering spiritual enlightenment” I am reminded of Truman Capote’s remark upon reading Kerouac’s “On the Road”, (albeit for a subtly different reason): “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Perhaps Mr. Cordell has some unique, un-contradictory take on the century of terrorist activity between the Catholics and Protestants on the Emerald Island right next door. What does he make of Prime Minister Menachim Begin’s affiliation with Irgun, responsible for numerous provocative assaults on Arab targets, such as Deir Yassin, in which ten percent of the Arabs killed were Christian. As a matter of point, a number of recent studies have concluded that there is a striking disconnect between actual religion and the activities of organizations commonly referred to as Religious terrorists. A distinguished professor of political science, Robert Pape, founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, was the first to document a comprehensive study on the phenomenon of suicide bombings from the period following the Iranian Hostage situation through the years immediately following the September 11 attacks. In his book, Dying to win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, he insists “There is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions.” This conclusion was reached after examining over 300 such assaults, wherein he concludes that these individuals gave their lives not for Islam, but in the cause of political activism. “Without Deir Yassin” remarked Begin, “there would have been no Israel.”
For claiming Islam to be a bigger threat to our freedom than Nazism ever was, Mr. Cordell must be either terribly ignorant of the past or pathologically insensitive to the truth. His fear and contempt for the world’s Moslem population makes him more of a bigot than I would normally dignify with such a lengthy response. Were it not for the potential grievous harm of the media resources at his disposal, I would have simply dismissed him as the insipid skin-head he truly is. No one labors to divide the world more industriously than al -Qaeda’s friends, right here in the West like Mr. Cordell, who incarcerate our society’s tolerance for diversity at the first hint of opportunity. Contradictions simply ooze from either side of his face, depending on his calculated sense of rhetorical timing. One can hardly maintain one’s equilibrium, with his dismissive contempt, on the one hand, for the those elected officials who demonstrate respect of tolerance and diversity and his equivalent condemnation of Islam’s intolerance for tolerance and diversity. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways. If his European precedent for diversity depresses him so, I ask him to please concentrate his efforts where he pays his taxes and stay out of American affairs; we are plainly far too complex and enlightened for his medieval sensibilities.
In keeping with the stylistic need to periodically engage his audience at the mercy of historical integrity, Mr. Cordell can hardly pull his tongue from our American boots long enough to regurgitate the sanitized recital of America’s triumphant prosperity in the unblemished glow of diversity and “respect for the individual liberties that make (us) what we are.” I for one am that unremarkable American who acknowledges my debt to the centuries of disrespect and oppression of those diverse cultures, the black slaves, the displaced, slaughtered Native Americans, the Chinese “coolies”, the marginalized women, the child laborers and every remaining civil rights struggle his White, Anglo-Christian sensibilities unjustifiably dismiss from the “larger picture”. I just want him to roll his tongue back into his face and find another pair of boots to clean.
And as if this all was not enough to get you to clean your rifle, suspicion is drawn to the name of the building, “Cordoba House”. I always thought the name was never pronounced better than when Ricardo Mantelban said it, but that’s an old Chrysler reference and better left asleep I guess. When the moors conquered most of the Iberian peninsula from the Visigoths who took it from the Romans who themselves conquered it a half millennium earlier, they established Cordoba as the provincial capital. That was 711AD. Like the Romans and the Visigoths before them they built many buildings, among them the world’s largest library and a Mosque, begun 73 years later on an abandoned construction site where the prior Visigothic church of St. Vincent was left abandoned. The erection of temples was nothing new. Cordoba during this time was a sophisticated city of 500,000 citizens who represented the vanguard of Christian, Jewish and Islamic culture. On June 29, 1236, it was again captured, this time by King Ferdinand III of Castile, during the Spanish Reconquista. The suggestion by Mr. Cordell that the Moslems have captured Manhattan and plan to build their Mosque headquarters on top of an old coat factory in accordance to their standard, thousand year old exemplar M.O., in light of the numerous points of clarification presented thus far, reminds one that he is first and foremost, a comedian.
And just as an ironic side note: I have on many occasions had the pleasure to attend music shows at a nearby arena, built in the 1970’s by construction crews represented by a significant number of tool belted Italians, former citizens or descendants of those same people responsible for the death of thousands of American GI’s only thirty years earlier during the Second World War. They named this arena “the Nassau Coliseum” or Coliseum for short. Isn’t this the same name as that immense round building in Rome, where over 700,000 men women and children; Christians, Jews and foreign prisoners; tigers, bears, dogs and elephants were slaughtered for the blood thirst/entertainment of the citizens of that enigmatic city so many years ago? Was it simply enough for my community to recognize the Italian dimension for its shocking inclusion of a brief period where unspeakable trespasses came to be and were subsequently forgiven. Or are we just replaying the ancient tapes; the un-reconciled feud between Brown skin and White; Moslem and Christian; Moslem and Jew; Western sensibilities and the rest of the world?
No my friends, we need this Cultural Center and Mosque just so people don’t have to come crawling back to Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, John Birch, Pat Roberts, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Terry Jones and the whole lot of them! Nothing would hurt Al Qaeda more than proof in America’s resolve to defend our tolerance. A shoot-out with Islam is not the solution Mr. Cordell. It may disgust you to stand in a supermarket line with neighbors who place a greater significance on the life of Mohammad than that of Jesus,; who spell God with an “A”; who sport large, black untrimmed beards or who might even conform to a code of fashion you find peculiar; don’t sanitize your reality with propaganda bearing false witness against the juvenile goblins of your own, bigoted social development.
Islam was hurt deeply on September 11th. I was in New York City that day the planes struck; six hundred feet above the sidewalk, outside the Merrill Lynch building on 47th St. between Park and Lexington Avenue, hanging off a hod hoist scaffold in a jump harness and hard hat. I spent the next few days down at Ground zero trying to help. A few close friends of mine are permanently disabled from helping make something of the cursed crater. We’re not only Americans Pat, but more to the point, we’re New Yorkers who work, shop and mess around with the same Moslems you so vehemently hate. My recommendation is that you don’t drive an unreliable car through the Arizona desert or Death valley. The car that blows past you in the intolerable heat might be me, saving my gas and passenger seat for the first “sane” hitchhiker I find; Moslem or not.
This message has been recorded and is available on YouTube. Simply cut and paste the five parts listed in order:
part 1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On5GhtHq44w&feature=channel
part 2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7O-4rlIGtk&feature=channel
part 3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJs3sgwHCK0&feature=channel
part 4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6PknDko6po&feature=channel
and part 5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0nbFsxYEvM&feature=channel
