The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Manhattan

I don’t see a good reason to be against the building of a mosque/cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. In fact, the arguments in favor sound quite reasonable to me.  But, then again, I don’t hate and fear Islam.  I see the truths in Islam – what I know of it, and, yes, even all those bellicose, xenophobic passages, too – just as I do in many other religions and worldviews to which I’m not devoted.  “Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.

Moreover, it’s my impression that two blocks in downtown Manhattan is the equivalent of around ten miles culturally in a normal city, a whole continent for non-urban cultures.  And, anyway, what Manhattanites do with their neighborhoods I do not take as my business – kind of like the state of my next door neighbors’ marriage and home decor aren’t my business either, nor the very heady aroma that sometimes wafts from the open front door of the other neighbor’s home.

But two blocks from Zero is way too close for some people (commenters), many of whom clearly live thousands of miles away.  Quick summary:  “Fight and slay the Muslims wherever you may find them.

The building proposal is from one perspective taken as an act of cowardly surrender – the construction of a monument to honor an enemy turned ideological conqueror. This view is embodied in an item like this campaign video from Rick Barber for Congress in Alabama.  From the alternative perspective, the same one that I presume led to the Manhattan Community Board voting 29 to 1 in favor of the project, Barber represents the unwanted return to the national stage of the self-righteously enraged – bellicose and xenophobic – bigot.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they find an excuse to nix the project – there’s talk about an historic site that would have to be destroyed to make way for it – now that the intrinsically meaningless approval has been offered. In the meantime, we have the explosive, fiery collision of two self-contained and radically opposed worldviews, the acts of each seeming to the other to prove its own point.  It’s an ideological pantomime of the kind of war we have so far avoided.

56 comments on “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Manhattan

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  1. It is the particular nature of the people behind this mosque, Farid Rauf and Co, and their Salafi associations that is the big issue here

  2. I was at the meeting and heard the reasons for why it should be built i.e., to show how the International Community so full of Peace, Love and Understanding, Man.

    How beautiful except for the fact that most of the International Community hates those Christers and Jooos so much they are either banned or exterminated from existence.

    The Dali-Lama and the Buddhist get off, scotts-free, because he is an International Marxist also screwing my freedom.

    How much more of the Intolerant are the rest of us suppose to tolerate for do-gooderness sake?

    Anyway I am fleeing this horrid Serfdom, scabby Manhattan with its myopically providential collectivists groupthinkers.

    I am getting the hell out of the Rotten Apple, let the Mommy-Nanny butt surfers pick up my hefty city tax tab I am leaving behind for them to suck on.

  3. @ Susan:
    and we surely won’t miss your scabrous self and asinine rantings.

    our loss will be someone else’s gain and we wish them luck with your loaded colostomy bag of gab.

  4. The fact that the Mosque is named after the city of Cordoba, which was the heart of Muslim conquest of Spain, and the opening is scheduled for the 10 year anniversary of the attacks, seriously that doesn’t seem perverse to you at all?

  5. @ tedstevens:
    As I understand it, at one time Cordoba was one of the leading centers of world culture. It declined precipitously in all respects after the fall of the Caliphate. I don’t see anything offensive in the least from the Cordoba Initiative web site, and would certainly prefer their project over total global war on Islam, or even the mere precedent of canceling a project of this type out of perceived connection between a major religion and a fringe group of mass murderers.

    As I understand it, the point of opening on 9/11 is as a gesture intended to state that the terrorists’ objective of inciting religious war was a complete failure. Those concerned about the encroachment of Islam on Western civilization won’t be persuaded, but if the mosque/center’s program resembles the web site, it looks supportable to me, especially when we wish to proclaim ourselves the allies of moderate Muslims, and encourage the moderation of Islam, worldwide. The alternative is too bleak to consider, or certainly to welcome.

  6. I’m sorry but the footprint of the Twin Towers is Sacred Ground, and putting the equivalent of the Finsbury Park Mosque on the property, strikes me as a surrender. Maybe the next time they put a chapel in Riyadh, not to say Medina

  7. @ narciso:
    The center is not planned for the “footprint” of the Twin Towers, or the WTC “property.” If shrines to the world’s religions were, however, allowed on the property, would you advocate that Islam be excluded?

