Obama supports ground-zero mosque

[Nothxkbi]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPPxBrtrH1c

This explains the whole thing without the racist fear mongering.

 

[Phenom]

Because all nazis were scum.

were they? all of them (not saying that they weren't)? Most of them were merely supporting, a very percentage in fact were the practicing.

Not all muslims are.

Reall? Well they all support a system no better(in my argument) than Nazism. Even Bin Laden. Same was said about the Nazis before the boat started to row.. guess where it got us.

What is different between Nazism and Islam?

And no, Many muslim raids throughout history were pretty much no different in matter, why did we forget about those, but we refuse(as we should) to forget about the Holocast(which they also happened to tak full part in BTW)?

Why must we always stoop to the morals of our adversary.

That's not the question, the question is about justice and fair practice. And no, if you do a crime or trade unfairly, punishment or a counter law would be just.

 

[avaratz]

This mosque thing is a storm in a teacup.

However, Islamic teachings scare me (and i have many Muslim friends).

 

[zulgin]

privaat eiendom stel voor dat privaat dinge daar mag gebeur. Hulle moet net nie kla as daar 'n porno winkel oorkant die pad opkom nie.

 

[d0b33]

Another reddit post...
http://i.imgur.com/6grbA.jpg

 

[Phenom]

Another reddit post...
http://i.imgur.com/6grbA.jpg

dull.. (Argument from Intimidation, no debate, only scraping the bottom of the barrel for scorn)

 

[racer]

It's mostly a matter of rights and a matter of reverence, and yes reverence IS relative and just. a bit liike your next door neighbor selling liqueur from his house 24 hours, should you just shut up?

hell yes.. and support his business fully!

 

[Phenom]

http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...ght-to-build-mosque-isn-t-an-endorsement.html

Obama Says Right to Build Mosque Isn’t an Endorsement

Aug. 15 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama said his support for the right of a Muslim group to build an Islamic center near the World Trade Center site isn’t necessarily an endorsement of the project.

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there,” Obama said yesterday in Panama City, Florida, during a trip with his family to the Gulf of Mexico. “I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding. That is what our country is about.”

Obama addressed the controversy over the center for the first time on Aug. 13 during an annual White House iftar dinner, marking the breaking of the daily fast in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. His remarks drew criticism from some Republicans and opponents of the plan to build the center on Park Place, two blocks from the target of the 2001 attacks.

“As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country,” Obama said at the dinner. “That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton said Obama, in making his comments in Florida, “is not backing off in any way” from his statement at the iftar dinner.

Not Passing Judgment

“It is not his role as president to pass judgment on every local project,” Burton said in an e-mailed statement. “But it is his responsibility to stand up for the constitutional principle of religious freedom and equal treatment for all Americans.”

The Islamic center plan has drawn opposition from Republican lawmakers including Arizona Senator John McCain and New York Representative Peter King, as well as the Anti- Defamation League.

“President Obama is wrong,” said King in an e-mailed statement. “The right and moral thing for President Obama to have done was to urge Muslim leaders to respect the families of those who died and move their mosque away from Ground Zero.”

“It’s offensive to families, to the citizens of New York City,” McCain said as he campaigned yesterday in Payson, Arizona. “I believe strongly that they shouldn’t build it there.”

Asked whether Obama should have weighed in, McCain said, “It’s his privilege.”

Election Issue

John Cornyn, a Republican Senator from Texas, said the New York mosque proposal will become an election issue in November.

“This is not about the freedom of religion,” Cornyn said on the “Fox News Sunday” program. “I do think it’s unwise to put a mosque at the site where 3,000 Americans lost their lives as the result of a terrorist attack. It shows that this administration, that Washington, the White House, the president himself seem to be disconnected from mainstream America.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn have supported the project. “I applaud President Obama’s clarion defense of the freedom of religion,” Bloomberg said in an Aug. 13 statement.

Government Role

Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said the federal government shouldn’t put any pressure on local officials regarding the mosque. There is a mosque in the Pentagon, also a target of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which hasn’t drawn any criticism, Nadler said.

