Mosque to be Built Near Ground Zero

peoples minds are the same.

This week, hundreds of mosques and Islamic organizations across the country have been encouraging their members to invite non-Muslims to attend prayers, discussions and tours of Islamic centers as a way to defuse hostility toward the Muslim population.

In New York, about 20 mosques are participating in the event, which began last weekend and ends on Sunday. And organizers said that it had been a success — the experience of the Omar Ben Abdel-Aziz Mosque notwithstanding — with hundreds of visitors attending lectures, tours and question-and-answer sessions at Islamic centers in all five boroughs of New York City and on Long Island.

The idea for the program, “A Week of Dialogue,” emerged from a summit of Islamic leaders last month in New York and was, in part, a response to the furor surrounding a plan to open a Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero.

“In terms of rectifying this Islamophobia and bigotry, we should focus on our relationship with our neighbors,” said Zaheer Uddin, executive director of the Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan New York, an umbrella group of mosques and Islamic groups in the city. “If our neighbors are happy, they can’t make some propaganda stuff.”

A New York Times poll in August found that 75 percent of New Yorkers had never visited a mosque, and that those who had, or who had a close Muslim friend, were more likely to support the Muslim center planned in Lower Manhattan.

N.Y. mosque debate echoes fear 225 years ago
Sunday, October 10, 2010 03:00 AM
By Paul Vitello
The New York Times

Many New Yorkers were suspicious of the newcomers’ plans to build a house of worship in Manhattan. Some feared the project was being underwritten by foreigners. Others said the strangers’ beliefs were incompatible with democratic principles.

Concerned residents held demonstrations, some of which turned bitter.

But cooler heads prevailed; the project proceeded to completion. And this week, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in lower Manhattan — the locus of that controversy two centuries ago — is celebrating the 225th anniversary of the laying of its cornerstone.

The Rev. Kevin V. Madigan, who is the pastor of St. Peter’s, was not initially struck by the parallels between the opposition the church had faced and what present-day Muslims have encountered in proposing a community center and mosque two blocks from ground zero.

But as an uproar enveloped the Islamic project over the summer, the priest said he was startled by how closely the opposition mirrored that brought in 1785 against St. Peter’s, blocks from the proposed mosque site.

City officials in 18th-century New York urged project organizers to change the church’s location, in what was then the heart of the city, to outside the city. Unlike the organizers of Park51, the Catholics complied.

Then there were fears about nefarious foreign backers. Just as some opponents of Park51 have said that the $100 million-plus project will be financed by the same Saudi sheiks who bankroll terrorists, many early Protestants saw the pope as the enemy of democracy. They feared the church would lead a papal assault on the new U.S. government.

The Park51 organizers say they will not accept foreign backing. But St. Peter’s Church was made possible by a handsome gift from King Charles III of Spain.

The angry eruptions at demonstrations this summer against the Muslim center were not as vehement as those directed at St. Peter’s, Madigan said.

Two decades after the church was built, Protestants started a melee that killed a policeman. They were incensed at a celebration going on inside that they viewed as an exercise in “popish superstition” — Christmas.
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2010/10/10/n-y--mosque-debate-echoes-fear-225-years-ago.html?sid=101

You miss the point that the irrational fears about the building of that church did not pan out, and that the fears regarding the building of the community center/mosque may be similarly irrational.

I think you're just to the point of opposing Firefly, no matter what.

Only small minded people and bigots think as you do.

How about the pain our country caused all those tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who lost family members and friends by us?

Are you a bigot for them too? Most, if not all of them, were Muslims.

What's a finger or two when we're talking about lives.

I'm talking about tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who have lost family and friends by our shock and awe campaign and during the six years of our war in that country