Salem 66: Dispatch #2 – September 14-20, 2015
Don Jolly covers the religion of the 2016 election season. Continue Reading →
Tag: ground zero
Disguising Islamophobia
This photo was taken yesterday by Jeremy Walton, assistant professor at NYU’s Religious Studies Program, in downtown Manhattan where various groups gathered to protest a proposed community center or to march in support of it. Continue Reading →
What is Sacred Ground?
Never ones to let a potential controversy get past them (today’s cover headline reads, “Scarlett [Johanson] may be getting a new ‘tattoo'”), The New York Daily News has helped to make the “Ground Zero Mosque” a noisy conversation with emphatic sides. Today I happened to pick up a copy of the paper while waiting for the clerks to ring me up at the local deli — two Yemenis who were good enough to make me a sandwich while fasting for Ramadan — only to find a blue border at the top of page 4 that reads, “Center of Controversy.” Columnist Mike Lupica writes:
…this debate isn’t abut correctness. Or freedom of religion. Or even the idea that if this mosque doesn’t get built, it will mean we are now deciding about religious freedom in this country one neighborhood at a time. It is about common sense.
More than that, it is about the constitutents of Sept. 11.
Muslims at Ground Zero
Yesterday, plans to build a Muslim religious center near Ground Zero were approved. Later in the day, Mayor Bloomberg spoke about the center with emotional praise. Here’s a smattering of news stories from around the web: including those that approve of the “mosque” so that “we” can, in part, keep our “enemies” closer and help them to become good Americans, Elizabeth Wurtzle at the Daily Beast; Mark Bergen at Religion Dispatches reviews how opposition to the center developed; MSNBC on Pat Robertson’s plans to oppose the approval; Welton Gaddy at WashPo’s On Faith blog asks why, after so many calls for “moderate” voices to counter Muslim extremism, an opportunity to support such a voice is made controversial; WSJ’s Dorothy Rabinowitz gets her hate on cause we’re Americans, not “insufficiently enlightened” liberals; Yahoo! gives a brief profile of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the center; Time’s Amy Sullivan says the controversy proves there is a new wave of intolerance. Continue Reading →
Expunging the Quran
An event was held in downtown Manhattan yesterday to protest the proposed building of a mosque on the World Trade Center site. Richard Bartholomew gives us a run-down of the event and surrounding commentary at his site, Bartholomew’s Notes. He quotes Pamela Geller, executive director of “Stop the Islamization of America” and a speaker at the rally:
“The only Muslim center that should be built in the shadow of the World Trade Center is one that is devoted to expunging the Quran and all Islamic teachings of the violent jihad that they prescribe, as well as all hateful texts and incitement to violence”