“Government has no right and no business to comment one way or the other on whether a church or a synagogue or a mosque should be anywhere, so long as they meet the legal requirements,” Nadler said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The Cordoba Initiative, the project’s sponsor, describes itself as devoted to ecumenical relationships with other faiths. New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously Aug. 3 to allow the demolition of a building on Park Place that would be replaced by a mosque.

“We must all recognize and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of lower Manhattan,” Obama said on Aug. 13. “I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground.”

Obama’s support was welcomed by the Council on American- Islamic Relations, whose director Nihad Awad expressed the hope that Obama’s remarks “will serve as encouragement to those who are challenging the rising level of Islamophobia in our society.”

‘More Pain’

The Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish organization with a mission to fight anti-Semitism, said in a July 28 statement that another location should be found.

“In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain -- unnecessarily -- and that is not right,” the statement, posted on the group’s website, said.

Debra Burlingame, whose brother was a pilot killed in the attacks, and is a spokeswoman for other Sept. 11 victims’ families, said building the center is a “deliberately provocative act that will precipitate more bloodshed in the name of Allah.”

“Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago, and where her true values were on display for all to see,” Burlingame said in an e-mailed statement.

Equal Treatment

In Florida yesterday, Obama told reporters that “my intention was simply to let people know what I thought, which was that in this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion.”

“It’s very important, as difficult as some of these issues are, that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about,” he said.

Fifty-three percent of registered New York City voters opposed the building of the Islamic center and mosque at the site and 34 percent supported its development, according to a Marist College poll conducted July 28 to Aug. 5.

Nationally, 68 percent of Americans said they opposed building the mosque near the World Trade Center site in an Aug. 6-10 poll conducted for CNN.

More than 2,700 people died at the World Trade Center when two hijacked commercial airliners slammed into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. The attacks were planned by al-Qaeda, an Islamist terrorist group headed by Osama bin Laden.

 

[Fudzy]

“I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding. That is what our country is about.”

Sadly, Obama and people like myself should come to terms that the America we hoped would come out of the Bush administration is just as intolerant and hell bent on making enemies as ever.

 

[smokey]

They really should build it. I am so glad that Obama is throwing his weight behind it.

Priceless.

 

[Phenom]

Actuallyl the guy (Thomas Jefferson) who wrote the first amendment("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.") also happened to be very active against allowing Muslim influence in his nation.

'What Jefferson really thought about Islam' - Christopher Hitchens

Jefferson's QuranWhat the founder really thought about Islam.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2007, at 3:05 PM ET

Thomas Jefferson. Click image to expand.Thomas JeffersonIt was quite witty of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., to short-circuit the hostility of those who criticized him for taking his oath on the Quran and to ask the Library of Congress for the loan of Thomas Jefferson's copy of that holy book. But the irony of this, which certainly made his stupid Christian fundamentalist critics look even stupider, ought to be partly at his own expense as well.

In the first place, concern over Ellison's political and religious background has little to do with his formal adherence to Islam. In his student days and subsequently, he was a supporter of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, a racist and crackpot cult organization that is in schism with the Muslim faith and even with the Sunni orthodoxy now preached by the son of the NOI's popularizer Elijah Muhammad. Farrakhan's sect explicitly describes a large part of the human species—the so-called white part—as an invention of the devil and has issued tirades against the Jews that exceed what even the most fanatical Islamists have said. Farrakhan himself has boasted of the "punishment" meted out to Malcolm X by armed gangsters of the NOI (see the brilliant documentary Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X, which catches him in the act of doing this). If Ellison now wants to use his faith to justify an appeal to pluralism and inclusiveness and diversity, he needs to repudiate the Nation of Islam, and in much more unambivalent terms than any I have yet heard from him.

