It is entirely un-American to persecute Muslims.
In ways that look like persecution, at least.
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Ok, just a general warning, don’t make the mistake that I did and read the comments.
Off to wash my brain out with vodka now.
@1: I’ve seen the same arguments. Talking points memos are being passed around it seems.
It seems the ‘argument’ is that burning the Koran offends Muslims, building a Muslim community center offends Americans, and since all offenses are created equal it means either both are ok (Free speech and religion) or both are wrong.
Any attempt at piercing their thick skull and pointing out that this is just like saying Muslims breathing is offensive to me, and me punching Muslims is offending to them, so it’s equivalent, any such attempt is completly futile.
Any attempt at piercing their thick skull and pointing out that this is just like saying Muslims breathing is offensive to me, and me punching Muslims is offending to them, so it’s equivalent, any such attempt is completly futile.
That’s not a ridiculous concept to them. That is in fact exactly how they think. The existence of people who they do not like is more offensive to them than they could ever conceive of any of their actions being offensive to the existing party. Punching Muslims for existing isn’t strange, it’s something they’ve been doing every chance they get ever since the conservative leadership decided that Islam was the new Communism.
Beyond your broader, points, BlackBloc, there seems to be a construction of “American” and “Muslim” as exclusive categories.
As an atheist, I’m used to being excluded from the category “American,” as lots of fools seem to construct it as exclusively Christian. But there’s a weirdness of Islam as a monolithic thing, in which the Sufis trying to build a community center wouldn’t also be murdered by the folks who attacked the WTC. It’s like saying that the Protestants and Catholics fighting in Northern Ireland were identical.
There’s simply no thinking or analysis allowed by the Palinite/TeaBagging/Gingrich/Gellerites. To call them stupid really is aiming too high.
I’ve been wondering where the book burners are going to get all of those Korans to burn, they don’t seem like the kind of people who would just have one lying around the house.
It would be wonderful and terrible if they set out to burn the ones that are given out by Muslim cultural centers. Like, Thanks for giving us all of these books to burn to show how much we hate you. That is mighty neighborly of ya.
I think it would be even more hilarious if they bought a whole bunch of Korans specifically to burn—assuming that Koran sales somehow benefit muslims—I honestly have no idea.
I keep hearing that burning the Q’uran is exactly the same as building a Muslim community center in Manhattan.
Which makes as much sense as equating me shitting on your bed with you putting manure on your garden. The community centre meets a real and present need for, among many other community services, prayer space for Muslims in Lower Manhattan. Burning the Koran is just being dicks.
@Piator
Burning the Koran is just being dicks.
Especially in Florida. It is gonna be 94 degrees there on Saturday! Although, because it is Florida, there is a pretty decent chance that their own God will shut them down (Florida thunderstorms can be wonderful things).
I’m all for them being allowed to burn Korans. But aside from them both having the RIGHT to burn a Koran and having the right to make a community center, there is no parallel.
The community center is being built because they have a need to serve that particular community. The Korans are being burned to be dicks towards Muslims. If you’re going to be a dick towards them call a spade a goddamn spade- you hate Muslims. I haven’t noticed the church equivocating about it- why’s Sarah Palin?
Has anyone asked this asshat how he’d react if his friendly neighborhood imam decided to have a mass bible-burning in front of his mosque? I think I might actually pay to hear the half-coherent mental diarrhea that would flow through that interview.
Frankly, I’m getting to the point that I think we need to just kill everyone and let the planet start over without us. We suck at civilization.
You know, you would think when the two top commanding military officers in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, come out and say, “Hey dumbfucks, this is a really bad idea! Please don’t do it!” that they would listen.
But no, not even two Bush-appointed four star generals in the United States Army can talk sense into these racist fuckwits.
And the fact that four months from now, the great big obnoxious Orange Boehner fuckwit is almost certainly going to be the United States Speaker of the House means it’s only gonna get worse. I give it less than nine months before the Republican House majority starts wasting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars pressing forward with utterly baseless impeachment proceedings against President Obama. That fucking asshole Boehner will not extend the same courtesy to Obama that Pelosi extended (but shouldn’t have) to President Bush… talk of impeachment will most certainly not be off the table in the 112th Congress. America is going to have a really bad hangover this coming January.
Ugh.
I don’t give a flying shit what Sarah Palin “thinks” (and please excuse the use of such a grandiose term) about anything.
She’s a pathological liar possessed of the most confused mind I have ever come across. There’s a reason that when you listen to her speak it’s so jarring. She’s incoherent and that is directly reflective of her mind. She is literally terrifyingly stupid. But the incoherence is indicative of something worse than stupidity.
And I’m really sick of our media elevating these freaks and jackasses like Palin and Beck by asking them what they think about things like BOOK BURNINGS, and then if one of them actually says “i’m not sure we should go so far as to BURN BOOKS” we get headlines all over the place “GLENN BECK SAYS DON’T BURN THE BOOKS” and we are all supposed to feel grateful and be like “oh even glenn beck said it’s bad”
I don’t need the clown car passengers to tell me that BOOK BURNING is un-American, authoritarian, and simply wrong.