    The irony of your comment about a chapel in Riyadh should be obvious to you. Last I checked, Saudi Arabia wasn’t based on a commitment to freedom of religion – to the contrary, the legitimacy of the House of Saud, such as it is, is its status as guardian of Islamic holy sites. The legitimacy of our government, and the basis of our civilizational project, is the diametrical opposite.

    Freedom of religion is the first of the four freedoms memorialized in the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights for a reason. A good reason.

  8. Why does it have be there, where 19 of the fellow religionists took down 3,000 lives. from a preacher who has cast doubt on exactly
    who had committed those acts on the dark Tuesday in September

  9. @ narciso:
    9/11 isn’t Oklahoma City, nor is it Pearl Harbor, nor is it anything else. If you’re going to characterize the words of the “preacher,” by whom I suspect you must mean Rauf, it would be helpful if you quoted them directly rather than characterize them prejudicially. I’ve read “controversial” comments of his that had the unfortunate defect of being accurately descriptive. He said, for instance, that calling “Muslims” responsible for 9/11 is a false summary of the events. He pointed to the character of US involvement in the Muslim world as one of the causes of the attack. It’s one of those obvious statements that is politically controversial, but requires peculiar doublethink on the part of those who condemn it: On the one hand, they want us to see the acts of the terrorists as descriptive of all of Islam. On the other hand, they see any attempt to explain the terrorists’ motivations as reprehensible. Yet, if “all of Islam” is responsible, then why did “all of Islam” attack New York City and the Pentagon? Were they just hallucinating reasons for identifying the financial and military centers of the United States as relevant to their political program?

    I don’t see how, if we are to prosecute a war, or, better, if we are to avoid it, we can do so effectively by lying to ourselves pleasantly, and refusing to see things as they are.

  10. So let me see if I get this straight, it is ‘unsophisticated and obsolete’ for us to consider our rights come from God, even if Thomas Jefferson said it first. But we must have a Mosque on the site of the greatest
    ‘mancaused disaster’ in American history, got it

  11. @ CK MacLeod:

    The schedule is really up to you. I think that I can find some help to defer the costs, but if it comes down to it I’ll pay myself. Provided, of course, that you go to Mecca. I would like to see you question a few locals and it would be nice if we could get some video of their reaction to your presence.

  12. @ narciso:
    narc, it’s not on the site, it’s a couple of blocks away. there are plenty of mosques in NYC and we here are holding up pretty well.
    the people of NYC and of the area are okay with it. the community board voted in favor of it.
    the commissioner of police in NYC, an extremely devout Roman Catholic (and a former Marine officer who served in Viet-Nam) is okay with it.

    the mayor, a very-much not-Roman Catholic, is okay with it.

    we’ve not yet heard Madonna’s opinion, but us NYers are just gonna proceed because the other Lady doesn’t say ” Give us your tired, un-Islamic poor.”

    if it’s too much for you to digest, hang out with Susan awhile… if you can tolerate that brand of unAmerican bigotry and banality, you’ll be able to stomache a mere mosque or three.

  13. Building anything above ground in Manhatten is foolish. The fanatics will come again, and again, eventually with a nuclear weapon.

    Having said that I have to agree with CK. It’s only a minority of Muslims (probably no more than 30 or 40%) who want to destroy the big apple and put us all under Sharia law; so it’s unfair to blame the whole religion.

  14. Sully wrote:

    Building anything above ground in Manhatten is foolish.

    I think it’s a bit late in the day to have worked that one out.

    What’s your estimate of the minority in favor of a religious war to the death?

  15. @ fuster:

    You need have no fear of going to Saudi Arabia.

    Per the Al Magrib Forum

    “Frogs. It is not permitted to eat them because the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) forbade killing them, as is reported in the hadeeth of ‘Abd al-Rahmaan ibn ‘Uthmaan, who said that the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) forbade the killing of frogs. (Narrated by Imaam Ahmad and Ibn Maajah; see also Saheeh al-Jaami, 6970). The rule is that everything which we are forbidden to kill, we are not allowed to eat; if we are allowed to eat it we are allowed to kill it.”

  16. @ CK MacLeod:

    What’s your estimate of the minority in favor of a religious war to the death?

    Among my acquaintances the majority are in favor. I tend to be among the moderates since I only want a religious war to the point of surrender and giveback of all territory except the Arabian peninsula.