As to the invocation of Jefferson, we know that when he and James Madison first proposed the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom (the frame and basis of the later First Amendment to the Constitution) in 1779, the preamble began, "Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free." Patrick Henry and other devout Christians attempted to substitute the words "Jesus Christ" for "Almighty God" in this opening passage and were overwhelmingly voted down. This vote was interpreted by Jefferson to mean that Virginia's representatives wanted the law "to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination." Quite right, too, and so far so good, even if the term Mahomedan would not be used today, and even if Jefferson's own private sympathies were with the last named in that list.
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A few years later, in 1786, the new United States found that it was having to deal very directly with the tenets of the Muslim religion. The Barbary states of North Africa (or, if you prefer, the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire, plus Morocco) were using the ports of today's Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia to wage a war of piracy and enslavement against all shipping that passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. Thousands of vessels were taken, and more than a million Europeans and Americans sold into slavery. The fledgling United States of America was in an especially difficult position, having forfeited the protection of the British Royal Navy. Under this pressure, Congress gave assent to the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by Jefferson's friend Joel Barlow, which stated roundly that "the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen." This has often been taken as a secular affirmation, which it probably was, but the difficulty for secularists is that it also attempted to buy off the Muslim pirates by the payment of tribute. That this might not be so easy was discovered by Jefferson and John Adams when they went to call on Tripoli's envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. They asked him by what right he extorted money and took slaves in this way. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Medieval as it is, this has a modern ring to it. Abdrahaman did not fail to add that a commission paid directly to Tripoli—and another paid to himself—would secure some temporary lenience. I believe on the evidence that it was at this moment that Jefferson decided to make war on the Muslim states of North Africa as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And, even if I am wrong, we can be sure that the dispatch of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to the Barbary shore was the first and most important act of his presidency. It took several years of bombardment before the practice of kidnap and piracy and slavery was put down, but put down it was, Quranic justification or not.

Jefferson did not demand regime change of the Barbary states, only policy change. And as far as I can find, he avoided any comment on the religious dimension of the war. But then, he avoided public comment on faith whenever possible. It was not until long after his death that we became able to read most of his scornful writings on revelation and redemption (recently cited with great clarity by Brooke Allen in her book Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers). And it was not until long after his death that The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth was publishable. Sometimes known as "the Jefferson Bible" for short, this consists of the four gospels of the New Testament as redacted by our third president with (literally) a razor blade in his hand. With this blade, he excised every verse dealing with virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, and other puerile superstition, thus leaving him (and us) with a very much shorter book. In 1904 (those were the days), the Jefferson Bible was printed by order of Congress, and for many years was presented to all newly elected members of that body. Here's a tradition worth reviving: Why not ask all new members of Congress to swear on that?

And here's a tradition worth inaugurating: The Quran repeats and plagiarizes many passages of the New Testament, including some of the most fantastic and mythical ones. Is it not time to apply the razor and produce a reasonable Quran as well? What could be more inclusive? What could be a better application of Jeffersonian original intent?

When the Muslims refused the Americans their rights, Jefferson Refused the Muslims their rights in equal return.

Something to take in note when addressing the very "right that people have that dates back to our founding."

 

[Fudzy]

Actuallyl the guy (Thomas Jeffereson) who wrote the first amendment was very conservative against allowing Muslim infulence in his nation.

'What Jefferson really thought about Islam' - Christopher Hitchens

When the Muslims refused the Americans their rights, Jefferson Refused the Muslims their rights in equal return.

Something to take in note when addressing the very "right that people have that dates back to our founding."

Nice find on Jihadwatch, again it comes back to intolerance, what was being challenged then was the equal treatment of people, something that is not being considered in this instance.

 

[w1z4rd]

Just to clarify Obama`s stance on this. He supports freedom of religion but does not endorse the mosque.

 

[Phenom]

Nice find on Jihadwatch, again it comes back to intolerance, what was being challenged then was the equal treatment of people, something that is not being considered in this instance.

Slate!
oh, really, ARE people being treated equally in Islamic nations?

