Wow. They're just not hiding anymore, are they?

[elfs]

The National Republican Trust

The National Republican Trust is an independent political action committee that raises money and inserts advertising, "independent" of a candidate's wishes, into various political campaigns for national congressional offices around the United States.

This has to be the most insane anti-BurlingtonCoatFactoryIslamicCommunityCenter ad yet. The screenshot above is the closer for the ad, which is a minute long.

And if you want jingoism that'll make your balls want to crawl up into your belly and hide-- even if you don't identify as a man, maybe especially if you don't-- don't miss the pop song "I am America" at the top of the playlist on the right.

I got this from Conor Friedersdorf, one of those conservatives from the Oakshott tradition (into which I'm completely grooving, even though I'm re-reading Russel Kirk's "The Conservative Mind" this month). His post, entitled Two Mobs, a Stabbing, and an Arson, ends:

I'd ask that everyone reevaluate that judgment. Besides the mob antagonism directed at people in protest zones who didn't even turn out to be Muslims, we've recently had protests at mosques in California and Tennessee, an arson at the site of the latter, and a Muslim cab driver stabbed, among other anti-Muslim acts. One way to prevent this from getting worse without abandoning legitimate debates about Islam in America is to forcefully push back against irresponsible elites (honorable mention goes to Adam Serwer and Outside the Beltway, among others, for doing this kind of work) rather than pretending that their incitement is without consequence.

Indeed.

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

my read of the situation is that until at least one person is killed, gruesomely, the braying for blood will continue.

Someone gets to be a scapegoat to this. Who?

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

It was ALMOST that construction worker who was accosted by the crowd last week.

He has no idea how very close to death he came that day.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Someone will be killed, alright, only it's going to be a U.S. serviceman:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/30/taliban-using-mosque-controversy-to-recruit.html

This consequence remains out of the minds of the protesters, probably because none of them have kin Afghanistan or Iraq.

[tagryn]

If the mosque does eventually go forward, the Taliban will be happy to co-opt it as a recruiting tool for their side, as well. Worrying about how their propaganda machine will turn anything we do against us is a no-win game.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Not really. It's being run by Sufi Muslims, A.K.A. The Hippies of Islam. The only thing bin Laden wants to do to Sufis is throw 'em in the fire with everyone else not Shi'a.

Not that this stops the protesters, who couldn't tell a Sufi from a souffle.

[tagryn]

As the article you linked to pointed out, they're trying to use the protests as a recruiting tool, without distinction as to which brand of Islam is promoting it. Certainly they won't refrain from turning it around and using it as a propaganda bonanza if that opportunity presents itself instead, again without distinction - that's how a good propagandist works, the message gets adapted to whatever hurts your enemy the most. And the Taliban have developed a very good grasp of how to manipulate public opinion, both at home and abroad.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yes, they're using the protests as a recruiting tool, and yes the brand of Islam matters. If a standard Sufi-branded Islamic community center had gone up there without the noise and anger, they'd have ignored it.

The protesters made it a story. The protesters incubated, hatched, raised, roasted, fucked, and served this contaminated turkey of a story, and handed those several hundred bad-tempered men with beards the perfect talking point: "Americans will even turn on the Islamic equivalent of dirty fucking hippies, imagine what they'd do to the rest of us!"

[tagryn]

* I note that the Taliban are not distinguishing Sufi from Wahhabi in using the story for their propaganda, are they? Expecting that the Taliban would refrain for theological reasons from using the mosque's presence against us is wishful thinking, much like assuming that Iran would never cooperate with al-Qaeda because they are Shia while AQ are Sunni. The reality is warfare makes for strange combinations. Imam Rauf and his group are not intending to give the Taliban such a large propaganda victory, I'm sure their intentions were good, but as the saying goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

The Taliban are a fundamentalist movement, and as such, tend towards looking for (and finding) divine providence in anything that happens. Having a mosque rise ten years later on the site of their enemies' greatest defeat will be seen as the "hand of Allah," I fully expect, by those inclined to look for divinations such as that. As I said, its a no-win game once you let how the Taliban might twist an action enter into the equation.

* If we're playing the blame game, an at-least-equal portion of responsibility lies on the mosque's supporters, who thought:

a) putting this complex where proposed was a good idea, all but dismissing the history of Ground Zero and the feelings many still have about 9/11, especially in NYC,
b) naming it after a symbol of Christian-Islamic warfare in Moorish Spain wasn't a big deal, for what's promoted as an interfaith center,
c) being oblique about who exactly was going to be financing it wasn't going to look suspicious, and
d) deciding to announce plans to possibly open it on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 wasn't provocative.

Even a little sensitivity and understanding would have gone a long way in heading off the firestorm that occurred. Instead, the bungled way it was presented as a fait accompli has made interfaith relations worse, not better. The Sufis need our support, but this project isn't the way to go about it.

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

The comments for the video are disabled. No surprise there.

But if you install the WebOfTrust (http://www.mywot.com/) extension for your browser, you can get a warning before going to the site in question.

You can also add your OWN rating to the site, making sure that anyone else who goes there, and also has the WOT extension, will be forewarned. WOT is turning out to be a surprisingly effective tool against hate.

Just be warned, that there are haters out there with VERY high ratings, and they're already taking action to make sure their hate sites get protected.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Nope, they're not.

It's the same old story. I expect the attacks against Jews to start up any day now...

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Seen, on Twitter: 5 Arrested in upstate NY on hate crime charges for targeting mosque; Muslim man hit by SUV http://bit.ly/b5WZZ8

Who's the next victim?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

My first reaction to that opening sentence was, "Don't you have an editor!? Who let that grammatical sewage flow into your paper?"

But I agree, it's terrible. Yesterday, Seattle saw its own assault on a brown skinned person (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/theblotter/2012764391_man_accused_of_hate_crime_at_d.html). Apparently, it doesn't matter to the wackaloons that, in Seattle, people wearing turbans are most likely Sikh, a religion that has nothing to do with Islam.