He's right of course, but there's more to this mosque business than just a slow news time. Hell, if we used this kind of story as a yardstick for measuring slow news times, we would have been moving backwards for the past 30 years.
FACT: Muslims began arriving in this country, by design or by force, as far back as the middle 1700s. Just think. It's a good possibility that Muslims were here before many of our white Christian ancestors.
FACT: What is most likely the first American mosque was founded in 1915 by Albanian Muslims in Briddeford, Maine. A Muslim cemetery still exists there.
FACT: During the 19th century, large numbers of Christian and Muslim immigrants arrived in the United States from Syria and Lebanon. Muslim farmers, peddlers and shop owners settled throughout the midwest. In 1934 the first mosque actually built in the U.S. was completed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
FACT: The estimated number of mosques in the U.S. is 2,000.
FACT: As of mid 2010, the Pew Forum estimated there were 1.57 billion Muslims in the U.S.
So, if my calculator is working correctly, this means that Muslims arrived in the U.S. at least 250 years ago. It also proves that the first mosque was founded nearly 100 whole years ago. And here we are in the year 2010 and Christians are just now bitching about mosques and Muslims? Where have they been all this time?
Don't get sensitive. Get real.
CORRECTION: Pew estimates the Muslim population in the U.S. to be 2,454,000.
Earlier this evening, I was sorely tempted to write an ink-the-aquarium diatribe about Mark Williams, the infamous tea party bigot and racist who wrote this weblog piece:
ReplyDelete“… the Ground Zero Mosque is a chest-beating pile of puke from the bellies of a savage, death cult culture, a throwback to the 7th century. Politically correct Judenrats* like New York Mayor Michael Boomberg and Scott Stringer (Manhattan Borough President) and domestic enemies who are supporting the mosque ....”
This is projection of the most toxic kind. Williams has the temerity to invoke the term Judenrats to incite a Kristallnacht assault on Muslim Americans. If this is what Amerika is becoming, I'm outa here.
I think that should have been i.57 Million Muslims, not Billion.
ReplyDeleteJudenrat? That means Jewish Lawyer, but face it, that is what America has been all along. Maybe we just never noticed.
As to death cults, I've been in mosques and I've been in cathedrals and which do you suppose have bleeding human bodies hung on torture machines and pictures of human hearts with knives stuck in them? They don't have body parts in gilded containers or indeed rotten dead bodies in glass coffins in Mosques.
They do have monstrous bigots and monsters who thrive on invoking bigotry, but then so do we as has been demonstrated.
There is always the chance that exposure will undo these bastards, but there's no chance that humankind will ever be different.
Thanks, Capt. I'm going to have to fire that editor.
ReplyDeleteGreat piece, tnlib. So many of the reactors to the community center are so hyperbolic, you have to assume they think that all Muslims currently living in America arrived here in a wave in October of 2001. And that there are have never before been mosques in NYC.
ReplyDeleteThe sad thing is, facts just get in the way with these people.
ReplyDelete