Here's a clue from a recent request by the Pope to build a Church in Saudi Arabia: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/111462-Saudi-Arabia-Leader-Calls-for-Interfaith-Dialogue

..To which the answer was an obvious 'NO'

Not only that, but:

"We have lost sincerity, morals, fidelity and attachment to our religions and to humanity," Abdullah said Monday, deploring "the disintegration of the family and the rise of atheism in the world – a frightening phenomenon that all religions must confront and vanquish."

- King Abdullah

oh so fair and integrated.. uh?

 

[Fudzy]

Slate!

Ah sorry, I first saw this speech on Friday on the previously mentioned website:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/08/m...ins-and-development-of-the-united-states.html

oh, really, ARE people being treated equally in Islamic nations?

Not at all! Women have f-all rights, let alone the gays and people of other colours.

Which is exactly why America should be seen as nation that accept's people for their differences rather than a stereotypical bunch of beer swilling red necks out to lynch the nearest 'towel head' they can find.

 

[Phenom]

Ah sorry, I first saw this speech on Friday on the previously mentioned website:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/08/m...ins-and-development-of-the-united-states.html

Ah, yes, 'da cracker'

Look, an argument is an argument, you can't really mind read the person who has given the arguement and claim to know their intenetions. The only thing relevant and functional to the world is the argument, nothing else. And no, these people certainly weren't the 'deep south', they were the liberal New Yorkers, in fact most liberals and democrats voted against this mosque.
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/08/11/rel11a.pdf

Not at all! Women have f-all rights, let alone the gays and people of other colours.

Which is exactly why America should be seen as nation that accept's people for their differences rather than a stereotypical bunch of beer swilling red necks out to lynch the nearest 'towel head' they can find.

'Scorn at anybody you disagree with.. Lets imagine the world without them...

Islam is banned (in practice) in most parts of china, do we now go out and call the Chinese 'chinese supremmists' for this? (go back to the pew research study i've posted earlier), Indians are the most anti-Islamic people on earth, do we then call them 'Indian suppremists'? So yes, tell that to the Chinese Red Nexks, and Indians Red Nexks as well. ?

 

[TonyHawk]

What's Obama hoping for... the militants won't bomb Ground Zero again... cause there's a mosque.... lol
1. They'll bomb anything
2. The towers was an american job... not the al-queers anyway

 

[Fudzy]

Islam is banned (in practice) in most parts of china, do we now go out and call the Chinese 'chinese supremmists' for this? (go back to the pew research study i've posted earlier), Indians are the most anti-Islamic people on earth, do we then call them 'Indian suppremists'? So yes, tell that to the Chinese Red Nexks, and Indians Red Nexks as well. ?

You're taking it out of context, again you probably see that the acceptance of Islam as a weakness in the Western world's outlook. It probably is, but then you can see the hypocrisy in preaching about religious freedom. You can be thankful that it wasn't Scientology-extremists that crashed into the WTC. We would have lost Hollywood.

 

[Fudzy]

What's Obama hoping for... the militants won't bomb Ground Zero again... cause there's a mosque.... lol
1. They'll bomb anything
2. The towers was an american job... not the al-queers anyway

Agree with point 1.

Facepalm at point 2.

 

[Phenom]

You're taking it out of context, again you probably see that the acceptance of Islam as a weakness in the Western world's outlook. It probably is, but then you can see the hypocrisy in preaching about religious freedom. You can be thankful that it wasn't Scientology-extremists that crashed into the WTC. We would have lost Hollywood.

Scientology doesn't preach terrorism. Hollywood is not hiding Tom Cruise.

Yes, I understand what you say on religious freedom (and I fully agree, so long as it's 100% personal, which also would not be feasible(ie. child indoctrination, circumcision.. we'd need to blade the Koran as Jefferson done to the Bible), and especially so with Islam), but what you haven't caught(my first post here) me say, is that I don't see Islam as only simply a religion, it is fully a governmental system as well, and thus acknowledged as such as well. And as such cannot simply be acknowledged the rights of that of a simple personal religion. (Just as Jefferson had done on that occasion)
.
Not only this but it's also a matter of reverence.