    And, actually, a few days after 9/11 I realized that new major building in Manhatten was foolish. Thus I’m not surprised that plans to replace the WTC have been put off and put off. An investor would have to be insane (or have government guarantees) to put a signature building on that site.

  17. Sully wrote:
    @ CK MacLeod:

    What’s your estimate of the minority in favor of a religious war to the death?
    Among my acquaintances the majority are in favor.

    “First we take Manhatten;Then we take Berlin”

  18. Fourcheese casady and fuster

    Sure, you will miss me about the same as you missed Steven Vincent who brilliantly coined Manhattan as ‘myopically provincial’ before he was killed fighting for women’s human rights and whatnot.

    Though you are myopically provincial I would suggest reading Vincent’s book published just before he was murdered by your own International Community of anti-Liberty allies then again silly Blue Smurfs don’t know how to read therefore my suggestion will be a waste of time.

  19. extremely devout Roman Catholic (and a former Marine officer who served in Viet-Nam) is okay with it.

    Big deal brother-50% of weekly highly devout Catholic goers were quite OK with electing an infanticide President who while as Illinois State Legislator argued and won that a human being must be forced to die alone in a hospital named Christ should such human being survive an initial abortion caused by doctors and nurses.

    Darling, using Catholics to shore up your moral compass is quite impotent.

  20. My only question for MacLeod, which ‘religious war’ are you talking about?

    Bill Maher anal worship of pot to get his flaccid porned-prick to believe in nothing?

    Listen Sweetie, I realize it is easy and convenient for you to take down ‘the Christers’-calling them bigots and backwards-because they don”t fight back and you are a weeny however everything I am today was indoctrinated though people like you.

    Seeing from my building’s rooftop the WTC attack on 9/11/2001 ended that indoctrination; I can now clearly see you for what you are and I know that you are so inside the myopic black box of indoctrinate idiocy you cannot see yourself.

    No doubt you will continue to pride and preen yourself on some ‘open-minded tolerance’ you do not possess.

  21. To deny a Mosque anywhere near the WTC, is a declaration of religious
    war, that’s an interesting reductio ad absurdum, that even Imam Rauf
    wouldn’t have come up with, After how many attempted attack in the greater NY area going back to ’93, you’d think they would get a lick of sense, then again they voted to reelect Bloomberg, and they send back Nadler and Schumer, no signs of intelligent life here

  22. @ Susan:
    You are full of… assumptions.

    @ narciso:
    Not sure where you got denying the mosque = declaration of religious war, though now that you mention it…

    Sully declared 30-40% of Muslims in favor of destroying the Big Apple and put us all under Sharia. I asked him for a similar estimate regarding those interested in religious war.

    What reason is there to deny the mosque? No matter how you work around it, it comes down to the fact that you assign sacred value to Ground Zero, and assign collective guilt to Islam. Because you at some level take your aversion to Islam as mandatory and presumptive, you assign no value or meaning at all to the Muslim’s belief that their religious expression is a positive just as Christians value Christianity, Buddhists value Buddhism, etc. You instead somehow expect them to feel shame about Islam, and to accept a statement that would say “a mosque desecrates this ground.” It would say that Muslims are barred from sharing in the national community that you have defined as “born on 9/11/01” – barred not by the action of the Muslims who wish to participate as full-fledged members in that community, but by the actions of the terrorists.

    That is collective guilt, and it eventually is based on religious bigotry. To me, it would be a a primordially un-American statement – a perfect representation of the “then the terrorists have won” cliche. The opponents want to establish the following religion: “Anything-but-Islam-ism.” It is also the precisely wrong strategy if we do want to avoid a religious war, or, if forced to fight it, to fight it in defense of our values, rather than, as the enemy would prefer, on the basis of its values.

    It also happens to be rightwing political correctness to the hilt.

  23. One begins with the particular nature of this mosque, on this particular site, it’s a done deal anyway, Bloomberg being willing to excuse Salafi
    wrongdoing everywhere

  24. Well CK it looks like we’ve both been pulling each others legs, and parsing our words carefully. I can’t finance a trip for you to go to Mecca, because as a non-Muslim you might be killed, and although I don’t agree with you on some issues I wouldn’t want to see you injured. I first assumed you knew this, but your reply made me wonder, and then the statement about “special permissions” was a give away. I thought I had you for a few minutes.

