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I Love New York
Using examples such as the protests against the proposed Islamic education center containing a mosque near Ground Zero, Sally Steenland puts recent anti-Muslim ranting into perspective and encourages Americans to look at the religion based on reality, not distortion.
More: The Distorted Lens of Islamophobia: We Need to Assess Islam Based on Reality, Not Rants
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I won't bother reading the article, for the title tells me all that we should need to know about the piece, and I it's clear to me that no one can even imagine a just argument for disagreeing with her. Some NY'ers might not be sufficiently recovered, psychologically, from the attacks on 9/11, but they hopefully are enough to not let their memories and losses due to the attacks in NYC cause them to oppose the construction of this mosque. It's not Islam that committed the 9/11 attacks.
A few Saudis did and the US political leadership [did] minimally allow the attacks to happen, because the US leadership had received plenty of forewarnings and did nothing to try to prevent the attacks. Instead of doing that, the Bush Jr-Cheney administration quite criminally forced the shutting down of the US Army's special intelligence team that was called Able Danger and which was established around three years earlier with the specific mandate of tracking Al Qaeda worldwide. Able Danger gathered tons of information and it included the fact that the US govt, State Dept, CIA and possibly FBI facilitated the entry of the alleged hijackers into the US and then facilitated them getting drivers' licenses and residential addresses while using their real names and the State Dept had these people categorized as terrorists.
And the war on Afghanistan was planned well enough in advance. By July 2001, it was definite that the US leadership was going to war on Afghanistan no later than October 2001.
Islam didn't attack the US, but a few Saudis, who were probably just patsies, and US political leadership did.
They forced the shutting down of Able Danger because of what the team had been doing and everything they had learned was a serious inconvenience to the war-planners of the US leadership. There certainly was no other valid, i.e., plausible reason.
I wonder where you dug up a strange link like the one you posted, but the right one is the following one.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/08/islamophobia.html
I've never seen app.mx3.americanprogress.org, before. It's a strange url. Maybe there's a special use for it, but it takes me through two redirections.
And I actually decided to read some of the article just to see what it's like. I just read the first part of it and it, alone, already contains very good and [important] information.
However, I've finished reading the whole piece and while I agree with the essence of what she says, I definitely disagree with the piece in one main respect.
That's very true, but it's seriously lacks realism. It's as if she forgets that the US has [always] been imperialist, colonialist and genocidal; and, since a little later, a widespread culture of gluttonous and crony capitalism. One of the more specific truths about the USA is that the genocide against or of American Indians is entirely real and it continues today. The treaties have never been respected by the imperialist, colonialist, racist, ... "America". And everyone who wishes to immigrate to America only dreams of White Man's America, not the true America.
Extremely few Americans pay any attention at all to the ongoing genocide against American Indians, the continued refusal to honor the treaties with them. Extremely few do and of the few who do, it's little time spent.
True, but America's GREATEST enemies are within and they are the US leadership elites, the war makers and profiteers, the financial industry profiteers or cronies, the pharmaceutical industry criminals, et cetera.
The real enemies are not the relatively few Muslims who want [understandable] revenge against the imperialist, ... USA. They correctly see the USA as their enemies. It's "America's" crimes against them and their countries that causes their desire for revenge, but they also are really few, relatively speaking anyway. They don't even have an army.
Yes, do do that with the USA's real and worst of enemies, the leadership of the USA!
Most voters have preferred to simply continue the imperialist, colonialist, pillaging, pilfering, ... govt and society they have LONG had. Voters haven't really wanted a good, ethical, Constitutional, ... govt. They have proven this time after time, with a few historical exceptions, that they want to continue the bloody history of the country and its govt, and to spread this internationally.
The GREATEST ENEMIES of the USA are the leadership of the USA and their electoral supporters. The USA otherwise has no real foreign enemies, albeit Israeli leadership clearly does constitute an exception.
Otherwise I agree with much of what she says and what she essentially means to say. It's just that she romanticizes the nature of the USA, neglecting what it really is and basically has always been. If it wasn't for that, then I'd say it's an [excellent] article; but I can't do that when people neglect the real nature of the USA, past and present. Stephen Lendman is an excellent writer in this respect. He never neglects what the real USA has been and is.
The USA is not and never has been a good country. There have been some exceptions, but the country overall has never been about [good]. And it's politically seeming like this nature will be continuing for a long time still to come.
Of course a Muslim mosque should be permitted near where the WTC Towers once unfortunately stood.
Faulting Islam for the 9/11 attacks is very bad for choice. It makes no sense. And it's also only something people who haven't carefully studied the 9/11 attacks more than superficially could do. Anyone who's spent considerable time carefully studying what happened on 9/11, everything related to it, would easily realize that the enemy was not even the 9/11 hijackers, who were, instead, people trying to strike America for it's evils in their countries, the extreme criminality and imperialism of the US there. But that's only one part of everything to be learned through careful study about the 9/11 attacks.
Anyone who thinks the "official (conspiracy) story" about 9/11 is the truth is extremely mistaken and very underinformed; only have superficial knowledge of what happened. The so-called "official story" has a [little] truth, sure, but it also has a hell of a lot of LIES and those had to be [deliberate]! Those lies did not appear in that "official (conspiracy) story" unintentionally.
It's the ROGUE, imperialist, ... US govt and elites that are to BLAME and no one else, for 9/11. And also to blame are voters who repeatedly keep this rogue, imperialist, ... govt going and never hold their leaders to account for their crimes on "America" and many other countries and peoples.