Ooh boy! A Rant!
Ladies and Gentlemen, please excuse me, for I need to rant.
I am really sick of this so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. But, I've already quasi-vented about that in a few facebook status updates, as well as responding to a few other people's statuses. So, I won't go into that here. Instead, I want need to rant about one of the arguments people have been using to excuse their racism and xenophobia, and make it more palatable to their own self-righteous eyes.
"The Al Queda terrorists that hijacked those planes and killed almost 3,000 people on 9/11 were muslims, and therefore the ground zero mosque would be an insult to the memories of all the Americans that died that day."
You know what? You got it half right.
Those terrorists were muslims. And the people they killed were Americans. You're good so far, but let's delve into the first part of that a little more.
Those terrorists were muslims.
As I've mentioned before, Timothy McVeigh was raised Catholic. I know, I know, his reasons for becoming a terrorist were not religious, per se, but more anti-government extremism gone horribly, horribly wrong. (Actually, all extremism is horribly, horribly wrong, but that's off-topic.) So, it's not a great analogy. So let's find a better analogy, shall we? How's this one:
Al Queda is every bit as much representative of the Islamic faith as neo-Nazi's and the KKK are representative of Christians.
They are an extreme, vocal minority with views that, although in part founded on the religion they espouse, have twisted and perverted the message of their religion to justify their backwards, narrow-minded, vitriolic racist beliefs.
Now, let's get back to the excuse statement above, and the half that people get wrong.
"therefore the ground zero mosque would be an insult to the memories of all the Americans that died that day."
So, setting aside the fear-mongering misnomer that is "Ground Zero Mosque", how will it insult their memories? In the days (and years) following 9/11, the political right in this country was beating it into our brains that if we did anything outside of our normal daily routines, "the terrorists would win" [1]. First off, that's an entirely absurd argument. In the lead-in to the United States of America's entry into both World War I and World War II, all sorts of sacrifices were asked (and demanded) of the American people to help us prepare for the war that would defeat our enemies. No one said that if we started rationing sugar, the Nazis would win. Ludicrous. But let's stay on that.
The right wing also beat the drum that "the terrorists hate our freedoms"[2]. So, using simple logic, they hate our freedoms, so if we lose our freedoms, the terrorists win. I don't think that's really a statement any thinking person would argue with. I'll not get into losses of civil liberties [3]. But isn't denying the rights of a peaceful group of Sufi's to gather at what is essentially the Islamic version of a YMCA near a place where a radical extremist group of a different sect of a varied religion committed a horrendous act of despicable evil, just another way of denying them freedom?
The nearly 3,000 innocent people that died that day in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. were (for the most part) Americans (there were foreign nationals killed that day to, I believe. Wrong place, wrong time for everyone). They lived as Americans, they died as Americans, martyrs for their freedom, in a way. The best way to honor them is to continue to exercise those freedoms, while also eliminating the culture of terror that fostered their murderers. But we need to retain and exercise those freedoms! Denying freedom to others, regardless of whether or not we know them, understand them, or fear them, is not the way to honor them. It is the way to make their deaths meaningless.
People are calling the cultural center a "9/11 victory monument" [4] are conflating all muslims into 1 category. I touched on that above. Shall I hold all Christians accountable for the Spanish Inquisition? Or the pedophilia of a minority of Catholic priests? No? You don't think that's fair? Neither do I, so stop frakking doing it!
For the love of whatever deity(s) you hold dear, stop f*cking conflating Al Queda with the entirety of the muslim faith. Until you do, I will do the same. So, from now on, every Christian I meet, I will automatically assume to be a snake-weilding, speaking-in-tongues, child-molesting, science-hating, racist, zealous, crusade-leading, jew-hating, persecuting, lynching terrorist.
After all, if you can do it, so can I. What's good for the goose, is good for the gander.
[1] http://officeofstrategicinfluence.com/webcomic/?id=13
[2] George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, September 20, 2001
[3] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
[4] Several facebook statuses of people I know and are 'friended' to.
Thank you. I am done now.
No worries,
Matt