Some loosely connected articles
Jul. 31st, 2010 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
A few of them are about the proposed mosque near the WTC site. Sorry, it's not a mosque. It's a cultural center which will have a mosque appended to it. So when people start talking about a "15 story mosque", think instead "15 stories of classrooms and pools and a gym, oh, and a mosque". Also, when they say "At the WTC" don't think "At the WTC" think "A few blocks away where there used to be a Burlington Coat Factory". I used to shop there occasionally. It's not quite as close as it's being made out to be.
Now, the Boy Scouts are trying to rebuild their ranks. Most of the comments point out that the Boy Scouts condone and endorse (and practice!) exclusion of atheists and gays. One of them, however, goes "Well, this country was better when we had more Boy Scouts and official recognition of them!" You know, back in the 50s or so.
Her crown glinting in the morning sun, Miss America was telling 45,000 Boy Scouts and their leaders the other day how thrilled she was to be here at the National Scout Jamboree, to be among “the most amazing young women ...”
Whoops! The scouts, ever courteous and kind, could nonetheless barely stifle a collective groan. Some covered their faces in embarrassment. Miss America — Caressa Cameron, the former Miss Virginia — quickly recovered, apologized and explained that she usually speaks to groups of young women.
The slip was an inadvertent reminder of a host of issues, including whether to admit girls, that the Boy Scouts of America faces this year as it celebrates its 100th anniversary.
The organization, long an icon of wholesomeness in a simpler America, has seen its membership plunge by 42 percent since its peak year of 1973, when there were 4.8 million scouts. In the last decade alone, membership has dropped by more than 16 percent, to 2.8 million.
The declines reflect the difficulties of keeping up with changing times and shifting demographics, as well as of battling a perception that the organization is exclusionary because it bars gay people and atheists, not to mention girls under 13.
An even bigger challenge emerged this year as a jury ordered the Scouts to pay $18.5 million in damages to a man who had been abused by a scout leader as a boy. The trial focused renewed attention on the secret files that the Scouts’ national office in Texas has kept for more than 70 years of claims of sexual abuse by troop leaders and volunteers.
Now, as the organization tries to rebuild its image and its membership, it has been forced to make a priority of addressing that problem, with a plan that it calls “youth protection.”
Under Robert Mazzuca, who took the helm of the Scouts three years ago as chief executive, the group has taken several steps to try to reassure parents that their children are safe. These include hiring a full-time youth protection director, Michael Johnson, a former police detective who is an expert on child abuse investigation and prevention.
Mr. Mazzuca said in an interview that scouting remained grounded in the core values of the Boy Scout Law (trustworthy, loyal, helpful) but that the organization needed better ways to communicate its relevance.
“We have allowed ourselves to be defined by others for a long period of time, and it’s time for us to be in charge of our own definition,” he said.
“Anything 100 years old has earned the right to a little arthritis,” he said, but added that this organization had become “stodgy and bureaucratic.”
“We need to be more nimble,” he said. “Scouts still have a wonderful story to tell.”
The jamboree here is a testament to the many ways in which the Scouts have adapted. Spread across hundreds of acres of this dusty military base, the scout encampment still offers boys the chance to partake in the activities that their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed — fly-fishing, reading a compass, rustling up a meal. Many boys devote hours to the low-tech pursuit of swapping scout patches with the same fervor of Wall Street traders.
But this is not your father’s jamboree. Among the sprawling areas here is a technology center with robotics and a tent where boys can have their mouths swiped to take a sample of their DNA. Some boys sport lime-green hair to match the T-shirts of their non-dress uniforms, and most wear loose-fitting knee-length shorts, some surfer-dude cool with bright swirls.
Scouts also wear “smart bracelets” that allow them to go cashless as they buy soda and memorabilia. An inflatable mosque provides a place for Muslim scouts to worship. There are stations where scouts can recharge their cellphones as well as those offering free calls and time online. Despite these innovations, there has been less advancement on other fronts. The tens of thousands of scouts here were largely a homogenous group of white boys. A Scout study from a few years ago on “tapping into diverse markets” said that parents of African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians had “no emotional connection to scouting.” A documentary to be broadcast in August on PBS explores this concept as it follows black and Hispanic scouts from Harlem.
