{"id":1050,"date":"2010-08-19T21:41:31","date_gmt":"2010-08-20T02:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/?p=1050"},"modified":"2010-08-20T21:00:28","modified_gmt":"2010-08-21T02:00:28","slug":"al-franken-responds-to-critics-of-the-ground-zero-mosque","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/?p=1050","title":{"rendered":"Al Franken responds to critics of the Ground Zero Mosque"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said on Wednesday that conservative criticism<\/strong> of plans to develop a mosque and Islamic community center in close proximity to “Ground Zero” in New York City is “one of the most disgraceful things that I’ve heard.”<\/p>\n

Disgraceful? Criticism is disgraceful?<\/p>\n

Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s take a look at what that word, disgraceful, means: shockingly unacceptable, scandalous, deplorable, despicable, contemptible, dishonorable, reprehensible, outrageous, abominable, atrocious, appalling, dreadful, disgusting, shameless.<\/p>\n

Do you know what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disgraceful to me? That Muslims would even consider building a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero. And if we let it happen, it just confirms to them that we are the weak, spineless, corrupt kafur that they think we are. That would be disgraceful.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another disgraceful thing: that Franken is trying to use this as a political opportunity to take shots at Gingrich instead of genuinely listening to the concerns and objections of Americans.<\/p>\n

Pat Condell thinks the mosque itself is disgraceful:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Apparently it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not enough that nearly 3,000 people had to lose their lives in a hideous act of religious mass murder, but now their memory has to be insulted as well, and the religion that murdered them allowed to build a towering triumphalist mosque on the ground where they died.<\/p>\n

It says a lot about the people behind this scheme that they had the bad taste to even propose building a mosque in such a place, but to describe it as they have as a tribute to the victims is beyond bad taste and shows a profound contempt for those who died.<\/p>\n

It would be hard to imagine a more provocative gesture, short of standing on their graves and burning the American flag. Yet how typical of Islam, with its own hair-trigger sensitivity to the slightest imagined insult to do something so arrogant and so insensitive.<\/p>\n

You know, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not an American, but it makes me sick to my stomach to think that Islam is going to be allowed anywhere near Ground Zero, because 9\/11 could never have happened if not for Islam and its teachings, and its doctrine of jihad and its false promise of an impossible afterlife, which none of those gullible lunatics would have been persuaded to carry out such an insane act – and also because it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just an attack on America but on all of us in the civilized world.<\/p>\n

As were the London, in Madrid, in Bali, the shootings in Mumbai and everywhere else that the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Religion of Peace\u00e2\u20ac\u009d decides it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like the way people do things.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Franken saved his harshest criticism for Newt Gingrich: “The most offensive thing I’ve heard is from Newt Gingrich.” ‘We can’t let the Nazis put up a building next to the Holocaust Museum,” asserted the Democratic Senator. “That’s equating all Muslims with Al Quaida. George W. Bush said Al Quaida is ‘a perversion of Islam.'”<\/p>\n

(Since when did Franken start looking to Bush as a reliable source of deep understanding?)<\/p>\n

But let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s get back to the question: is Al Quaida a perversion of Islam? Or is it a group of people who are actually doing what their book says they should do, are they\u00c2\u00a0 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153submitting\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, are they literally following what the Koran teaches?<\/p>\n

Colonel Allen West said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You need to get into the Koran, you need to understand their precepts, you need to read the Sura, you need to read the Hadiths, and then you can really understand: this is not a perversion, they are doing exactly what this book says.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Maybe Franken should read the Koran, the Sura and the Hadiths.<\/p>\n

Why is Gingrich\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s statement offensive to Franken?<\/p>\n

The guy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a Muslim, so he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably not personally offended. Maybe he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s offended because he believes we should respect all religions, or because Gingrich was drawing a parallel between Islam and Nazis.<\/p>\n

Pat Condell has an answer to that one:<\/p>\n

[Islam] has no right even to call itself a religion. Without the shield of religion to hide behind, Islam would be banned in the civilized world as a political ideology of hate, and we have no obligation to make allowances for it, any more than we do for Nazism.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bigger threat to our freedom than Nazism ever was. Yes, both are totalitarian and both divide the world unnecessarily into \u00e2\u20ac\u0153us\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153them\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, the pure and the impure, and both make no secret of their desire to exterminate the Jews.<\/p>\n

But we were all more or less on the same side against the Nazis, whereas the Islamo-Nazis have got plenty of friends among people in the West who ought to know better.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Friends like Al Franken?<\/p>\n

So, what can we do about it?<\/p>\n

Again, Pat Condell weighs in:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153But you know, it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be this way. Here in London, we had a similar situation just recently where they wanted to build a gigantic mosque to overshadow the Olympic Games.<\/p>\n

Public opinion put a stop to that, and public opinion can put a stop to this disgraceful plan as well – and it can tell this group, and the politicians who support them, that enough is enough, and that this is one insult too far, and that America is a big country, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plenty of room for them to build their offensive mosque – if they have to – somewhere else, somewhere perhaps more appropriate to the spirit of their religion, like the Arizona desert or Death Valley.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.nowpublic.com\/world\/al-franken-conservative-criticism-mosque-disgraceful<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said on Wednesday that conservative criticism of plans to develop a mosque and Islamic community center in close proximity to “Ground Zero” in New York City is “one of the most disgraceful things that I’ve heard.” Disgraceful? Criticism is disgraceful? Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s take a look at what that word, disgraceful, means: shockingly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1050"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1087,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050\/revisions\/1087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phyrfight.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}