Thanos Thanos:
Support for the mosque polled higher in Manhattan that it did in the other four NYC boroughs. Going by that it was hardly a cut-and-dried issue as you're trying to present it.
Not really. The southern half of Manhattan is where the richest of the rich live, the other boroughs usually hold those with less affluence, be it blue collar emergency responders, or the average office worker who can't afford the very pricey Manhattan prices, let alone the thousands of other workers whose salary wasn't in the millions and were working in or around the Twin Towers.
In the end, most New Yorkers, as a whole, were against this project. And, I'm not sure if you noticed, New York City isn't exactly a hotbed of Republican activity, with only one out of the five boroughs going for McCain in 2008.
http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/resul ... t/map.html$1:
And it got turned into a rightist issue by the rightists themselves, especially since most of them used it as an opportunity to ramp up more of the 'Obama is a secret Muslim' nonsense.
Even if I accept this as true, what's your point? Most people accept birthers (yes, even on the right) as conspiracy nuts anyway. They'll use images of Obama ordering chicken instead of pork chops as evidence of his Muslim beliefs.
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It was also another clear display of how the right now invariably behaves when there's an indication that they might not get their way, i.e. yell, scream, conspiracy theorize, slander the President some more, hold their breath until their faces turn blue, etc, etc, etc.
Oh noes. The right supposedly might protest and cause a shitstorm? Oh shit, call the National Guard. Like this never happened before under any other Presidency in the history of American politics. You do realize I feel absolutely no sympathy for President Obama for facing issues that other Presidents have faced, right? Yes, that includes public pressure.
And yes, that includes him getting involved in issues he could have stayed out of by saying "Well this is a local and state issue, and I don't want to add my authority and voice as the President over issues that don't relate to the federal government". I'd have thought he'd have learned after this story:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/22/harvar ... index.html$1:
I personally thought the idea of a mosque in that particular location was fairly stupid. Not to mention completely ignorant of the political firestorm that was inevitable. And very insensitive to a lot of New Yorkers who are still traumatized by what happened on Sept 11.
I agree with you.
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But, assuming one actually supports property rights and the rights of religious freedom for everyone and not just for their own little group, then the local Muslims did have a clear right to build it there if they wanted to.
Property rights should mean more than just a right to stock your armoured fortress in the woods with lots of machine guns, or allowing a corporation to poison every waterway within the vicinity of it's operations and then say a big 'fuck you' to everyone it ends up harming. At least that's the way I view it.
But that's the thing, they still have the choice to build there. People telling them they're bringing a lot of bad press and attention to whatever beliefs they have, or that it's insensitive to the families of thousands of people who died on that day is just as allowable.
Those who were very much against the mosque plans attempted to make the damaged store a local landmark, and that failed. After that, it's the choice of whoever is building the mosque to continue the project or not, protests aside.
Show me an article where, after the whole attempt to make said structure a landmark failed, the mosque couldn't be built immediately. I don't think it exists (I might be wrong though, but still) and bringing negative press upon said mosque was basically attempting to put public pressure against the mosque planners.
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