Mr. Mazzuca is trying to change that, with the Scouts making a major push among Hispanics, the largest-growing ethnic group in the country. “We used to just translate our material into Spanish words,” he said, “not linking them to things that are meaningful to Hispanics.” He said that focus groups showed that Hispanics viewed the Boy Scouts as “elite and unattainable.” And in setting up pilot programs, he said, he had to overcome concern that some potential scouts might be from illegal immigrant families.
In a pilot program in Fresno, Calif., Mr. Mazzuca said, the Scouts had doubled their Hispanic membership in nine weeks, though it is not clear yet how many will stay.
But the demographic group that seems to have drawn the most attention is young girls. When they turn 13 and have completed eighth grade, they can join the Boy Scouts’ Venturing program, where many of the leaders are women. But many are pushing for access for preteen girls.
Katrell Cooper, a 16-year-old venturer from Utah, who works at the BMX center here, turned up her nose at the Girl Scouts.
“I don’t want to sit around and make quilts and sell cookies,” she said after she expertly glided down a mountain-boarding course on which a few boys had tumbled. “I want to do stuff.”
The debate rages on scout Web sites over the perceived advantages and disadvantages of allowing younger girls. Would they be too much of a distraction? Or would their presence better prepare boys for the real world?
Several 15-year-old boys here said they would welcome girls into the Boy Scouts. “It would be more cool with them,” said Shane West from Jupiter, Fla. Why? “They’re girls.”
Rocky Spiker, from Utah, said girls would “keep us in line.” Ben Rosenbaum, also from Utah, said, “Women deserve the same stuff as men do.”
The boys were practicing at a shooting range, where their instructor, Kelli Walters, 18, from Pennsylvania, who is certified by the National Rifle Association and is part of the Venturing program, had longed to join the Boy Scouts, a family tradition. She was bored with Girl Scouts.
Mr. Mazzuca said he wanted the Scouts to stay true to the organization’s roots of helping boys, especially at younger ages, to become good men, but he was open to discussions.
For now, he is focused on the jamboree, which holds its centennial celebration Saturday. The anniversary will be marked across the country, including in Times Square, where a display will offer canoe rides in an artificial river on Broadway.
Then for the Scouts, it will be back to finding a way out of the woods.
And a corollary article on the Girl Scouts.
Two years shy of their 100th birthday, the Girl Scouts are going through a midlife crisis of sorts, rethinking everything except their cookie recipes.
Struggling to maintain its relevance after years of declining membership, the organization is rolling out a rebranding campaign — for the first time in 30 years — throughout the country this month, trying to shed the quaint image of crafts and campfire songs and reposition itself as an agent of change for girls.
“Our image was seen as old-fashioned and a bit tired,” said Laurel Richie, the chief marketing officer, who was a partner at the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, where she rebranded companies like American Express.
The update includes a new logo — the old one had been around since the graphic designer and filmmaker Saul Bass created it in 1978 — with bangs and an upturned nose.
Membership has declined 13 percent in the past decade. Recruiting urban and minority girls is the nub of the Girl Scouts’ effort to push back. Its new “What Did You Do Today?” campaign will also appear in Spanish-language media outlets to reach out to the growing number of teenage Hispanic girls in the United States.
This fall, the Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas, in San Antonio, plans to introduce a new initiative, called Gamma Sigma, with five public high schools in a district with a high rate of dropouts and teenage pregnancy.
“Gamma Sigma suggests a club with sororitylike traditions like pinning and candlelight ceremonies that appeal to girls,” said Ann Maria Chavez, the council’s chief executive.
Traditional badges are out. Gamma Sigma will have speakers, workshops and experiences intended to bolster girls’ self-esteem and decision-making, Ms. Chavez said.
What succeeds in San Antonio — which has 18,400 scouts in an area that extends to the Mexican border — will resonate, she said, because the area’s 60 percent Hispanic population mirrors “what is happening across the country, and what the rest of the country will look like in 15 to 20 years.”
“This will help girls get involved and think about who they are and where they want to go with their lives,” said Ms. Chavez, who also noted that “it’s not easy to reach girls that age.”
