THE GREY LADY’S VEIL: MARILYN PENN
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The Gray Lady’s Veil
By Marilyn Penn
In a front page article about the Ground Zero Mosque in Wednesday’s Times (8/11/10), reporter Anne Barnard manages to incorporate the following loaded phrases: volatile post 9/11 passions and politics; combustible debate…characterized by powerful emotions and mistaken information…and a national political climate in which no preparation could have headed off controversy; fear and confusion in New York about Islam after 9/11; a movement…against Muslims seeking a larger role in American public life.
In contrast to these descriptions of the general population’s mood, the post 9/11 volatility was characterized solely by the televised images of American Muslims dancing in the streets of Brooklyn and New Jersey, cheering the destruction which had taken the lives of 3,000 victims. There were no such demonstrations on the part of non-Muslim New Yorkers who were somber and grief-stricken by the wholesale slaughter and grotesque photos of trapped people jumping from the windows of a burning building. The national ceremonies in Washington included a Muslim imam conducting prayer services alongside a grave president who made certain to stress that this country was not at war with Islam – this only days after the worst military attack on home ground since World War 11.
Far from being excluded from public life, the Muslim presence in our country has intensified with greater displays of head scarves and veils and more demands for special privileges such as those granted by Harvard in closing the university gym for certain hours to allow Muslim women to exercise without being seen by men, or the University of Michigan installation of foot baths outside its state-owned building in deference to Muslim religious customs. Several Muslims have been appointed to the Obama administration, most recently, Dalia Mogahed, a veiled Egyptian born woman who serves on the president’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and Rashad Hussain, a White House lawyer who has traveled to the Middle East with Hillary Cllinton.
Ms. Barnard refers to the case of Debby Almontaser but omits any reference to her connection to the group which had printed Intifada NYC tee shirts for a local street fair or to her pretense that intifada merely meant a shaking off before she resigned from her appointment as principal of the Khalil Gibran Charter School. It was not anti-Muslim groups which prompted Ms. Almontaser’s resignation – it was her own obvious bias which made her a clearly unsuitable choice for administrator of a public school.
Ms. Barnard further neglects to mention that Iman Rauf, the head of the Cordoba Initiative, is on the public payroll of the State Department as he travels around the mideast at this moment, or that he was a member of the group that sponsored the Turkish Flotilla or that his father was the director of the 96th Street Mosque, financed largely by Saudi Arabia, the leading exporter of Wahhabi terrorists, along with 46 other Arab nations. The Iman has not disavowed suicide bombing and considers that the US was complicit in the 9/11 attack.
Nowhere in the lengthy article is there any word of the revelation that Con Edison owns half the land under the Burlington Coat Factory building and that the buyers and backers’ representation of the Cordoba parcel to the Community Board and the Landmark Commission was deceptive and incomplete.
The Times’ coverage of this controversy has been one-sided from the start, insinuating that the legitimate antipathy towards having the symbol of Muslim domination in close proximity to the Ground Zero memorial site is nothing more than bigotry that is growing across the nation. One sure way to inflame a backlash against Muslims is to have limousine liberals join with them in accusing exceptionally tolerant Americans of religious intolerance. We are not the people who murder those who spoof our prophets, who stone our adulterers, who perform honor killings on our daughters, who call for eradication of homosexuals and Jews, who keep our women veiled and subjugated and who prohibit the construction of mosques in our country as churches and synagogues are forbidden in Muslim lands.
We are instead, people of common sense who know enough to recognize the signs of Muslim aggression in the terrorist incidents we have suffered since 9/11 and the all-too obvious symbol of this aggression in foisting a mosque on a population bereaved and bereft not only by radical Islamist perpetrators but by the supposedly moderate Muslims who concur that the U.S. got what it deserved in 2001. We are, judging from the ever dwindling subscription rates to the New York Times, people who recognize that the Gray Lady has been semi-veiled over the past ten years
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