  25. @ CK MacLeod:

    Sully declared 30-40% of Muslims in favor of destroying the Big Apple and put us all under Sharia. I asked him for a similar estimate regarding those interested in religious war.

    Okay, I’ll bite. The vast majority of Muslims are not interested in open religious war because, I believe, they realize that their side is, at present, unprepared for open war. Which is why, on the other side, I’m for bringing it on now, or at least for ceasing the importation of people with no interest in assimilating and accepting whatever our shared values are, now that we’ve established (in the other thread) that we no longer even agree on fundamental rights.

  26. @ narciso:

    narc, how about you make your case for saying that this particular mosque is to be a Salafist den of criminals so that you don’t continue to sound simple and simply bigoted?

    last I heard, it’s not illegal to practice any particular religion in this country and criminality was defined mostly by conduct.

    show something real.

  27. Rod Dreher, was more eloquent on the subject than I could be, but some of the commenters are as clueless as LG

  28. @ Susan:

    Susan, you really are full of stuff. You assume that people here are too dumb or too blind to comprehend what it is that concerns you.

    Not real good, we’re neither unintelligent, ignorant, foolishly friendly and forgiving, nor unable to calculate our own best interests and follow them.

    Nor do we need information on the perils of journalism. My own next of kin is one, has been to Basra, Baghdad, Kirkuk, Kabul, and is soon headed to the Afghan/Pakistan border.

    When the second plane struck, I was standing on the roof of my hospital and waited though the day for the survivors that we eventually understood weren’t going to be coming in for treatment.

    We are not against waging war and killing our enemies.
    We are against spreading the type of oversimple mindlessness that multiplies our enemies while it diminishes our own hard-won freedom.

  29. @ narciso:
    Dreher’s article struck me as morally incoherent and confused. He gives himself away repeatedly by saying, in effect, “not that I would assign collective guilt to Islam, but here is why I assign collective guilt to Islam.”

    A Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor wouldn’t bother me at all, and might qualify as a “seed of peace” if anyone anywhere felt any particular enmity toward Shinto beliefs, or even remembered them. It would be more a seed of “huh?” Auschwitz is a German cultural center (though located in Poland – it’s also a Polish cultural center and may even be a Shinto cultural center). Continually reminding the Germans that Auschwitz is a German cultural center has been one of the mainsprings of post-WW2 reconciliation – wisely, the Germans have extended efforts to do the reminding on their own.

  30. @ Sully:
    In the present case under discussion, we have a Muslim group openly and positively embracing our culture, in particular our values of tolerance and freedom of worship, and asking to participate as full-fledged, equal members of the larger community, presumptively as capable of expressing respect and with as much a right not to be judged, as anyone else.

  31. There is nothing of the kind, it’s more like putting up a Mosque, on Hagia Sophia, or say the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, imho

  32. @ CK MacLeod:

    I never said I was against the mosque. I’m hoping the mosque at ground zero is an ostentatious one, with an especially fiery Imam and a fully stocked book and pamphlet store.

  33. Well your point it taken about Cordoba being a cultural capital that doesn’t change the fact that it was conquered by an expansionist ideology that sought conversion of all of Europe under Islam, and therefore the death of Western civilization, you seem a completely reasonable person CK (I don’t know how they let you on the internet) but Islam has been seeking to subjugate Christianity, more importantly, Western civilization since its inception, and yes Christianity has always been big on subjugation too, I know, but our ideas are better, imperfect okay, but at a point in history after the Caliphate was destroyed in Europe, the Christian nations progressed and Islamic nations regressed, to me this point is inarguable. A Mosque near ground zero strikes me as taking a page of the Marxist/Gramscian playbook, use tolerance and freedom to annihilate your enemy from within. I know we’ve become spineless in this country and devolved into blobs, but now we’re even becoming not especially viscous blobs as well, a Mosque at the WTC, cannot happen, and probably won’t.

  34. Well my complaint may not been in vain, after all, last fall some eight months ago, the idea was bandied about those civilian trials for terrorists in NY, events since then, has discouraged that enterprise,

  35. @ narciso:

    A nice imposing mosque at Ground Zero will be a great place for “moderate” Muslims to hold vigorous protests, exercising their rights of assembly and speech, decrying the unfair treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when he finally comes to trial in NYC. I’m looking forward to the banners.

