New York City approves plans for Mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero

[Guitar Shark]

Many Islamic extremists want the complete elimination of every single American.

There, I fixed your statement to make it pass the smell test...

[jhale667]

In classic far left fashion, you have it ass backwards. The Islamist's want the complete elimination of every single American. They took out 3000 in New York and continue to this day with failed attempts to take out large groups of people on American soil and have succeeded in smaller attacks, such as The Fort Hood Massacre. It cracks me up how you defend a religion that to this day, denigrates women, performs Honor Killings and continues to intimidate and subjugate populations, via acts of terrorism. I have yet to see peaceful Muslims stand up, condemn and or stop the heinous acts of there violent brethren.

You're not looking closely enough.

In classic neocon shitbag fashion, you're being both a fear AND a hate-mongering idiot. None of my muslim co-workers have tried to kill me (shock!). Blanket statements like that are just idiotic. THIS is why you don't get taken seriously.

[Nickdfresh]

An actual well reasoned article that bothered to fact check...

'Ground Zero Mosque' Park51 Not a Triumph of Radical Islam
By ROMESH RATNESAR Romesh Ratnesar Wed Aug 18, 3:30 am ET

Should Muslims be allowed to build a mosque at Ground Zero? Merely posing the question is an act of deliberate distortion. As its defenders point out, the Community Center at Park51 will occupy not a solitary inch of the 16-block site on which the Twin Towers stood. Once built, the center will indeed house a mosque, "open and accessible to all" - but also a swimming pool, basketball court, auditorium, library, day-care facility, restaurant and cooking school. The center is being built by a private organization on land it legally owns. Twenty-nine out of 30 Lower Manhattan community-board members voted to approve it. By every legal standard, the case for allowing Park51 to be built is, in the words of conservative UCLA constitutional-law professor Eugene Volokh, "open and shut."

But the question isn't going away. President Obama's statement on Aug. 13 endorsing "the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan" has unleashed another storm of partisan bloviation. Obama is "pandering to radical Islam," says Newt Gingrich; John Boehner finds Obama's comments "deeply troubling." On this issue, the President's critics have public opinion on their side: nearly 70% of Americans in a CNN–Opinion Research Corporation poll say they oppose a Ground Zero mosque. (See Mark Halperin on why the GOP should avoid the issue.)

Many opponents of the Park51 project claim that the mosque itself isn't the problem; it's the idea of building it so close to the World Trade Center. Such misgivings have some validity. But the heat the mosque controversy has generated, on both the left and right, is unhealthy, misplaced and ultimately self-defeating. It reflects our tendency to exaggerate the real threat posed by Islamic extremism and what America should do about it. And nine years after 9/11, the fight over the mosque near Ground Zero shows how obsessed we remain with an enemy that may no longer exist. (See more commentary on Islamophobia and the mosque near Ground Zero.)

The mosque's critics and champions both say their goal is to counter radical Islam. In his Aug. 3 speech defending the Park51 project, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that "we would play into our enemies' hands" if we were to deny American Muslims the right to build a mosque where they choose. "To cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists," Bloomberg said. New York Congressman Jerrod Nadler, a mosque supporter, says, "Everybody's liberty is at stake here." The mosque's opponents make the same argument in reverse. Gingrich has called the Cordoba Initiative part of "an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization." Building the mosque, in the words of one conservative columnist, would be "a symbolic monument to the triumph of Islamism in the United States." (See the moderate imam behind the mosque near Ground Zero.)

The prevalence of such rhetoric on both sides of the mosque debate makes it seem as if the struggle against global jihadism hangs in the balance. The truth is that Osama bin Laden and his ilk face much bigger problems. The story of the past decade in the Muslim world is that of the widespread rejection - or "refudiation," to borrow a phrase - of terrorism. A study by the Pew Research Center earlier this year found that support in Muslim countries for suicide bombings has fallen precipitously from post-9/11 levels. One-third of Pakistanis believed terrorism was justified in 2002; now just 8% do. For all our anxiety about the rise of religious extremism, no government in the Arab world has been toppled by forces sympathetic to al-Qaeda since 2001. And though some militant Muslims surely wish us harm, their ability to actually inflict it has eroded; it has been more than five years since the last successful al-Qaeda attack in the West.

The eclipse of al-Qaeda has come about largely through revulsion at the jihadists' indiscriminate slaughter of fellow Muslims, from Indonesia to Iraq. And yet we have failed to notice. A Gallup poll taken in June found that Americans still believe terrorism is a bigger threat to the future well-being of the country than health care costs, unemployment and illegal immigration. (Only the federal debt was deemed an issue of equal seriousness.) America's post-9/11 obsession with terrorism, the belief that we are locked in an epic ideological struggle with radical Islam, has stretched our resources to the limit and distracted us from higher-order priorities. National myopia poses a bigger challenge to the U.S.'s long-term stability than terrorism ever will.

What does this mean for the mosque near Ground Zero? However the dispute is ultimately resolved, its impact on the "threat" posed by radical Islam will be negligible. That's because the threat is receding on its own. Allowing a place of worship to be built in lower Manhattan will constitute neither an American triumph nor a defeat. It will simply tell the world that this nation, wisely, has decided to move on.

Time

[GAR]

The Islamist's want the complete elimination of every single American.

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They'd luvvit. They get high on that shit.

