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Last week, Newt Gingrich jumped on the far right-wing crazy train over plans to build a Muslim community center near the 9/11 site in New York City. He's weirdly putting forth, “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” Then last night on Faux News, he called NYC Mosque supporters "hostile to our civilization," as if freedom of religion wasn't one of the core values of the Founders of this nation. Gingrich is following a familiar pattern of right-wing demagogues before him. For Joe McCarthy it was communists; for Benito Mussolini it was trade unionists; for Pol Pot and Mao Tse Tzung it was people who had an education or knew how to read. In every case, the pattern is the same. Identify a minority, claim that they're a super-evil force with supernatural powers to destroy the nation, and then use the hate and fear for them that you've helped whip up to grab your own political power. In Newt's case, he's hoping his fear-mongering about the world's largest religion will cause people to forget that he handed divorce papers to his second wife - who had been his high-school math teacher - when she was coming out of anesthesia after cancer surgery, and that his third wife is the House staffer he was having sex with in the back room in the Capitol between his excursions to the floor of the House to lead the prosecution of Bill Clinton for having sex with a consenting adult. Will it work? So far, Faux News groupies are lapping it up. But will Newt succeed in fooling the rest of America? Newt was my congressman back in the days when he was going after Clinton and I lived in Georgia, and he left Congress because he couldn't even fool his own constituents. I'm betting this latest gambit won't gain much traction beyond Fox News groupies.
1. It is not a Mosque that
1. It is not a Mosque that is being built at/near the old Twin Towers site . . . It is a community/cultural center focused on peaceful co-existence between all religions and designed to foster peace and understanding between people of all religions that happens to be being paid for by people of the Muslim faith.
2. The 09/11 Memorial is not a war memorial; it is the site of a horrific crime against all people that has been memorialized. To condemn the attempt of people to heal the wound inflicted is a disservice to people everywhere.
3. As a percentage of fatalities and injuries, more innocent U.S. Citizens of Moslem faith died and were injured in the 09/11 attacks than their percentage in the general population. The attacks were, also, a crime against peace-loving Muslims everywhere AND more especially here in the United States of America where we all enjoy freedom of religion. Their pain is no less real than that felt by the population-at-large and they have rights to the same freedoms earned through the expense of their blood as the rest of us.
4. The Torah teaches my tribe that we are to respect folk of all traditions because my people were once strangers in the land of Egypt . . . Unkind acts inspired by or inflicted because of xenophobia is not a Divine Commandment in any of the religions inspired by Abraham’s understanding of divine. This includes intentionally inflicted suicidal acts of mass murder AND protests inspired by the willfully imperfect understanding of the facts and other folk of differing traditions and backgrounds.