    “Free the honorable servant of Allah!”

    “Death to the Great Satan!”

  36. tedstevens wrote:

    Well your point it taken about Cordoba being a cultural capital that doesn’t change the fact that it was conquered by an expansionist ideology that sought conversion of all of Europe under Islam, and therefore the death of Western civilization,

    Actually, I think it would be more fair to say that Islam sought and still seeks the conversion of the entire world – just like everyone else, though the mature religions and cultures give up on taking their ideologies to their logical extremes, while sometimes harboring an idea that eventually (the Day of Judgment, the triumph of liberal democracy, the revolution) everyone else will see the error of his ways.

    at a point in history after the Caliphate was destroyed in Europe, the Christian nations progressed and Islamic nations regressed, to me this point is inarguable.

    Everything is arguable, and such judgments are always hostage to tomorrow’s, next year’s, next decade’s, next century’s headlines. It’s a popular view on the right – Mark Steyn – to declare that Christianity and Western Civ are in fact in an irreversibly decadent phase, no longer able to stand up for themselves, doomed, doomed, doomed. The judgment of history would in that case seem to be that, after all, tolerance is weakness, and intolerant Islam got something more right after all, even if in the historical short-term, a mere handful of centuries, it was forced to bide its time.

    A Mosque near ground zero strikes me as taking a page of the Marxist/Gramscian playbook, use tolerance and freedom to annihilate your enemy from within. I know we’ve become spineless in this country and devolved into blobs, but now we’re even becoming not especially viscous blobs as well, a Mosque at the WTC, cannot happen, and probably won’t.

    Dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal prevents us from presuming that the free and open exercise of someone else’s unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is in fact a sinister plot aimed at destroying our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Letting others join in our plurality would mean that if a bunch of Gramscists put together $100 MM to build a culture and anti-worship center, we’d probably have to let them do it, though maybe keep an eye out for revolutionary activities.

    And if the day comes that, through the building of culture cum worship centers, Islam manages to persuade enough Americans of the essential superiority of some interpretation of Sharia Law and Islamic forms of worship over the traditions that we took on instead, then them’s the democratic breaks. Same goes for other comprehensive alternative religions or legal traditions or ideologies. It’s not something I see as likely anytime soon or really ever.

  37. @ CK MacLeod:

    You prompt a great idea. Give the militant atheists space next to the Ground Zero mosque for a Temple of Reason. In fact, give everybody a spot. I’d go to New York more often to check out the scene as the Pentacostal Church of God folks interact with the Muslims and the atheists. Add some Wiccans and you’d have a continuous tolerance happening of the sort never before seen in the history of the world.

  38. The Ummayad, (Syrian), Abbasid (Mesopotamia) and Fatimid (Egyptian)
    kingdoms not to mention Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, is a different animal from Wahhabi versions of Hanbali Islam, which is the dominant current in most American mosques

  39. Add some Wiccans and you’d have a continuous tolerance happening of the sort never before seen in the history of the world.

    Okay everybody we can shut down the internet now, Sully has achieved the greatest comment in internet/blogging history, time for everyone to move onto something else.

  40. tedstevens wrote:

    Sully has achieved the greatest comment in internet/blogging history

    He does that a lot, though you also have to put up with his exhibitionistic pyromania and certain other habits.

  41. Ya lost me, CK.

    Analogous to a street fight:
    You knock the other guy down,
    You jump on him,
    You put your thumb in his eye,
    And ask him if he’s had enough yet.
    Knowing full well that the thumb in the eye will, with enough pressure, drive into the brain of the loser –
    The lousy fighter on the ground … folds.

    Don’t be that lousy fighter.

    ~(Ä)~

2 Pings/Trackbacks for "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Manhattan"
  1. […] withdrawn now that it’s reopened all kinds of wounds. Then the left — and I guess, per CK MacLeod’s latest, the center — congratulates itself for not being as bigoted as the right, even though almost […]

  2. […] and can lead to the same destination.  (Contrary to some reports, I did not call anyone a bigot in my post of last Wednesday.)  Consistently, and perhaps inescapably, the rejection of Cordoba House rests on assignment of […]

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