She said she thought she was “really connecting to girls” by using Twitter, then “one of them told me, ‘We don’t use Twitter.’ So I stopped that.”
As much as the Girl Scouts are intent on modernizing, they are not tinkering with the cookies. Last year, the Girl Scouts sold $700 million in Thin Mints, Do-Si-Dos and the rest. Sales were up 2.6 percent over 2008, the organization said.
Even so, Ms. Richie said, “We’ve got to be seen as more than cute little Brownies selling cookies.”
One link on the subject of how some parties lie and manipulate (brings up the cultural center AND the boy scouts, so it's our little linchpin here)
A NYTimes article on the cultural center Read the comments, they're... enlightening. My favorite was the one who said upfront that people a few thousand miles away don't get any say. Hear, hear! You don't live in NYC, you never lived in NYC, you probably don't especially want to come to NYC - you don't get a vote.
Incidentally, for all the people talking about the guys "celebrating in Pakistan" or wherever it was, all I can think, every time, is of sitting on 9/11 watching the video of people being evacuated from Disney World, laughing and waving.
Debate Heats Up About Mosque Near Ground Zero
By MICHAEL BARBARO
An influential Jewish organization on Friday announced its opposition to a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan, intensifying a fierce national debate about the limits of religious freedom and the meaning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The decision by the group, the Anti-Defamation League, touched off angry reactions from a range of religious groups, which argued that the country would show its tolerance and values by welcoming the center near the site where radical Muslims killed about 2,750 people.
But the unexpected move by the ADL, a mainstream group that has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on plans for the Muslim center, could well be a turning point in the battle over the project.
In New York, where ground zero has slowly blended back into the fabric of the city, government officials appear poised to approve plans for the sprawling complex, which would have as many as 15 stories and would house a prayer space, a performing arts center, a pool and a restaurant.
But around the country opposition is mounting, fueled in part by Republican leaders and conservative pundits. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the center, branding it an “unnecessary provocation.” A Republican political action committee has produced a television commercial assailing the proposal. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has decried it in speeches.
The complex’s rapid evolution from a local zoning dispute into a national referendum highlights the intense and unsettled emotions that still surround the World Trade Center site nine years after the attacks.
To many New Yorkers, especially in Manhattan, it is a construction zone, passed during the daily commute or glimpsed through office windows. To some outside of the city, though, it stands as a hallowed battlefield that must be shielded and memorialized.
Those who are fighting the project argue that building a house of Muslim worship so close to ground zero is at best an affront to the families of those who died there and at worst an act of aggression that would, they say, mark the place where radical Islam achieved a blow against the United States.
“The World Trade Center is the largest loss of American life on our soil since the Civil War,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And we have not rebuilt it, which drives people crazy. And in that setting, we are told, why don’t we have a 13-story mosque and community center?”
He added: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.”
Several family members of victims at the World Trade Center have weighed in against the plan, saying it would desecrate what amounts to a graveyard. “When I look over there and see a mosque, it’s going to hurt,” C. Lee Hanson, whose son, Peter, was killed in the attacks, said at a recent public hearing. “Build it someplace else.”
Those who support it seem mystified and flustered by the heated opposition. They contend that the project, with an estimated cost of $100 million, is intended to span the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim, not widen it.
Oz Sultan, the programming director for the center, said the complex was based on Jewish community centers and Y.M.C.A.’s in Manhattan. It is to have a board composed of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders and is intended to create a national model of moderate Islam.
“We are looking to build bridges between faiths,” Mr. Sultan said in an interview.
City officials, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, have forcefully defended the project on the grounds of religious freedom, saying that government has no place dictating where a house of worship is located. The local community board has given overwhelming backing to the project, and the city’s landmarks commission is expected to do the same on Tuesday.
“What is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?” Mr. Bloomberg asked recently.
“Democracy is stronger than this,” he added. “And for us to just say no is just, I think — not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.”
Still, the arguments against the Muslim center appear to be resonating. Polling shows that a majority of Americans oppose building it near ground zero.
Resistance is particularly strong among some national Republican leaders. In stump speeches, Twitter messages and op-ed articles, they have turned angry denunciations of the plan into a political rallying cry that they say has surprising potency.
The two major Republican candidates for governor of New York, Rick A. Lazio and Carl Paladino, are making it a central issue in their campaigns, attacking the state’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, who is also the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, for not aggressively investigating the project’s finances..
In North Carolina, Ilario Pantano, a former Marine and a Republican candidate for Congress, has also campaigned on the issue, and says it is stirring voters in his rural district, some 600 miles away from ground zero.
A few days ago, at a roadside pizza shop in the small town of Salemburg, he attacked the proposal before an enthusiastic crowd of hog farmers and military veterans.
“Uniformly, there was disgust and disdain in the room for the idea,” Mr. Pantano said.
The issue was wrenching for the Anti-Defamation League, which in the past has spoken out against anti-Islamic sentiment. But its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11, and he suggested that the center’s backers should look for a site “a mile away.”
“It’s the wrong place,” Mr. Foxman said. “Find another place.”
Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.
“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s statement drew criticism almost immediately.
“The ADL should be ashamed of itself,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which promotes interethnic and interfaith dialogue. Speaking of the imam behind the proposed center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, he said, “Here, we ask the moderate leaders of the Muslim community to step forward, and when one of them does, he is treated with suspicion.”
C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington group that emphasizes religious freedom, called the decision “disappointing,” and said he read about it “with a great deal of sorrow.”
On Friday, Mr. Sultan, the programming director for the proposed Muslim center, expressed surprise and sadness at the news. Told of Mr. Foxman’s remarks about the families of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “That response is just not well thought out.” He said that Muslims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin towers, or responded to the scene.
“The ADL has always been antibigotry,” he said. “This just does not seem consistent with their message.”
Incidentally, I'll cut you some slack because you *are* a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Foxman, but comparing 9/11 TO the Holocaust? If I did it, or anybody else did it, we'd be told just how classy we were.
And another link on the not-actually-a-mosque.
Apparently some buses in the nation currently have anti-Islam ads on their sides.
Oh, and the Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee says that Islam might be a "cult". Yes, I suppose for that definition of "cult" that includes every religion under the sun, sure!
Now, the Boy Scouts are trying to rebuild their ranks. Most of the comments point out that the Boy Scouts condone and endorse (and practice!) exclusion of atheists and gays. One of them, however, goes "Well, this country was better when we had more Boy Scouts and official recognition of them!" You know, back in the 50s or so.
Her crown glinting in the morning sun, Miss America was telling 45,000 Boy Scouts and their leaders the other day how thrilled she was to be here at the National Scout Jamboree, to be among “the most amazing young women ...”
Whoops! The scouts, ever courteous and kind, could nonetheless barely stifle a collective groan. Some covered their faces in embarrassment. Miss America — Caressa Cameron, the former Miss Virginia — quickly recovered, apologized and explained that she usually speaks to groups of young women.
The slip was an inadvertent reminder of a host of issues, including whether to admit girls, that the Boy Scouts of America faces this year as it celebrates its 100th anniversary.
The organization, long an icon of wholesomeness in a simpler America, has seen its membership plunge by 42 percent since its peak year of 1973, when there were 4.8 million scouts. In the last decade alone, membership has dropped by more than 16 percent, to 2.8 million.
The declines reflect the difficulties of keeping up with changing times and shifting demographics, as well as of battling a perception that the organization is exclusionary because it bars gay people and atheists, not to mention girls under 13.
An even bigger challenge emerged this year as a jury ordered the Scouts to pay $18.5 million in damages to a man who had been abused by a scout leader as a boy. The trial focused renewed attention on the secret files that the Scouts’ national office in Texas has kept for more than 70 years of claims of sexual abuse by troop leaders and volunteers.
Now, as the organization tries to rebuild its image and its membership, it has been forced to make a priority of addressing that problem, with a plan that it calls “youth protection.”
Under Robert Mazzuca, who took the helm of the Scouts three years ago as chief executive, the group has taken several steps to try to reassure parents that their children are safe. These include hiring a full-time youth protection director, Michael Johnson, a former police detective who is an expert on child abuse investigation and prevention.
Mr. Mazzuca said in an interview that scouting remained grounded in the core values of the Boy Scout Law (trustworthy, loyal, helpful) but that the organization needed better ways to communicate its relevance.
“We have allowed ourselves to be defined by others for a long period of time, and it’s time for us to be in charge of our own definition,” he said.
“Anything 100 years old has earned the right to a little arthritis,” he said, but added that this organization had become “stodgy and bureaucratic.”
“We need to be more nimble,” he said. “Scouts still have a wonderful story to tell.”
The jamboree here is a testament to the many ways in which the Scouts have adapted. Spread across hundreds of acres of this dusty military base, the scout encampment still offers boys the chance to partake in the activities that their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed — fly-fishing, reading a compass, rustling up a meal. Many boys devote hours to the low-tech pursuit of swapping scout patches with the same fervor of Wall Street traders.
But this is not your father’s jamboree. Among the sprawling areas here is a technology center with robotics and a tent where boys can have their mouths swiped to take a sample of their DNA. Some boys sport lime-green hair to match the T-shirts of their non-dress uniforms, and most wear loose-fitting knee-length shorts, some surfer-dude cool with bright swirls.
Scouts also wear “smart bracelets” that allow them to go cashless as they buy soda and memorabilia. An inflatable mosque provides a place for Muslim scouts to worship. There are stations where scouts can recharge their cellphones as well as those offering free calls and time online. Despite these innovations, there has been less advancement on other fronts. The tens of thousands of scouts here were largely a homogenous group of white boys. A Scout study from a few years ago on “tapping into diverse markets” said that parents of African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians had “no emotional connection to scouting.” A documentary to be broadcast in August on PBS explores this concept as it follows black and Hispanic scouts from Harlem.
Mr. Mazzuca is trying to change that, with the Scouts making a major push among Hispanics, the largest-growing ethnic group in the country. “We used to just translate our material into Spanish words,” he said, “not linking them to things that are meaningful to Hispanics.” He said that focus groups showed that Hispanics viewed the Boy Scouts as “elite and unattainable.” And in setting up pilot programs, he said, he had to overcome concern that some potential scouts might be from illegal immigrant families.
In a pilot program in Fresno, Calif., Mr. Mazzuca said, the Scouts had doubled their Hispanic membership in nine weeks, though it is not clear yet how many will stay.
But the demographic group that seems to have drawn the most attention is young girls. When they turn 13 and have completed eighth grade, they can join the Boy Scouts’ Venturing program, where many of the leaders are women. But many are pushing for access for preteen girls.
Katrell Cooper, a 16-year-old venturer from Utah, who works at the BMX center here, turned up her nose at the Girl Scouts.
“I don’t want to sit around and make quilts and sell cookies,” she said after she expertly glided down a mountain-boarding course on which a few boys had tumbled. “I want to do stuff.”
The debate rages on scout Web sites over the perceived advantages and disadvantages of allowing younger girls. Would they be too much of a distraction? Or would their presence better prepare boys for the real world?
Several 15-year-old boys here said they would welcome girls into the Boy Scouts. “It would be more cool with them,” said Shane West from Jupiter, Fla. Why? “They’re girls.”
Rocky Spiker, from Utah, said girls would “keep us in line.” Ben Rosenbaum, also from Utah, said, “Women deserve the same stuff as men do.”
The boys were practicing at a shooting range, where their instructor, Kelli Walters, 18, from Pennsylvania, who is certified by the National Rifle Association and is part of the Venturing program, had longed to join the Boy Scouts, a family tradition. She was bored with Girl Scouts.
Mr. Mazzuca said he wanted the Scouts to stay true to the organization’s roots of helping boys, especially at younger ages, to become good men, but he was open to discussions.
For now, he is focused on the jamboree, which holds its centennial celebration Saturday. The anniversary will be marked across the country, including in Times Square, where a display will offer canoe rides in an artificial river on Broadway.
Then for the Scouts, it will be back to finding a way out of the woods.
And a corollary article on the Girl Scouts.
Two years shy of their 100th birthday, the Girl Scouts are going through a midlife crisis of sorts, rethinking everything except their cookie recipes.
Struggling to maintain its relevance after years of declining membership, the organization is rolling out a rebranding campaign — for the first time in 30 years — throughout the country this month, trying to shed the quaint image of crafts and campfire songs and reposition itself as an agent of change for girls.
“Our image was seen as old-fashioned and a bit tired,” said Laurel Richie, the chief marketing officer, who was a partner at the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, where she rebranded companies like American Express.
The update includes a new logo — the old one had been around since the graphic designer and filmmaker Saul Bass created it in 1978 — with bangs and an upturned nose.
Membership has declined 13 percent in the past decade. Recruiting urban and minority girls is the nub of the Girl Scouts’ effort to push back. Its new “What Did You Do Today?” campaign will also appear in Spanish-language media outlets to reach out to the growing number of teenage Hispanic girls in the United States.
This fall, the Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas, in San Antonio, plans to introduce a new initiative, called Gamma Sigma, with five public high schools in a district with a high rate of dropouts and teenage pregnancy.
“Gamma Sigma suggests a club with sororitylike traditions like pinning and candlelight ceremonies that appeal to girls,” said Ann Maria Chavez, the council’s chief executive.
Traditional badges are out. Gamma Sigma will have speakers, workshops and experiences intended to bolster girls’ self-esteem and decision-making, Ms. Chavez said.
What succeeds in San Antonio — which has 18,400 scouts in an area that extends to the Mexican border — will resonate, she said, because the area’s 60 percent Hispanic population mirrors “what is happening across the country, and what the rest of the country will look like in 15 to 20 years.”
“This will help girls get involved and think about who they are and where they want to go with their lives,” said Ms. Chavez, who also noted that “it’s not easy to reach girls that age.”
She said she thought she was “really connecting to girls” by using Twitter, then “one of them told me, ‘We don’t use Twitter.’ So I stopped that.”
As much as the Girl Scouts are intent on modernizing, they are not tinkering with the cookies. Last year, the Girl Scouts sold $700 million in Thin Mints, Do-Si-Dos and the rest. Sales were up 2.6 percent over 2008, the organization said.
Even so, Ms. Richie said, “We’ve got to be seen as more than cute little Brownies selling cookies.”
One link on the subject of how some parties lie and manipulate (brings up the cultural center AND the boy scouts, so it's our little linchpin here)
A NYTimes article on the cultural center Read the comments, they're... enlightening. My favorite was the one who said upfront that people a few thousand miles away don't get any say. Hear, hear! You don't live in NYC, you never lived in NYC, you probably don't especially want to come to NYC - you don't get a vote.
Incidentally, for all the people talking about the guys "celebrating in Pakistan" or wherever it was, all I can think, every time, is of sitting on 9/11 watching the video of people being evacuated from Disney World, laughing and waving.
Debate Heats Up About Mosque Near Ground Zero
By MICHAEL BARBARO
An influential Jewish organization on Friday announced its opposition to a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan, intensifying a fierce national debate about the limits of religious freedom and the meaning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The decision by the group, the Anti-Defamation League, touched off angry reactions from a range of religious groups, which argued that the country would show its tolerance and values by welcoming the center near the site where radical Muslims killed about 2,750 people.
But the unexpected move by the ADL, a mainstream group that has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on plans for the Muslim center, could well be a turning point in the battle over the project.
In New York, where ground zero has slowly blended back into the fabric of the city, government officials appear poised to approve plans for the sprawling complex, which would have as many as 15 stories and would house a prayer space, a performing arts center, a pool and a restaurant.
But around the country opposition is mounting, fueled in part by Republican leaders and conservative pundits. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the center, branding it an “unnecessary provocation.” A Republican political action committee has produced a television commercial assailing the proposal. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has decried it in speeches.
The complex’s rapid evolution from a local zoning dispute into a national referendum highlights the intense and unsettled emotions that still surround the World Trade Center site nine years after the attacks.
To many New Yorkers, especially in Manhattan, it is a construction zone, passed during the daily commute or glimpsed through office windows. To some outside of the city, though, it stands as a hallowed battlefield that must be shielded and memorialized.
Those who are fighting the project argue that building a house of Muslim worship so close to ground zero is at best an affront to the families of those who died there and at worst an act of aggression that would, they say, mark the place where radical Islam achieved a blow against the United States.
“The World Trade Center is the largest loss of American life on our soil since the Civil War,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And we have not rebuilt it, which drives people crazy. And in that setting, we are told, why don’t we have a 13-story mosque and community center?”
He added: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.”
Several family members of victims at the World Trade Center have weighed in against the plan, saying it would desecrate what amounts to a graveyard. “When I look over there and see a mosque, it’s going to hurt,” C. Lee Hanson, whose son, Peter, was killed in the attacks, said at a recent public hearing. “Build it someplace else.”
Those who support it seem mystified and flustered by the heated opposition. They contend that the project, with an estimated cost of $100 million, is intended to span the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim, not widen it.
Oz Sultan, the programming director for the center, said the complex was based on Jewish community centers and Y.M.C.A.’s in Manhattan. It is to have a board composed of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders and is intended to create a national model of moderate Islam.
“We are looking to build bridges between faiths,” Mr. Sultan said in an interview.
City officials, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, have forcefully defended the project on the grounds of religious freedom, saying that government has no place dictating where a house of worship is located. The local community board has given overwhelming backing to the project, and the city’s landmarks commission is expected to do the same on Tuesday.
“What is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?” Mr. Bloomberg asked recently.
“Democracy is stronger than this,” he added. “And for us to just say no is just, I think — not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.”
Still, the arguments against the Muslim center appear to be resonating. Polling shows that a majority of Americans oppose building it near ground zero.
Resistance is particularly strong among some national Republican leaders. In stump speeches, Twitter messages and op-ed articles, they have turned angry denunciations of the plan into a political rallying cry that they say has surprising potency.
The two major Republican candidates for governor of New York, Rick A. Lazio and Carl Paladino, are making it a central issue in their campaigns, attacking the state’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, who is also the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, for not aggressively investigating the project’s finances..
In North Carolina, Ilario Pantano, a former Marine and a Republican candidate for Congress, has also campaigned on the issue, and says it is stirring voters in his rural district, some 600 miles away from ground zero.
A few days ago, at a roadside pizza shop in the small town of Salemburg, he attacked the proposal before an enthusiastic crowd of hog farmers and military veterans.
“Uniformly, there was disgust and disdain in the room for the idea,” Mr. Pantano said.
The issue was wrenching for the Anti-Defamation League, which in the past has spoken out against anti-Islamic sentiment. But its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11, and he suggested that the center’s backers should look for a site “a mile away.”
“It’s the wrong place,” Mr. Foxman said. “Find another place.”
Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.
“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s statement drew criticism almost immediately.
“The ADL should be ashamed of itself,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which promotes interethnic and interfaith dialogue. Speaking of the imam behind the proposed center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, he said, “Here, we ask the moderate leaders of the Muslim community to step forward, and when one of them does, he is treated with suspicion.”
C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, a Washington group that emphasizes religious freedom, called the decision “disappointing,” and said he read about it “with a great deal of sorrow.”
On Friday, Mr. Sultan, the programming director for the proposed Muslim center, expressed surprise and sadness at the news. Told of Mr. Foxman’s remarks about the families of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “That response is just not well thought out.” He said that Muslims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin towers, or responded to the scene.
“The ADL has always been antibigotry,” he said. “This just does not seem consistent with their message.”
Incidentally, I'll cut you some slack because you *are* a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Foxman, but comparing 9/11 TO the Holocaust? If I did it, or anybody else did it, we'd be told just how classy we were.
And another link on the not-actually-a-mosque.
Apparently some buses in the nation currently have anti-Islam ads on their sides.
Oh, and the Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee says that Islam might be a "cult". Yes, I suppose for that definition of "cult" that includes every religion under the sun, sure!
More loose connections: First article mentions this
Date: 2010-07-31 09:19 pm (UTC)"GOP members called it a 'slush fund.' Is there a merit badge for classy?"
What they don't tell you is about the way they killed it, explained here (complete with towering rant):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry4H6ujgd60
We love Anthony Weiner. He can be vice president when we elect Grayson.