Pages: 1 2 |
|
 Print This Post
|
Claiming that the charge of “insensitivity is a smokescreen for bigotry,” Awad sidestepped O’Reilly’s questions to get to his main talking point: an attack on Pamela Geller, the organizer of the mosque’s opposition. In a McCarthyesque gesture, he held up a printout of what he said was a defamatory illustration of his prophet Muhammed taken from Geller’s website – as if this somehow invalidates all the legitimate complaints and questions about the mosque’s inappropriateness, true purpose, and funding. O’Reilly rightfully shut Awad down before he could smear Geller any further.
Awad then backtracked to show a list of 9/11 families who support the mosque, but by then O’Reilly had given up on him.
Mega-mosque apologists claim that its erection is an interfaith gesture that will not only heal the wounds inflicted on 9/11, but will prove America’s capacity for tolerance and religious freedom. Why is the burden on us? Americans are constantly being asked to demonstrate our tolerance, to prove we aren’t bigoted, racist or Islamophobic. We have nothing to prove. We already have the most fair-minded, religiously tolerant, inclusive society in the history of the world. We were the ones attacked on 9/11. We continue to be attacked. By fundamentalist Muslims.
No more. From now on the burden must be on the other side. If Nihad Awad and the Park 51 mosque developers truly want to begin the healing, they can start by abandoning the project rather than by reopening the painful wounds of Ground Zero.
