Stop the presses! This just in: The Associated Press “standards center” has issued a “staff advisory” on covering what is to be known from here on out as “the New York City mosque.” From now on, the AP “staff” – and, therefore, everybody who still actually reads newspapers that still actually use the wire service’s copy – is supposed to conform to what amounts to the Muslim Brotherhood narrative about the Islamic cultural center formerly known as the “Ground Zero mosque.”
This is disgusting. And it is typical reframing of the debate by changing the name.
AP’s Deputy Managing Editor for Standards and Production, Tom Kent, sent this “guidance” out to his colleagues yesterday, with inputs from Chad Roedemeier in the New York bureau and Terry Hunt in Washington: “We should continue to avoid the phrase ‘Ground Zero mosque’ or ‘mosque at Ground Zero’ on all platforms. (We’ve very rarely used this wording, except in slugs, though we sometimes see other news sources using the term.) The site of the proposed Islamic center and mosque is not at Ground Zero, but two blocks away in a busy commercial area. We should continue to say it’s “near” Ground Zero, or two blocks away.”
Interestingly, among those who formerly used the now-proscribed descriptor “Ground Zero mosque” is none other than Feisal Abdul Rauf, its imam and chief promoter. He called it that even though the proposed venue has always been two blocks away from the World Trade Center site.
Perhaps Rauf used this moniker because his planned location for the mosque was part of the real estate attacked and damaged on 9/11 – the home of the Burlington Coat Factory until it was struck by a landing gear from a plane that struck one of the Twin Towers. Perhaps he used that term to brand his “Cordoba House” because body parts from the victims of those attacks have been found all over Lower Manhattan, including the old Burlington factory area, making it part of the hallowed ground.
Or perhaps, Imam Rauf called his project the Ground Zero mosque because he wanted to associate his 15-story, $100 million complex as closely as possible to the location where nearly 3,000 Americans and other innocent people – precisely because they were murdered there by people who wanted, as he does, to “bring shariah to America.”
The last explanation would certainly conform to the triumphalist past practice of adherents to shariah, the barbaric, totalitarian political program that masquerades as a religion. Indeed, there is a tradition of constructing mosques at the site of previous Islamic conquests for example in Jerusalem, Istanbul and Cordoba, Spain. (See www.NoMosqueAtGroundZero.com). Yes, it was for Cordoba – where a Catholic church was converted into the world’s third largest mosque by the Moorish conquerors of Spain – that Rauf wanted initially to name his Ground Zero mosque.
OnTwitter I am Lesabre1"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them." - Karl Popper
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