Några inlägg om planerad Ground Zero-moské

Ett par intressanta inlägg i frågan om den planerade moskén vid Ground Zero i New York som ju diskuteras rätt mycket.

Dels Christpher Caldwell i FT: A mosque that wrecks bridges. Här några stycken:

"In May, [Mr Bloomberg] said: “If somebody was going to try, on that piece of property, to build a church or a synagogue, nobody would be yelling and screaming.” That is right. But history matters, too. The attacks of 2001 were not a political-science abstraction. They were an expression of Islam. Not all of Islam, certainly – and Islam is neither the only religion that has such crimes to answer for nor the only one that has provoked such controversies. The building of a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz in the 1980s so wounded Jewish sensibilities that Pope John Paul II ordered it removed in 1993, even though the Holocaust was not carried out in the name of any faith.

[...]

Islam – which is, like Christianity but unlike contemporary Judaism, an evangelising and expansionist religion – is a bigger challenge. A radical school of it views the US as its main enemy. Because that school is amply funded by Arabian oil, there is a standing fear that radicals will capture any large international project involving Islam, no matter how good its original intentions.

[...]

Remedying the weakness that Mr bin Laden diagnosed and exploited is seen by a lot of Americans as a matter of national survival. “Building bridges” to other cultures is a distraction from that task. It will be years before we know whether such sentiments are counselled by the voice of fear or the voice of reason, but they must be taken seriously. Mr Bloomberg is not taking them seriously. Faced with a delicate and intellectually complex situation, he has taken refuge in cant. He may have squandered an opportunity to resolve this controversy at a relatively low cost."

Andrew Sullivan ger Caldwell detta mothugg.

Douglas Murray kommenterar också bygget. Några rader:

"The story is repeated around the globe, the story of Muslim denial, self-pity, and demands for extraordinary sensitivity from others even whilst trampling on every sensitivity of absolutely everyone else.

[...]

If the people who are building the ground zero mosque cared about improving Islam’s image, they would have taken their mosque elsewhere. If they cared about cultural sensitivities, reciprocity or freedom of religion, then they wouldn’t be trying to provoke people by building a mega-mosque at ground zero.

The very idea is stupid and offensive. Needlessly provocative, needlessly offensive or, at the very best, entirely needlessly thoughtless.

For Muslims, the answer to radical Islam may well be some nice official version of Islam that hasn’t yet been discovered. But for free and open societies, the answer to radical Islam is not Islam."

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