Mosque to be Built Near Ground Zero

Sort of like PTSD then? But, we do not discount PTSD as a syndrome that does not need to be addressed, since it is painful for the individual. We do not ask suvivors of concentration camps to vacation on the Rhine and enjoy a nice Oktoberfest. Similarly, I believe, we should not ask New Yorkers to live comfortably with a Ground Zero mega-mosque.

Notice that New Yorkers usually do not stick their nose in the problems of the rest of the country, I believe. Interesting, I think, how many people from other places think New York is their business? Perhaps, M.Y.O.B. is the correct etiquette?

But some of those grieving families and friends were American Muslims.

Foofie wrote:

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Notice that New Yorkers usually do not stick their nose in the problems of the rest of the country, I believe. Interesting, I think, how many people from other places think New York is their business? Perhaps, M.Y.O.B. is the correct etiquette?

I thought all you folks lived in the United States.

This conflict is about conservative Christian New Yorkers and conservative Jewish New Yorkers, uniting to dump on Muslim New Yorkers.

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This conflict is about conservative Christian New Yorkers and conservative Jewish New Yorkers, uniting to dump on Muslim New Yorkers.

No, conservative Jewish New Yorkers are not really involved as an organized group....

Governor Patterson just proposed a reasonable compromise. The state is willing to help the Cordoba group find a different site for the proposed cultural center/mosque which is further from the WTC location. That should satisy all parties, except those who plain do not want Muslims building any more mosques anywhere.

I just choose to value old-time New Yorkers over this comparatively recent immigrant group.

When Arabs, many of them Syrian Christians, first came to New York around 1870, they settled on Washington Street, in the shadow of where the World Trade Center would be put up a century later.

PRESENT DAY ARABS AND MUSLIMS

Today, Arabs in the city are part of a larger Muslim community from virtually every part of the globe. Muslim New Yorkers come from Bangladesh, India, Afghanistan and Iran, from the Balkans, from West Africa (notably Ghana, Senegal, Niger and Sierra Leone) and even from the Americas, principally Guyana and Trinidad-Tobago.

Of the estimated 600,000 Muslims in New York, about 200,000 are of Arab ancestry, according to Louis Abdulatif Cristillo of the Muslims in New York Project at Columbia University.

Arab Muslims, who have immigrated in greater number since the mid 1960s, were once a nearly invisible minority compared to Christian Arabs. But now the Muslims have become increasingly engaged in the public life of the city. They live beyond the traditional enclaves of lower Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights, and South Brooklyn, venturing out into the other boroughs to live, open businesses and become part of mixed neighborhoods.

There has been a tremendous expansion of mosques since the late 1970's, with close to 130 mosques now in the city.

The early history of Muslims in the U.S. was a lonely one. While there are isolated reports of "Moorish" sailors and even an Egyptian dwelling in corners of the colonies, the first significant populations were slaves from West Africa. Bilali Mohammed was born in Guinea in roughly 1770 and died in 1857 on a plantation on Sapelo Island in Georgia, leaving behind a 13-sheaf document in Arabic. It's a treatise of religious jurisprudence specific to the society of Muslim West Africa and one of the earliest classic slave narratives. Abdulrahman Ibraheem Ibn Sori, like the literary figure of Oroonoko in Aphra Behn's famous 1688 novel of the same name, was royalty from a Guinean kingdom before being abducted and whisked away to slavery in Mississippi. As word of a lettered, regal "Prince of Slaves" spread across the country, Ibn Sori won allies and friends and was eventually freed in 1828 by an order from President John Quincy Adams. He left the U.S. for the former slave republic of Liberia in Africa but died of fever soon thereafter, never to return to the land of his birth.

Most Muslim African slaves were far less lucky, and memory of their varied cultural heritage dissipated over generations of enslavement. Black Islam would be revived in the first half of the 20th century as a creed of empowerment and redemption. The Nation of Islam, founded in 1933, sought to step away from the indignity of the past with a wholesale rejection of the predominantly white, Christian nation that surrounded them; to this day, the website of the now much diminished group identifies black Americans as descendants of a "Lost Nation of Asia." For prominent activists like Malcolm X, Islam was a badge of otherness, of distinction and pride in the face of old injustices.

On the sidelines of these struggles, other Muslims were more than happy to try to fit in. By the end of the 19th century, immigrants from the Ottoman Empire began settling in pockets across the U.S. Some of the first active Muslim congregations in the country began in towns like Cedar Rapids, Iowa (led by Lebanese), and Biddeford, Maine (led by Albanians). In 1926, Polish-speaking Tatars opened one of the first mosques in Brooklyn. By the latter half of the 20th century, the majority of Muslims moving to the U.S. were from South Asia and Arab states. Today, there are an estimated 7 million Muslims living in the U.S., from myriad communities and all walks of life. To speak of them in generalities would be pointless.

Can we jump to the point where no religious group is assumed to be pointing fingers? Can we just jump to blaming the atheists already?

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I agree. This "compromise" means that the Muslim center must bow to extremist pressure and move or refuse and be made out to be the bad guy for not taking a "reasonable" solution. It's a lose-lose for them and the governor shouldn't have set it up that way.

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Like any loyal dog (i.e., Rin Tin Tin, Lassie) I do not bite the hand that feeds me and my family since the 1880's.

So you admit that you care not at all for the rule of law, for justice, for what's right. All you care about is filling your own tummy and you're more than willing to do whatever is necessary to provide cover for those who would commit evil, as long as you are allowed to escape that evil.

...So, while I respect your emotional antipathy to the building of this mosque, I feel that it is not enough of a substantive objection to actually block construction of that mosque.