[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[david buchanan]

Steve asked:
 Who benefits from all this silly bickering over a Mosque?  Who always benefits? (Ok, I've been reading Howard Zinn lately.)


dmb says:

At this point, it certainly looks like the Republicans will benefit from it. Howard Zinn's light is very handy in a situation like this. The people are being used against the people, as usual. In that spirit, how about a local working gal's view of the big plan? This is about as fun as the Wall Street Journal ever gets:

As supporters held signs extolling religious freedom at the site of the proposed Islamic center Wednesday, a stripper who gave her name as Cassandra was working the afternoon shift at New York Dolls on Murray Street — just around the corner. She worried that calls to prayer from the mosque at Park51 might wake up neighbors. But when she was told that the organizers aren’t planning loudspeakers, she said she didn’t have a problem with the project.
“I don’t know what the big deal is,” Cassandra said. “It’s freedom of religion, you know?”
Down on Church Street, one block east of the proposed Islamic center and two blocks from Ground Zero, men placed bets on horse racing at an Off-Track Betting facility. One bettor said he could see why the families of victims might get upset about the mosque and community center, but scoffed at the notion that the area around the betting parlor was hallowed ground.
“The bums used to sit right in front of it,” he said of the Park51 location, which would replace a former Burlington Coat Factory store damaged in the terrorist attack.
Not everyone engaged in weekday activities in the neighborhood agrees. Workers near the World Trade Center — including those working in the site — have expressed opposition to the proposed Islamic center. Some of the construction workers have even taken to wearing stickers and signs that demonstrate their opposition to the project, as  the news website DNAinfo reported.
But if Ground Zero has been made sacred by tragedy, it’s hard to say the same for the Pussycat Lounge one block south of the site. The front entrance of the strip club and bar, which has been there for more than four decades, offers a clear view of the ongoing construction at the World Trade Center site. There weren’t many customers on Wednesday afternoon, when a television reporter stood in the middle of the street filming a report on the Park51 controversy.
Inside, a bartender who said her name was Dasha offered brief remarks against the proposed Islamic center. She said she’s uneasy about organized religion in general.
But Chris, the stripper who volunteered in the Ground Zero recovery, sat on a barstool in a tiny, shiny red dress and defended Park51. “They’re not building a mosque in the World Trade Center,” she pointed out. “It’s all good. You have your synagogues and your churches. And you have a mosque.”
Chris said she lost eight friends on Sept. 11, 2001 — firefighters from the Brooklyn firehouse next to her home at the time. “The people who did it are not going to the mosque,” she said. 

Steve quoted former free-loving hippie Cat Steven's comments on being asked about Salman Rushdie:
 "Under Islamic Law, the ruling regarding blasphemy is quite clear; the person found guilty of it must be put to death. Only under certain circumstances can repentance be accepted.... The fact is that as far as the application of Islamic Law and the implementation of full Islamic way of life in Britain is concerned, Muslims realize that there is very little chance of that happening in the near future. But..."


dmb says:

There really is no comparison to this drastic Islamic law but I recently learned that blasphemy was still a crime in the UK until very recently. Just a few years ago a comedian named Stewart Lee was actually charged with the crime. He seems to be okay now so they apparently don't put people to death for it, but they used to. We used to. Christianity doesn't act like that anymore but this behavior is definitely not alien to our culture. You know what I was saying about the Islamic nations being nearly psychotic in their repressive attitudes toward women? Well, you could say the same thing about Victorian America or Victorian England. 

I'm not saying that Islamic fundamentalism is a friend of mine and I don't mean to suggest that militant Islam is a fiction. But they really aren't so different from us. Most of the difference really boil down to money, schooling and culture. Judaism, Islam and Christianity are three peas in a pod, you know. They come out of the same books. In some stories, if you scratched out one name and put in the other, you would hardly notice any difference. 

If there is one thing we learned from the post 9-11 Bush administration, it is that fear makes people stupid. Fear makes people vote against people. It makes them hate government that's of the people. (That's me channeling Zinn.) 











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