[GAR]

'Ground Zero Mosque' Park51 Not a Triumph of Radical Islam
By ROMESH RATNESAR Romesh Ratnesar Wed Aug 18, 3:30 am ET

Time

All Islam is radical Islam.. that's like saying "obey only the nonviolent part of the Koran they ripped from the Bible" and not the parts that condone murder, violence and schiophrenia.

Islam is a culture of handpicked schizophrenia built to excite the masses to unison. That worked in the 7th century to unite the Arabs off the cheaper, less- helpful classical idols of their conquerors but it doesn't work today. They need to ditch that.

[Seshmeister]

All Islam is radical Islam.. that's like saying "obey only the nonviolent part of the Koran they ripped from the Bible" and not the parts that condone murder, violence and schiophrenia.

Islam is a culture of handpicked schizophrenia built to excite the masses to unison. That worked in the 7th century to unite the Arabs off the cheaper, less- helpful classical idols of their conquerors but it doesn't work today. They need to ditch that.

I would like you to see you distinguish that statement from the bible but I don't think you could.

Here's a thought for the hard of thinking, 1.1 billion muslims, kind of surprising you haven't been wiped out yet.

[Seshmeister]

Stupid or baiting, life's too short.

[Nickdfresh]

All Islam is radical Islam.. that's like saying "obey only the nonviolent part of the Koran they ripped from the Bible" and not the parts that condone murder, violence and schiophrenia.

Islam is a culture of handpicked schizophrenia built to excite the masses to unison. That worked in the 7th century to unite the Arabs off the cheaper, less- helpful classical idols of their conquerors but it doesn't work today. They need to ditch that.

You need to Google a bit more, retard.

Or maybe you can run and hide like the Chicken Little cowardly bitch™ afraid of the supposed "Evil (Manchurian Candidate-Like) Muslims" programmed to kill us like Abrahamic Stepford-children despite the fact that you know none of them and obviously cannot have any intellectual or conversational interactions in your shitty day-job easily stolen by Mexicans...

[Nickdfresh]

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They'd luvvit. They get high on that shit.

Nice White-Powa' racist Neo-Nazis, who share much of your world view, also celebrated on 9/11...

[Nickdfresh]

Validation of that statement depends on verification of authorship on an individual basis.

Nobody said "never let the Jihads build a mosque." Just not the one under consideration, that's all.

Regardless of where it's going to be built, the CIA will plant more bugs in the walls and doors than in FORD's memory bank no matter what!

It would be completely illegal for the "CIA" to "plant bugs" or operate in any sort of domestic internal-security function not directly related to their own security at CIA facilities. That's what the FBI is for, Google-fuckwit...

[Nickdfresh]

Good luck with that shit, fuckstump.

[FORD]

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They'd luvvit. They get high on that shit.

Bullshit.

[jhale667]

I sit next to one such person at work.

As do I.


Those throwing around generalizations need to STFU.

[jhale667]

The only acceptable generalization in this discussion - ALL organized religion is pretty much batshit, and there's a damn good reason for the church/state separation in America as we've seen in this very thread.

America In The Twilight Zone: I Can't Believe We Are Even Discussing This
by Russell Simmons

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-simmons/america-in-the-twilight-z_b_683035.html

It was a bitter cold night in Grant Park in downtown Chicago on November 4th, 2008, but tens of thousands of people waited in the frigid weather to hear the victory speech of our 44th President, Barack Obama. Millions of people in this nation and around the world, including myself, were glued to the television to see how he would inspire us to come together after a very contentious battle with Senator John McCain. These words, in particular, have stayed with me for almost two years, as I believe they are words that define the very essence of who our president is:

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world -- our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down -- we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security -- we support you. And to all those who have wondered if Americas beacon still burns as bright -- tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.


For that is the true genius of America -- that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

As I reflect upon these words and think of the furor that has erupted over the "Ground Zero Mosque" proposal, as the Chairman of The Foundation Of Ethnic Understanding, I am appalled. Am I in a dream? I can't even believe, that in this day and age, we are even discussing this. In my previous blog for Huffington Post, I expressed my dissatisfaction for the reactionary right wing's response, which opposes the very nature of our nation's values: liberty and tolerance. In this country, the fact that we still have this type of hate is disheartening, to say the least. It is like we are living in a twilight zone. As the conservatives and the right continue to preach that they are the ones who are on god's side, I am dismayed to see them behave in quite the opposite manner.

During Ramadan dinner on Friday night at the White House, President Obama's righteous stand opposing bigotry and supporting religious liberty sends a critical message to opponents of the Cordoba House Islamic Center. We must never tolerate hate and bigotry directed at any group, including Muslims. President Obama is right that we all must 'recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of Lower Manhattan.'

Yet we all have a sacred responsibility to defend the most vulnerable among us and minorities who are under attack. Not in our America will Muslims be targeted as second class citizens without the strongest and loudest protest. We welcome President Obama to this conversation. If nothing else, this president will be remembered for showing the most amazing leadership in the promotion of tolerance, love and compassion. And for that we will be forever grateful.

[Anonymous]

I sit next to one such person at work.

Is it that poor, poor girl that uses "like" & "OMG" between every word?

Can we bomb those people?

Granted, there wouldn't be much left of Amerika, but the people would survive & rebuild anew. And maybe the world wouldn't hate Amerikaners so much afterwards.

Cheers! :bottle: