Some articles!
Aug. 9th, 2010 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyGuess what? People are lying when they say "Why the WTC?" because they don't want mosques ANYwhere in the US.
Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
While a high-profile battle rages over a mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, heated confrontations have also broken out in communities across the country where mosques are proposed for far less hallowed locations.
In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for a march and a county meeting.
In late June, in Temecula, Calif., members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby.
In Sheboygan, Wis., a few Christian ministers led a noisy fight against a Muslim group that sought permission to open a mosque in a former health food store bought by a Muslim doctor.
At one time, neighbors who did not want mosques in their backyards said their concerns were over traffic, parking and noise — the same reasons they might object to a church or a synagogue. But now the gloves are off.
In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law.
These local skirmishes make clear that there is now widespread debate about whether the best way to uphold America’s democratic values is to allow Muslims the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans, or to pull away the welcome mat from a faith seen as a singular threat.
“What’s different is the heat, the volume, the level of hostility,” said Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky. “It’s one thing to oppose a mosque because traffic might increase, but it’s different when you say these mosques are going to be nurturing terrorist bombers, that Islam is invading, that civilization is being undermined by Muslims.”
Feeding the resistance is a growing cottage industry of authors and bloggers — some of them former Muslims — who are invited to speak at rallies, sell their books and testify in churches. Their message is that Islam is inherently violent and incompatible with America.
But they have not gone unanswered. In each community, interfaith groups led by Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, rabbis and clergy members of other faiths have defended the mosques. Often, they have been slower to organize than the mosque opponents, but their numbers have usually been larger.
The mosque proposed for the site near ground zero in Lower Manhattan cleared a final hurdle last week before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailed the decision with a forceful speech on religious liberty. While an array of religious groups supported the project, opponents included the Anti-Defamation League, an influential Jewish group, and prominent Republicans like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker.
A smaller controversy is occurring in Temecula, about 60 miles north of San Diego, involving a typical stew of religion, politics and anti-immigrant sentiment. A Muslim community has been there for about 12 years and expanded to 150 families who have outgrown their makeshift worship space in a warehouse, said Mahmoud Harmoush, the imam, a lecturer at California State University, San Bernardino. The group wants to build a 25,000-square-foot center, with space for classrooms and a playground, on a lot it bought in 2000.
Mr. Harmoush said the Muslim families had contributed to the local food bank, sent truckloads of supplies to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and participated in music nights and Thanksgiving events with the local interfaith council.
“We do all these activities and nobody notices,” he said. “Now that we have to build our center, everybody jumps to make it an issue.”
Recently, a small group of activists became alarmed about the mosque. Diana Serafin, a grandmother who lost her job in tech support this year, said she reached out to others she knew from attending Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies. She said they read books by critics of Islam, including former Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. She also attended a meeting of the local chapter of ACT! for America, a Florida-based group that says its purpose is to defend Western civilization against Islam.
“As a mother and a grandmother, I worry,” Ms. Serafin said. “I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that.”
“I do believe everybody has a right to freedom of religion,” she said. “But Islam is not about a religion. It’s a political government, and it’s 100 percent against our Constitution.”
Ms. Serafin was among an estimated 20 to 30 people who turned out to protest the mosque, including some who intentionally took dogs to offend those Muslims who consider dogs to be ritually unclean. But they were outnumbered by at least 75 supporters. The City of Temecula recently postponed a hearing on whether to grant the mosque a permit.
Larry Slusser, a Mormon and the secretary of the Interfaith Council of Murietta and Temecula, went to the protest to support the Muslim group. “I know them,” he said. “They’re good people. They have no ill intent. They’re good Americans. They are leaders in their professions.”
Of the protesters, he said, “they have fear because they don’t know them.”
Religious freedom is also at stake, Mr. Slusser said, adding, “They’re Americans, they deserve to have a place to worship just like everybody else.”
There are about 1,900 mosques in the United States, which run the gamut from makeshift prayer rooms in storefronts and houses to large buildings with adjoining community centers, according to a preliminary survey by Mr. Bagby, who conducted a mosque study 10 years ago and is now undertaking another.
A two-year study by a group of academics on American Muslims and terrorism concluded that contemporary mosques are actually a deterrent to the spread of militant Islam and terrorism. The study was conducted by professors with Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the University of North Carolina. It disclosed that many mosque leaders had put significant effort into countering extremism by building youth programs, sponsoring antiviolence forums and scrutinizing teachers and texts.
Radicalization of alienated Muslim youths is a real threat, Mr. Bagby said. “But the youth we worry about,” he said, “are not the youth that come to the mosque.”
In central Tennessee, the mosque in Murfreesboro is the third one in the last year to encounter resistance. It became a political issue when Republican candidates for governor and Congress declared their opposition. (They were defeated in primary elections on Thursday.)
A group called Former Muslims United put up a billboard saying “Stop the Murfreesboro Mosque.” The group’s president is Nonie Darwish, also the founder of Arabs for Israel, who spoke against Islam in Murfreesboro at a fund-raising dinner for Christians United for Israel, an evangelical organization led by the Rev. John Hagee.
“A mosque is not just a place for worship,” Ms. Darwish said in an interview. “It’s a place where war is started, where commandments to do jihad start, where incitements against non-Muslims occur. It’s a place where ammunition was stored.”
Camie Ayash, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, lamented that people were listening to what she called “total disinformation” on Islam.
She said her group was stunned when what began as one person raising zoning questions about the new mosque evolved into mass protests with marchers waving signs about Shariah.
“A lot of Muslims came to the U.S. because they respect the Constitution,” she said. “There’s no conflict with the U.S. Constitution in Shariah law. If there were, Muslims wouldn’t be living here.”
In Wisconsin, the conflict over the mosque was settled when the Town Executive Council voted unanimously to give the Islamic Society of Sheboygan a permit to use the former health food store as a prayer space.
Dr. Mansoor Mirza, the physician who owns the property, said he was trying to take the long view of the controversy.
“Every new group coming to this country — Jews, Catholics, Irish, Germans, Japanese — has gone through this,” Dr. Mirza said. “Now I think it’s our turn to pay the price, and eventually we will be coming out of this, too.”
A Times blog about how reading any book over the summer is good for kids
You can read all nine pages of comments if you like, but they're mostly either "Yes, duh" or "OMG, no, if we don't force 'worthy' books on children they'll never read them ever!" Worthy means, basically, hard. If it's fun, if it's enjoyable in any way, if you don't have to struggle every page - it's a waste of time!
An op-ed about the marriage-restriction being overturned in California
Until Wednesday, the thousands of same-sex couples who have married did so because a state judge or Legislature allowed them to. The nation’s most fundamental guarantees of freedom, set out in the Constitution, were not part of the equation. That has changed with the historic decision by a federal judge in California, Vaughn Walker, that said his state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the 14th Amendment’s rights to equal protection and due process of law.
The decision, though an instant landmark in American legal history, is more than that. It also is a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.
As the case heads toward appeals at the circuit level and probably the Supreme Court, Judge Walker’s opinion will provide a firm legal foundation that will be difficult for appellate judges to assail.
The case was brought by two gay couples who said California’s Proposition 8, which passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote, discriminated against them by prohibiting same-sex marriage and relegating them to domestic partnerships. The judge easily dismissed the idea that discrimination is permissible if a majority of voters approve it; the referendum’s outcome was “irrelevant,” he said, quoting a 1943 case, because “fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote.”
He then dismantled, brick by crumbling brick, the weak case made by supporters of Proposition 8 and laid out the facts presented in testimony. The two witnesses called by the supporters (the state having bowed out of the case) had no credibility, he said, and presented no evidence that same-sex marriage harmed society or the institution of marriage.
Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in their ability to form successful marital unions and raise children, he said. Though procreation is not a necessary goal of marriage, children of same-sex couples will benefit from the stability provided by marriage, as will the state and society. Domestic partnerships confer a second-class status. The discrimination inherent in that second-class status is harmful to gay men and lesbians. These findings of fact will be highly significant as the case winds its way through years of appeals.
One of Judge Walker’s strongest points was that traditional notions of marriage can no longer be used to justify discrimination, just as gender roles in opposite-sex marriage have changed dramatically over the decades. All marriages are now unions of equals, he wrote, and there is no reason to restrict that equality to straight couples. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” he wrote. “That time has passed.”
To justify the proposition’s inherent discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation, he wrote, there would have to be a compelling state interest in banning same-sex marriage. But no rational basis for discrimination was presented at the two-and-a-half-week trial in January, he said. The real reason for Proposition 8, he wrote, is a moral view “that there is something wrong with same-sex couples,” and that is not a permissible reason for legislation.
“Moral disapproval alone,” he wrote, in words that could someday help change history, “is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women.”
The ideological odd couple who led the case — Ted Olson and David Boies, who fought against each other in the Supreme Court battle over the 2000 election — were criticized by some supporters of same-sex marriage for moving too quickly to the federal courts. Certainly, there is no guarantee that the current Supreme Court would uphold Judge Walker’s ruling. But there are times when legal opinions help lead public opinions.
Just as they did for racial equality in previous decades, the moment has arrived for the federal courts to bestow full equality to millions of gay men and lesbians.
On the uptick in bias crimes on Staten Island.
Young Residents on Staten Island Try to Make Sense of a Spate of Violence
By KIRK SEMPLE
Arianna Rodriguez, a bright and verbose 11-year-old, was bravely attempting to explain the swirl of race and class divisions, immigration politics and bewildering violence that had swamped Port Richmond, her neighborhood on Staten Island. Finally, she sighed and threw up her hands.
“What has it come to?” she asked. “This is terrible!”
In the past week, the world — at least in the eyes of Arianna and others of her generation in these uneasy streets on the borough’s north shore — seems to have descended on Port Richmond. Patrol cars cruise around the clock; television trucks have become a fixture; politicians wearing suits and furrowed brows come and go.
And just as the community’s leaders are trying to make sense of the crimes that have made the neighborhood a center of attention — a string of at least 10 attacks against Mexican immigrants, mostly by black assailants, in the past four months — so, too, are its young people.
Social workers and others point out not only that the children embody the community’s future, but also that most of the attackers are believed to be in their teens or early 20s. The most recent victim was 18.
On Monday night, young people were invited to speak at a round-table discussion with civic leaders at a local Baptist church, both as a sort of therapy and as a way to help the adults figure out how to address the roots of the violence. Their comments at the meeting, and in numerous interviews over the past few days, reveal the challenges of growing up in Port Richmond: navigating streets where the level of threat can change block by block and hour by hour; negotiating a place riven by fault lines of race, ethnicity, class and immigration status; and trying, in spite of all that, to hold on to friendships and simple pleasures.
“It used to be nice,” said Farad Montalvo, 17, a Staten Island native of part-Puerto Rican heritage who will be a senior at Port Richmond High School in the fall. “Now kids are getting scared. They can’t walk down the street now.”
Children here said they learned the geography of danger early in life. They know to avoid the darker streets and other places that offer cover for muggers. Some parents allow them to visit the main commercial strip, Port Richmond Avenue, by day but forbid them to go at night, when the street traditionally becomes the domain of thieves, hustlers and prostitutes.
The temporary police surge that began last week has apparently halted much of the crime along the avenue and nearby streets. But some children worried aloud about what would happen once the officers left.
“It’s a war between Mexicans and blacks,” said Dream Rogers, 11, who was walking with her sister, Kim, 10, on Tuesday. “When the cops leave, it’s going to start again.”
At school, social tensions are rarely felt among the youngest children but appear to worsen in the upper grades — and become increasingly complicated. High school students spoke of black classmates who disparaged other blacks from poorer backgrounds, and Mexican-Americans born in the United States who talked condescendingly about peers born in Mexico.
Some young people told of trying to digest bigoted comments by relatives and family friends while maintaining friendships with people of other ethnicities. One black high school sophomore, who counted Mexicans and other Latinos among her friends, said she had heard relatives and family friends criticize Mexicans. “People think of them as low,” she said.
Most students said that fistfights driven solely by ethnic differences were rare at their schools, where cliques were based on interests rather than race or national origin. Still, whether to assert their identity or protect themselves, Mexican gangs have taken root in the schools, they said.
Darren, who is black and a sophomore at Port Richmond High, said the gangs were intimidating and, as a result, their members were largely left alone. The more timid Mexicans were more likely to be picked on, he said.
“I’ve got nothing against them,” he said of Mexicans in general, as he arrived for a summer football clinic at the high school. “They work for my Moms.” He added, “One even made me breakfast this morning.”
The discussion on Monday night was supposed to be an opportunity for young children to express their concerns in a quiet setting. But it was somewhat eclipsed by the arrival of Christine C. Quinn, speaker of the City Council, and six television camera crews.
All the same, from the children’s halting comments emerged a list of changes they thought might make a difference in their lives, from increasing the number of public buses to creating a civilian neighborhood patrol.
“This neighborhood really changed from when I was growing up until now,” said Jocelyn Jackson, 14. “I’m always looking over my shoulder.”
On Wednesday — partly inspired, she said, by comments she had heard at the children’s meeting — Ms. Quinn unveiled a 10-point plan to respond to the violence. It included expanding an anti-bias curriculum in the area’s high schools, increasing anti-bias training for social service organizations, improving park safety and starting a public information campaign aboard the Staten Island Ferry.
But some children said there were problems that lay far deeper than such measures could reach. Larry Martinez, 17, vice president of a student anti-violence group that formed several years ago, said the biggest problem facing the neighborhood’s youth was a lack of recreation and other diversions.
“There is no money, there is no funding, there are no after-school activities, there are no camps,” said Larry, who was born on Staten Island and is of Mexican descent. “People have nothing to do.”
Some young people feared that students would take the summer’s violence into school in the fall, perhaps setting off wider conflicts.
“I know that if the attacks keep happening, the Hispanic gangs are going to do the same,” said Larry’s sister Sonia, 15, a junior. She paused, then added, “I don’t want this to be a clash of the gangs.”
On ugly animals
A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck!
By NATALIE ANGIER
A friend recently sent around an e-mail with the subject line “lost cat bulletin.” Open the message and — gack! — there was a head-on shot of a star-nosed mole, its “Dawn of the Dead” digging claws in full view and its hallmark nasal boutonniere of 22 highly sensitive feelers looking like fresh bits of sirloin being extruded through a meat grinder.
“I don’t think anyone would come near that cat, much less steal it,” tittered one respondent. Another participant, unfamiliar with the mole, wondered whether this was a “Photoshop project gone bad,” while a third simply wrote, “Ugh.”
We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish, octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.
Yet there are some animals that few would choose as wallpaper for a Web browser — that, to the contrary, will often provoke in a human viewer a reflexive retraction of the nostrils accompanied by a guttural or adenoidal vocalization: ugh, yuck, ew.
Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.
Among the all-star uglies are the star-nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away. The blobfish, by contrast, is practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor.
“It looks like if you handled it,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, “at the very least you’d get some kind of rash.”
We have the male proboscis monkey and the male elephant seal, with their pendulous, vaguely salacious Jimmy Durantes, and the woolly bat and the vampire bat, their squashed snub noses accentuating their razor-toothed gapes. The warthog’s trapezoidal skull is straight out of Picasso’s “Guernica,” while the warthog’s kin, the babirusa, gives new meaning to the word skulduggery: On occasion, one of its two pairs of curving tusks will grow up and around and pierce right into its skull.
Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that are stump-limbed, hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as a jack rabbit’s or curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it.
As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.
“No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue,” said Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “But the resemblance of the pinkish nose to human flesh subverts our expectations and becomes a perverse violation of whatever values we have about what constitutes normal or healthy human skin.”
Conservation researchers argue that only by being aware of our aesthetic prejudices can we set them aside when deciding which species cry out to be studied and saved. Reporting recently in the journal Conservation Biology, Morgan J. Trimble, a research fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and her colleagues examined the scientific literature for roughly 2,000 animal species in southern Africa, and uncovered evidence that scientists, like the rest of us, may be biased toward the beefcakes and beauty queens.
Assessing the publication database for the years 1994 through 2008, the researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee.
“The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” Ms. Trimble said. Speculating on a possible reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love of what they do, and a lot of them are interested in big, furry cute things.”
Or little cute things. Humans and other mammals seem to have an innate baby schema, an attraction to infant cues like large, wide-set eyes, a button nose and a mouth set low in the face, and the universality of these cues explains why mother dogs have been known to nurse kittens, lionesses to take care of antelope kids.
On a first pass, then, “ugliness would be the deviation from these qualities,” said David Perrett, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Tiny, close-set eyes, prominent snout, no forehead to speak of: it sure sounds like a pig.
A helpless baby grows into a healthy, fertile youth, which in humans is visually characterized by clarity of shape, sleekness of form and visibility of musculature, said Wendy Steiner of the University of Pennsylvania, who is author of “Venus in Exile” and “The Real, Real Thing,” to be published this fall. “An animal with saggy skin, whiskers and no neck will look like some old guy who’s lost it,” she joked.
The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.” You can keep your rhinoplasty, though: the male monkey’s bulbous proboscis lends his mating vocalizations resonant oomph.
People are also keenly, even obsessively vigilant for signs of ill health in others. “That means anything that looks seriously asymmetrical when it should be symmetrical, that looks rough and irregular when it should be smooth, that looks like there might be parasites on the skin or worms under the skin, jaundice or pallor,” Dr. Miller said. “Anything mottled is considered unattractive. Patchy hair is considered unattractive.” We distinguish between the signs of an acquired illness and those of an innate abnormality. Splotches, bumps and greasy verdigris skin mean “possibly infectious illness,” while asymmetry and exaggerated, stunted or incomplete features hint of a congenital problem.
If we can’t help staring, well, life is nasty and brutish, but maybe a good gander at the troubles of others will keep it from being too short. “Deformities provide a lot of information about what can go wrong, and by contrast what good function is,” Dr. Miller said. “This is not just about physical deformities. People who seem crazy are also highly attention-grabbing.”
And as long as we’ve been gawking and rubbernecking, we’ve felt guilty about the urge. In his book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dr. Dutton recounts a passage from Plato in which a man passing by a pile of corpses at the feet of an executioner wants desperately to look, tries to resist and then finally relents, scolding his “evil” eyes to “Take your fill of the beautiful sight!”
The appeal of ugly animals is that neither they nor their mothers will care if you stare, and if you own a pet that others find shocking or ugly, you probably won’t mind if others stare, too.
Joan Miller, vice president of the Cat Fanciers’ Association Inc., said she found the hairless Sphynx cat, with its “huge ears” and only “a minor amount of wrinkling,” to be “absolutely marvelous looking” and “strong as an ox,” although she conceded it sometimes needed to wear a sweater.
Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.
On hateful and, yes, offensive ads that some buses in the city will have regarding the proposed it's-not-a-mosque at the not-the-WTC-site
City Buses to Get Ads Opposing Islam Center
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
City buses will soon carry a provocative advertisement that opposes the construction of a mosque near ground zero and depicts a plane flying toward a flaming World Trade Center, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Monday.
The group behind the advertisement had sued the authority last week, alleging that the advertisement had initially been rejected as inappropriate.
The advertisement juxtaposes a photograph of the World Trade Center, seen in the instant before the second tower was hit, with a rendering of the controversial mosque and Islamic center planned for Lower Manhattan. In bold capital letters, the ad asks, “Why There?”
In the suit, the ad’s sponsor, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Pamela Geller, a prominent right-wing blogger, claimed that the firm that handles advertising for the transit agency had infringed on its right to free speech by repeatedly requesting changes to the ad, like removing the image of the plane.
In a short statement issued on Monday, a spokesman for the authority, Kevin Ortiz, said the advertisement as originally submitted had been deemed acceptable under the agency’s “advertising guidelines and governing legal standards.”
The authority, which must approve advertising in the transit system, said it had not made a final decision on the advertisement before the lawsuit was filed.
John H. Banks III, a mayoral appointee to the authority’s board, said he supported the decision, despite his personal objection to the advertisement. “The wonderful thing about our country is that people have a right to express themselves, as long as it doesn’t endanger anyone’s life,” Mr. Banks said. “I support it, even though I disagree with it vehemently.”
The planned mosque, which received final city approval last week, has been at the center of a fierce national debate about religious freedom and the legacy of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Asked if she was concerned that the image of the flaming twin towers might upset some New Yorkers, Ms. Geller, in a brief interview on Monday, replied: “Not at all. It’s part of American history.”
Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
While a high-profile battle rages over a mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, heated confrontations have also broken out in communities across the country where mosques are proposed for far less hallowed locations.
In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for a march and a county meeting.
In late June, in Temecula, Calif., members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby.
In Sheboygan, Wis., a few Christian ministers led a noisy fight against a Muslim group that sought permission to open a mosque in a former health food store bought by a Muslim doctor.
At one time, neighbors who did not want mosques in their backyards said their concerns were over traffic, parking and noise — the same reasons they might object to a church or a synagogue. But now the gloves are off.
In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law.
These local skirmishes make clear that there is now widespread debate about whether the best way to uphold America’s democratic values is to allow Muslims the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans, or to pull away the welcome mat from a faith seen as a singular threat.
“What’s different is the heat, the volume, the level of hostility,” said Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky. “It’s one thing to oppose a mosque because traffic might increase, but it’s different when you say these mosques are going to be nurturing terrorist bombers, that Islam is invading, that civilization is being undermined by Muslims.”
Feeding the resistance is a growing cottage industry of authors and bloggers — some of them former Muslims — who are invited to speak at rallies, sell their books and testify in churches. Their message is that Islam is inherently violent and incompatible with America.
But they have not gone unanswered. In each community, interfaith groups led by Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, rabbis and clergy members of other faiths have defended the mosques. Often, they have been slower to organize than the mosque opponents, but their numbers have usually been larger.
The mosque proposed for the site near ground zero in Lower Manhattan cleared a final hurdle last week before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailed the decision with a forceful speech on religious liberty. While an array of religious groups supported the project, opponents included the Anti-Defamation League, an influential Jewish group, and prominent Republicans like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker.
A smaller controversy is occurring in Temecula, about 60 miles north of San Diego, involving a typical stew of religion, politics and anti-immigrant sentiment. A Muslim community has been there for about 12 years and expanded to 150 families who have outgrown their makeshift worship space in a warehouse, said Mahmoud Harmoush, the imam, a lecturer at California State University, San Bernardino. The group wants to build a 25,000-square-foot center, with space for classrooms and a playground, on a lot it bought in 2000.
Mr. Harmoush said the Muslim families had contributed to the local food bank, sent truckloads of supplies to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and participated in music nights and Thanksgiving events with the local interfaith council.
“We do all these activities and nobody notices,” he said. “Now that we have to build our center, everybody jumps to make it an issue.”
Recently, a small group of activists became alarmed about the mosque. Diana Serafin, a grandmother who lost her job in tech support this year, said she reached out to others she knew from attending Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies. She said they read books by critics of Islam, including former Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. She also attended a meeting of the local chapter of ACT! for America, a Florida-based group that says its purpose is to defend Western civilization against Islam.
“As a mother and a grandmother, I worry,” Ms. Serafin said. “I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that.”
“I do believe everybody has a right to freedom of religion,” she said. “But Islam is not about a religion. It’s a political government, and it’s 100 percent against our Constitution.”
Ms. Serafin was among an estimated 20 to 30 people who turned out to protest the mosque, including some who intentionally took dogs to offend those Muslims who consider dogs to be ritually unclean. But they were outnumbered by at least 75 supporters. The City of Temecula recently postponed a hearing on whether to grant the mosque a permit.
Larry Slusser, a Mormon and the secretary of the Interfaith Council of Murietta and Temecula, went to the protest to support the Muslim group. “I know them,” he said. “They’re good people. They have no ill intent. They’re good Americans. They are leaders in their professions.”
Of the protesters, he said, “they have fear because they don’t know them.”
Religious freedom is also at stake, Mr. Slusser said, adding, “They’re Americans, they deserve to have a place to worship just like everybody else.”
There are about 1,900 mosques in the United States, which run the gamut from makeshift prayer rooms in storefronts and houses to large buildings with adjoining community centers, according to a preliminary survey by Mr. Bagby, who conducted a mosque study 10 years ago and is now undertaking another.
A two-year study by a group of academics on American Muslims and terrorism concluded that contemporary mosques are actually a deterrent to the spread of militant Islam and terrorism. The study was conducted by professors with Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the University of North Carolina. It disclosed that many mosque leaders had put significant effort into countering extremism by building youth programs, sponsoring antiviolence forums and scrutinizing teachers and texts.
Radicalization of alienated Muslim youths is a real threat, Mr. Bagby said. “But the youth we worry about,” he said, “are not the youth that come to the mosque.”
In central Tennessee, the mosque in Murfreesboro is the third one in the last year to encounter resistance. It became a political issue when Republican candidates for governor and Congress declared their opposition. (They were defeated in primary elections on Thursday.)
A group called Former Muslims United put up a billboard saying “Stop the Murfreesboro Mosque.” The group’s president is Nonie Darwish, also the founder of Arabs for Israel, who spoke against Islam in Murfreesboro at a fund-raising dinner for Christians United for Israel, an evangelical organization led by the Rev. John Hagee.
“A mosque is not just a place for worship,” Ms. Darwish said in an interview. “It’s a place where war is started, where commandments to do jihad start, where incitements against non-Muslims occur. It’s a place where ammunition was stored.”
Camie Ayash, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, lamented that people were listening to what she called “total disinformation” on Islam.
She said her group was stunned when what began as one person raising zoning questions about the new mosque evolved into mass protests with marchers waving signs about Shariah.
“A lot of Muslims came to the U.S. because they respect the Constitution,” she said. “There’s no conflict with the U.S. Constitution in Shariah law. If there were, Muslims wouldn’t be living here.”
In Wisconsin, the conflict over the mosque was settled when the Town Executive Council voted unanimously to give the Islamic Society of Sheboygan a permit to use the former health food store as a prayer space.
Dr. Mansoor Mirza, the physician who owns the property, said he was trying to take the long view of the controversy.
“Every new group coming to this country — Jews, Catholics, Irish, Germans, Japanese — has gone through this,” Dr. Mirza said. “Now I think it’s our turn to pay the price, and eventually we will be coming out of this, too.”
A Times blog about how reading any book over the summer is good for kids
You can read all nine pages of comments if you like, but they're mostly either "Yes, duh" or "OMG, no, if we don't force 'worthy' books on children they'll never read them ever!" Worthy means, basically, hard. If it's fun, if it's enjoyable in any way, if you don't have to struggle every page - it's a waste of time!
An op-ed about the marriage-restriction being overturned in California
Until Wednesday, the thousands of same-sex couples who have married did so because a state judge or Legislature allowed them to. The nation’s most fundamental guarantees of freedom, set out in the Constitution, were not part of the equation. That has changed with the historic decision by a federal judge in California, Vaughn Walker, that said his state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the 14th Amendment’s rights to equal protection and due process of law.
The decision, though an instant landmark in American legal history, is more than that. It also is a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.
As the case heads toward appeals at the circuit level and probably the Supreme Court, Judge Walker’s opinion will provide a firm legal foundation that will be difficult for appellate judges to assail.
The case was brought by two gay couples who said California’s Proposition 8, which passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote, discriminated against them by prohibiting same-sex marriage and relegating them to domestic partnerships. The judge easily dismissed the idea that discrimination is permissible if a majority of voters approve it; the referendum’s outcome was “irrelevant,” he said, quoting a 1943 case, because “fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote.”
He then dismantled, brick by crumbling brick, the weak case made by supporters of Proposition 8 and laid out the facts presented in testimony. The two witnesses called by the supporters (the state having bowed out of the case) had no credibility, he said, and presented no evidence that same-sex marriage harmed society or the institution of marriage.
Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in their ability to form successful marital unions and raise children, he said. Though procreation is not a necessary goal of marriage, children of same-sex couples will benefit from the stability provided by marriage, as will the state and society. Domestic partnerships confer a second-class status. The discrimination inherent in that second-class status is harmful to gay men and lesbians. These findings of fact will be highly significant as the case winds its way through years of appeals.
One of Judge Walker’s strongest points was that traditional notions of marriage can no longer be used to justify discrimination, just as gender roles in opposite-sex marriage have changed dramatically over the decades. All marriages are now unions of equals, he wrote, and there is no reason to restrict that equality to straight couples. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” he wrote. “That time has passed.”
To justify the proposition’s inherent discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation, he wrote, there would have to be a compelling state interest in banning same-sex marriage. But no rational basis for discrimination was presented at the two-and-a-half-week trial in January, he said. The real reason for Proposition 8, he wrote, is a moral view “that there is something wrong with same-sex couples,” and that is not a permissible reason for legislation.
“Moral disapproval alone,” he wrote, in words that could someday help change history, “is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women.”
The ideological odd couple who led the case — Ted Olson and David Boies, who fought against each other in the Supreme Court battle over the 2000 election — were criticized by some supporters of same-sex marriage for moving too quickly to the federal courts. Certainly, there is no guarantee that the current Supreme Court would uphold Judge Walker’s ruling. But there are times when legal opinions help lead public opinions.
Just as they did for racial equality in previous decades, the moment has arrived for the federal courts to bestow full equality to millions of gay men and lesbians.
On the uptick in bias crimes on Staten Island.
Young Residents on Staten Island Try to Make Sense of a Spate of Violence
By KIRK SEMPLE
Arianna Rodriguez, a bright and verbose 11-year-old, was bravely attempting to explain the swirl of race and class divisions, immigration politics and bewildering violence that had swamped Port Richmond, her neighborhood on Staten Island. Finally, she sighed and threw up her hands.
“What has it come to?” she asked. “This is terrible!”
In the past week, the world — at least in the eyes of Arianna and others of her generation in these uneasy streets on the borough’s north shore — seems to have descended on Port Richmond. Patrol cars cruise around the clock; television trucks have become a fixture; politicians wearing suits and furrowed brows come and go.
And just as the community’s leaders are trying to make sense of the crimes that have made the neighborhood a center of attention — a string of at least 10 attacks against Mexican immigrants, mostly by black assailants, in the past four months — so, too, are its young people.
Social workers and others point out not only that the children embody the community’s future, but also that most of the attackers are believed to be in their teens or early 20s. The most recent victim was 18.
On Monday night, young people were invited to speak at a round-table discussion with civic leaders at a local Baptist church, both as a sort of therapy and as a way to help the adults figure out how to address the roots of the violence. Their comments at the meeting, and in numerous interviews over the past few days, reveal the challenges of growing up in Port Richmond: navigating streets where the level of threat can change block by block and hour by hour; negotiating a place riven by fault lines of race, ethnicity, class and immigration status; and trying, in spite of all that, to hold on to friendships and simple pleasures.
“It used to be nice,” said Farad Montalvo, 17, a Staten Island native of part-Puerto Rican heritage who will be a senior at Port Richmond High School in the fall. “Now kids are getting scared. They can’t walk down the street now.”
Children here said they learned the geography of danger early in life. They know to avoid the darker streets and other places that offer cover for muggers. Some parents allow them to visit the main commercial strip, Port Richmond Avenue, by day but forbid them to go at night, when the street traditionally becomes the domain of thieves, hustlers and prostitutes.
The temporary police surge that began last week has apparently halted much of the crime along the avenue and nearby streets. But some children worried aloud about what would happen once the officers left.
“It’s a war between Mexicans and blacks,” said Dream Rogers, 11, who was walking with her sister, Kim, 10, on Tuesday. “When the cops leave, it’s going to start again.”
At school, social tensions are rarely felt among the youngest children but appear to worsen in the upper grades — and become increasingly complicated. High school students spoke of black classmates who disparaged other blacks from poorer backgrounds, and Mexican-Americans born in the United States who talked condescendingly about peers born in Mexico.
Some young people told of trying to digest bigoted comments by relatives and family friends while maintaining friendships with people of other ethnicities. One black high school sophomore, who counted Mexicans and other Latinos among her friends, said she had heard relatives and family friends criticize Mexicans. “People think of them as low,” she said.
Most students said that fistfights driven solely by ethnic differences were rare at their schools, where cliques were based on interests rather than race or national origin. Still, whether to assert their identity or protect themselves, Mexican gangs have taken root in the schools, they said.
Darren, who is black and a sophomore at Port Richmond High, said the gangs were intimidating and, as a result, their members were largely left alone. The more timid Mexicans were more likely to be picked on, he said.
“I’ve got nothing against them,” he said of Mexicans in general, as he arrived for a summer football clinic at the high school. “They work for my Moms.” He added, “One even made me breakfast this morning.”
The discussion on Monday night was supposed to be an opportunity for young children to express their concerns in a quiet setting. But it was somewhat eclipsed by the arrival of Christine C. Quinn, speaker of the City Council, and six television camera crews.
All the same, from the children’s halting comments emerged a list of changes they thought might make a difference in their lives, from increasing the number of public buses to creating a civilian neighborhood patrol.
“This neighborhood really changed from when I was growing up until now,” said Jocelyn Jackson, 14. “I’m always looking over my shoulder.”
On Wednesday — partly inspired, she said, by comments she had heard at the children’s meeting — Ms. Quinn unveiled a 10-point plan to respond to the violence. It included expanding an anti-bias curriculum in the area’s high schools, increasing anti-bias training for social service organizations, improving park safety and starting a public information campaign aboard the Staten Island Ferry.
But some children said there were problems that lay far deeper than such measures could reach. Larry Martinez, 17, vice president of a student anti-violence group that formed several years ago, said the biggest problem facing the neighborhood’s youth was a lack of recreation and other diversions.
“There is no money, there is no funding, there are no after-school activities, there are no camps,” said Larry, who was born on Staten Island and is of Mexican descent. “People have nothing to do.”
Some young people feared that students would take the summer’s violence into school in the fall, perhaps setting off wider conflicts.
“I know that if the attacks keep happening, the Hispanic gangs are going to do the same,” said Larry’s sister Sonia, 15, a junior. She paused, then added, “I don’t want this to be a clash of the gangs.”
On ugly animals
A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck!
By NATALIE ANGIER
A friend recently sent around an e-mail with the subject line “lost cat bulletin.” Open the message and — gack! — there was a head-on shot of a star-nosed mole, its “Dawn of the Dead” digging claws in full view and its hallmark nasal boutonniere of 22 highly sensitive feelers looking like fresh bits of sirloin being extruded through a meat grinder.
“I don’t think anyone would come near that cat, much less steal it,” tittered one respondent. Another participant, unfamiliar with the mole, wondered whether this was a “Photoshop project gone bad,” while a third simply wrote, “Ugh.”
We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish, octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.
Yet there are some animals that few would choose as wallpaper for a Web browser — that, to the contrary, will often provoke in a human viewer a reflexive retraction of the nostrils accompanied by a guttural or adenoidal vocalization: ugh, yuck, ew.
Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.
Among the all-star uglies are the star-nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away. The blobfish, by contrast, is practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor.
“It looks like if you handled it,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, “at the very least you’d get some kind of rash.”
We have the male proboscis monkey and the male elephant seal, with their pendulous, vaguely salacious Jimmy Durantes, and the woolly bat and the vampire bat, their squashed snub noses accentuating their razor-toothed gapes. The warthog’s trapezoidal skull is straight out of Picasso’s “Guernica,” while the warthog’s kin, the babirusa, gives new meaning to the word skulduggery: On occasion, one of its two pairs of curving tusks will grow up and around and pierce right into its skull.
Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that are stump-limbed, hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as a jack rabbit’s or curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it.
As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.
“No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue,” said Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “But the resemblance of the pinkish nose to human flesh subverts our expectations and becomes a perverse violation of whatever values we have about what constitutes normal or healthy human skin.”
Conservation researchers argue that only by being aware of our aesthetic prejudices can we set them aside when deciding which species cry out to be studied and saved. Reporting recently in the journal Conservation Biology, Morgan J. Trimble, a research fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and her colleagues examined the scientific literature for roughly 2,000 animal species in southern Africa, and uncovered evidence that scientists, like the rest of us, may be biased toward the beefcakes and beauty queens.
Assessing the publication database for the years 1994 through 2008, the researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee.
“The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” Ms. Trimble said. Speculating on a possible reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love of what they do, and a lot of them are interested in big, furry cute things.”
Or little cute things. Humans and other mammals seem to have an innate baby schema, an attraction to infant cues like large, wide-set eyes, a button nose and a mouth set low in the face, and the universality of these cues explains why mother dogs have been known to nurse kittens, lionesses to take care of antelope kids.
On a first pass, then, “ugliness would be the deviation from these qualities,” said David Perrett, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Tiny, close-set eyes, prominent snout, no forehead to speak of: it sure sounds like a pig.
A helpless baby grows into a healthy, fertile youth, which in humans is visually characterized by clarity of shape, sleekness of form and visibility of musculature, said Wendy Steiner of the University of Pennsylvania, who is author of “Venus in Exile” and “The Real, Real Thing,” to be published this fall. “An animal with saggy skin, whiskers and no neck will look like some old guy who’s lost it,” she joked.
The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.” You can keep your rhinoplasty, though: the male monkey’s bulbous proboscis lends his mating vocalizations resonant oomph.
People are also keenly, even obsessively vigilant for signs of ill health in others. “That means anything that looks seriously asymmetrical when it should be symmetrical, that looks rough and irregular when it should be smooth, that looks like there might be parasites on the skin or worms under the skin, jaundice or pallor,” Dr. Miller said. “Anything mottled is considered unattractive. Patchy hair is considered unattractive.” We distinguish between the signs of an acquired illness and those of an innate abnormality. Splotches, bumps and greasy verdigris skin mean “possibly infectious illness,” while asymmetry and exaggerated, stunted or incomplete features hint of a congenital problem.
If we can’t help staring, well, life is nasty and brutish, but maybe a good gander at the troubles of others will keep it from being too short. “Deformities provide a lot of information about what can go wrong, and by contrast what good function is,” Dr. Miller said. “This is not just about physical deformities. People who seem crazy are also highly attention-grabbing.”
And as long as we’ve been gawking and rubbernecking, we’ve felt guilty about the urge. In his book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dr. Dutton recounts a passage from Plato in which a man passing by a pile of corpses at the feet of an executioner wants desperately to look, tries to resist and then finally relents, scolding his “evil” eyes to “Take your fill of the beautiful sight!”
The appeal of ugly animals is that neither they nor their mothers will care if you stare, and if you own a pet that others find shocking or ugly, you probably won’t mind if others stare, too.
Joan Miller, vice president of the Cat Fanciers’ Association Inc., said she found the hairless Sphynx cat, with its “huge ears” and only “a minor amount of wrinkling,” to be “absolutely marvelous looking” and “strong as an ox,” although she conceded it sometimes needed to wear a sweater.
Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.
On hateful and, yes, offensive ads that some buses in the city will have regarding the proposed it's-not-a-mosque at the not-the-WTC-site
City Buses to Get Ads Opposing Islam Center
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
City buses will soon carry a provocative advertisement that opposes the construction of a mosque near ground zero and depicts a plane flying toward a flaming World Trade Center, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Monday.
The group behind the advertisement had sued the authority last week, alleging that the advertisement had initially been rejected as inappropriate.
The advertisement juxtaposes a photograph of the World Trade Center, seen in the instant before the second tower was hit, with a rendering of the controversial mosque and Islamic center planned for Lower Manhattan. In bold capital letters, the ad asks, “Why There?”
In the suit, the ad’s sponsor, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which is run by Pamela Geller, a prominent right-wing blogger, claimed that the firm that handles advertising for the transit agency had infringed on its right to free speech by repeatedly requesting changes to the ad, like removing the image of the plane.
In a short statement issued on Monday, a spokesman for the authority, Kevin Ortiz, said the advertisement as originally submitted had been deemed acceptable under the agency’s “advertising guidelines and governing legal standards.”
The authority, which must approve advertising in the transit system, said it had not made a final decision on the advertisement before the lawsuit was filed.
John H. Banks III, a mayoral appointee to the authority’s board, said he supported the decision, despite his personal objection to the advertisement. “The wonderful thing about our country is that people have a right to express themselves, as long as it doesn’t endanger anyone’s life,” Mr. Banks said. “I support it, even though I disagree with it vehemently.”
The planned mosque, which received final city approval last week, has been at the center of a fierce national debate about religious freedom and the legacy of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Asked if she was concerned that the image of the flaming twin towers might upset some New Yorkers, Ms. Geller, in a brief interview on Monday, replied: “Not at all. It’s part of American history.”
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Date: 2010-08-13 09:47 am (UTC)So democracy, where the will of the majority determines how things go, is fine only as long as the majority thinks like you do? If another group has the majority, then dictatorships are better or something?
A two-year study by a group of academics on American Muslims and terrorism concluded that contemporary mosques are actually a deterrent to the spread of militant Islam and terrorism.
That reminds me of what I had read about the closure of a mosque here in Hamburg which had been used by, among others, some of the people involved in the 9/11 incident.
The article said (IIRC) that while it appears that people attending there, as well as the preachers, tended to be radical, closing it down may not have been the best idea simply because as long as it existed, it made it easier to keep an eye on radical people, because they tended to stick together and attend that mosque.
Now that they'll disperse throughout Hamburg to other mosques, it'll be harder to intelligence agencies to keep tabs on people with worrying outlooks.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-13 02:07 pm (UTC)1. See, the problem is that these people really think that a democracy means that "whatever the majority says goes". But in a well-designed democracy we protect the rights of the minority. Your rights don't go away just because there's more of the other guy. But these people think they do. If they didn't, they wouldn't think "majority rules!" lets them block other people from practicing their religion.
2. What they're really getting at here is also a stealth attack against reproductive rights. If all those pesky women would stop using birth control and having frivolous abortions, why, we'd outnumber the other guys again!