(Disclamer: This article is less funny if you read this disclaimer, but I wanted to say straight that the offensive jokes made here refer to how one person can find an offensive comment bad, while an equally offensive comment hilarious)
Ok, now first of all, I have nothing against Muslims in general. Every religion that exists has at some point in history had extremists go and do crazy things. Christians had the crusades, Muslims like to blow things up, and Jews nailed a really nice guy to a tree. This stuff happens, and if you gave me enough time I could come up with an atrocity for every religion that exists.
The sad thing is, most people will be offended by the reference to their own religion, but not the reference to a different religion. Odd how that works isn’t it?
Now, on the topic of offending people, Muslims seem to be quite easy to offend, so much so that one airline decided to erase Israel to avoid offending them. I believe that event came out after the announcement of the Mosque so I guess that doesn’t count as evidence on how fearful people are of offending Muslims.
Does anybody know the procedure for making a building?
First, you make a goal, the stated goal is to have a place of worship to accommodate the Muslim population. This is completely reasonable.
Second, you decide on a budget, without a budget you really can’t decide on much else. They state a $100,000 budget, I’m not sure where they are getting the money but neither does anybody else. It has to be legal though, as suicide bombing a bank isn’t as profitable as it sounds.
Yes, that was offensive, but so is the third step: you choose a location. Where did they choose? The closest possible building to ground zero as they could.
This group of supposedly peace loving Muslims made a conscious choice to build their Mosque so close to ground zero that it’s shadow will cover the site every day. You think my joke two paragraphs ago was in bad taste? It is nothing compared to the insult building the Mosque in that spot is. According to google maps, it is only 1/10th of a mile away, or a 2 minute walk. That is, after fixing the map settings so it no longer tells you to jump across the ocean 3 times.
After a while I got bored and started playing around.
Seriously though, a two minute walk, I was expected to get from one class to the next in five minutes when I was in high school. Just to show you a bit of perspective on how short a distance that really is.
It doesn’t matter if the guy claims it would look bad to move it, it looks bad to put it there. It was no accident, somebody had to have noticed that the building they chose to renovate was severely damaged by the incident, or that you can look down the street and see ground zero.
I can buy that we can’t permanently ban Muslims from practicing their religion where they want, but at the same time we need to leave a little cliff note for them. (Hey guys, the wound hasn’t healed yet. It takes a little longer to ease the pain of three thousand lives lost in a religious attack against normal peaceful citizens. You know, just an FYI)
Seriously though, it is simply bad taste to build a mosque there. New York is around 300 square miles, there is no pressing need to have the mosque located a tenth of a mile away with all that other potential real estate. 100k budget? Huge city? There’s really no excuse. Nobody forced them to choose that spot to build on.
So those are my two cents and I’m sure you all want your two minutes back. We’re even.