Mosque in NYC: Bushit Still Distorts 9/11

News that a mosque is planned to be built about two and a half blocks from Ground Zero in New York City have fanned the flames of the worst kind of intolerance and misinformation lingering from eight years of Bush propaganda. Even a usually sensible blogger cries foul, arguing that the plan "seems like tasteless nose thumbing at Americans and at worst, an attempt to replace our native cultures."

Lest you be confused, this not an Indian woman writing about "our native cultures." No, this is someone taking the easiest phrase out of the 2001-2008 ersatz thinking manual. Rule 1: when in doubt, trot out nativism. The same nativism used against every immigrant group since the Irish potato famine.

Oversight? Absolutely not. I tried to call the blogger to her senses (see comments here), but she continued to argue insane notions such as "The devastation of 9-11 was not committed in the name of Jesus or Yahweh, but to praise Allah."

That's right, fellow non-Muslims. Let's tar a billion and a half Muslims in the world because of the alleged actions of 18. Let's forbid the building of a mosque just to show them. Right? Wrong!

So little is really known about 9/11 and so much nonsense was justified in the name of that event, that most people forget that

• we never had actual evidence proven in court about who and what brought these events about, nor much less why, having instead to rely on the word of the men who stole the election of 2000; 
• there is no "war" on, since a war is a state of belligerency between two nation-states -- those who would like to try every Muslim in a military tribunal ought to ask the same for the Mafia, the KKK, the white-power militias associated with the likes of Timothy McVeigh, since they are equally as criminal and at war with American society and ideals as Al Qaeda; and
• we do have freedom to believe in anything or nothing at all in this country (and I, for one, would like very much to keep it that way).

In the particular case of the mosque in question, it is planned to be erected two and a half blocks away from Ground Zero. There is a Greek Orthodox church and other places of worship in the vicinity. The leader behind this project is a respected advocate of inter-religious tolerance highly praised and respected by a leading New York rabbi.

If we are going to decide that all mosques and Muslims are responsible for the crimes of 9/11, then

• Are all U.S. whites responsible for 300 years of kidnapping, torture and slavery of millions of African Americans?
• Do all Jews and all synagogues stand accused for the Israeli armed forces attacks on civilians during the Sabra-Shatila massacre of the 1980s, or the flattening of Qana just a few years ago or the humanitarian disaster of Gaza that still continues today?
• Is the rape of children by a relatively small proportion of priests irrevocably the fault of all Catholics, including the children, and all Catholic churches?

I could go on, but the intelligent reader will have gotten the point. Even if all 18 suicide attackers on board of the four airplanes that crashed on September 11, 2001, died with praises of Allah on their lips or their minds (which we don't know for a fact), it is hardly reasonable or logical to blame these actions on their religion and all fellow believers.

Let's stop the shouting and start reasoning together.

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Are We Breeding Jihadists?

Ever since Hannah Arendt's memorable "banality of evil" concerning Adolf Eichmann, it's been something of a cliché to "discover" that criminals were originally mild-mannered milquetoasts. True to script, the lazier journalists are having a field day with the ordinariness of Faisal Shahzad, the alleged Times Square bomber.

Yet the real news would be discovering what forces combined to change the Eichmanns and the Shahzads from mere mediocrities to criminals. By forces, I mean to include nature, or natural predispositions and personal decisions for which each individual is responsible, and nurture, the external, social influences that might have turned a mediocre nature into something ready to become truly awful.

We can do nothing about the personal decisions the Eichmanns and the Shahzads and the Timothy McVeighs have made. But we can think and act on the cues we get about their social influences.

Indeed, the United States made sure Germany was not penalized in 1945 as it had been under the Versailles Treaty in 1918 so as not to provide Germans disgruntled with the consequences of losing a war the excuse for getting revenge through World War III.

As Shahzad's story beings to be pieced together, it seems pretty clear that he carried a major social grudge. Like so many, he was scammed into a mortgage he really couldn't afford and his employment collapsed with the economy.

Might he have remained happily unknown today with another sequence of events? Might he have avoided seeking comfort in jihadism to assuage his sense of economic failure in the land of alleged plenty?

If Albert Gore had been allowed to be sworn in despite his narrow win in 2000, might the catastrophic greed allowed to run free in the Bush era have been reined in? If, even without Gore, had Bush acted sooner and asked for a stimulus package earlier, wouldn't the Great Recession have been less great?

I realize this is all woulda, coulda, shoulda.

But we do confront "tea party" folks who demand with protest signs awash in misspellings and solecisms that "furriners lurn" English and old people who wave their medicare cards while they call government health programs "socialism" and we continue to have too many weapons on the streets and in gun stores. Isn't this the kindling for home-grown jihadism of a nut-wing variety?

In brief, there's a lot of anger out there. People continue to experience very bad times, which breed worse people. That's why we need to push to make better times, to curb excess and include every level of society in the nation's bounty, so we can breed more tolerant people of good will and deed.

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"Regime Change" We Don't Want to Believe In

In the past week or so, the talk in Washington among journalists and think tank wonks outside the Obama Administration has been bubbling with the phrase "regime change" in reference to Iran. We've seen that movie before, new euphemism notwithstanding, and it has no happy ending.

As much as I would prefer an Iranian president with a name that was easier on the English-speaking tongue (5 syllables is way too long!), I don't think that a Western-inspired, or much less funded, overthrow or a coup, or any of the names we use for the forcible removal of a ruler, is what we want to do. Here's why:

• the coup d'etat is most un-Jeffersonian and never a good path to democracy;
• pushing for "regime change" in another country invites reciprocity and, last I heard, folks in the Middle East would like to turn ours into ... ahem ... an Islamic theocracy; and
• the cure is almost always worse than the disease (think Chile 1973, Brazil 1964, and oh, Iran 1954).

Let's stop there. I like triads. Thank goodness the jabber I've heard does not come from the Obama folks. But, frankly, if they are in the least tempted, this short post ought to help.