What’s next, I should ask Glenn Beck or Sa-RAH, if they think it’s bad to throw beer bottles out my window at old ladies walking on the side of the road?
Give me a fucking break!
Palin: burning books=bad. Removing them=good. It’s like the RATM song Bulls on Parade, “They don’t got to burn the books they just remove them.”
I got a headache reading some of the comments on her facebook page. One woman complained about the “Iraquois” burning our flag on the original 9/11 and said we should watch that footage at least once a month. I have to say I’m interested in seeing that combination of Middle Easterners and New York-area Native Americans go at it, but I wasn’t able to find it on the youtubes.
It must be very strange to be Former Half-Term Governor Palin. A woman of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, she can’t get anyone to not take notice. She is like a great painter or musician who is so completely of her time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not thrilled, is completely fucking captivated by her bullshit. She’s like Creed: the rock band, not the character on The Office.
Just because the world needs more pedants, the apostrophe in Quran comes AFTER the R. It’s Qur’an. The emphasis is on the last syllable, not the first. </dork>
felagund,
I still like Koran and Peking over Qur’an/Quran and Beijing, though I’ve come to accept Mumbai (maybe because I’m not much of a Police fan anymore.) Obama’s (and other’s) correct pronunciation of Pakistan reminds me of the SNL bit about Nicaragua and Guatemala.
But thanks for the dorkiness lesson. I’m a fan of pedantry even if I opt not to use the better/correct information.
Just to add some more pedantry, the apostrophe in “Qur’an” is actually the letter alif - a glottal stop - and does not indicate stress (though the second syllable is stressed in this case).
If that’s not confusing enough, there is also the letter `ayn, written with a back-tick instead of an apostrophe. This represents a quick narrowing in the throat (and which is very hard to hear or produce for non-Arabic speakers), used in words like “Shi`a”.
Also, Sarah Palin is an idiot.
Oh my head.
I read some of the comments.
I particularly liked the guy who said Jesus turned the other cheek. Jesus loved his neighbor. Jesus was crucified. Maybe that’s our fate as well.
Honestly, how can they misspell “Irac”?
And the “we didn’t start this” bullshit, when we obviously DID start the war in Iraq for no good reason whatsoever.
Ugh. the idiocy is truly depressing.
No, Dave Fried, the apostrophe is not the letter alif. The letter alif is written, but only as a chair for the madda, the glottal stop followed by long-vowel “a” The glottal stop is not an alif and the alif is not a glottal stop.
Oh, and Sarah Palin sucks.
She’s a pathological liar possessed of the most confused mind I have ever come across. There’s a reason that when you listen to her speak it’s so jarring. She’s incoherent and that is directly reflective of her mind. She is literally terrifyingly stupid. But the incoherence is indicative of something worse than stupidity.
Palin isn’t exactly *stupid*. But she learned how to snap off answers while doing the beauty pageant thing. Start talking quickly (to display confidence) and get out a few intelligent-sounding words. It’s great training for sound-bite politics.
It really bothers me that she’s so popular for Republicans. “She’s pretty, *and* nasty!”
I mean, is that really what they want?
I have nothing against pretty; there’s even times when nasty is necessary. But that’s all she has, and it seems like they love her for it.
felagund: I stand corrected - I accidentally got Hebrew in your Arabic…
But the apostrophe represents the glottal stop either way, right?
@LongHairedWeirdo - what bugs me is that stupid beauty pageant answers work on a lot of people. Haven’t we as a species needed to evolve some kind of bullshit detector for survival? Aren’t we smart enough to figure out, even if we don’t understand the first thing about an issue, whether somebody is completely blowing smoke up our asses?
I’ve heard criticisms of conservatives based on their being too authoritarian. I think the problem isn’t authoritarianism - it’s their inability to tell a valid authority from an invalid one.
Especially since none of the Korans being burnt were torn out of the hands of libraries or Muslims. They were bought from the store, like everything else.
The community center is someone else’s property. So guess what? We don’t have a right to tell them what they can do with it (within these bounds) just as we can’t actually stop someone from shredding a book they own, despite our misgivings.
Is anyone else amazed that the whole Park51 thing has brought out the touchy-feely in our wingnut population? I mean, they’re talking in the kind of language that they otherwise would attribute to effete coastal girly men, with all their concern about offending people and sensitivity to others’ feelings. I thought these were the gun-toting, moose-dressing, Ted Nugent-loving tough guys. Have they all started eating arugula doused with Grey Poupon? What is the world coming to?!
@14: “Who paid her to “write\” that, and how much?”
First thing I thought when I read the questions was that yesterday there was an article on Yahoo about how many important/famous people were criticizing the pastor who was organizing the burning. One of the first lines was “it seems the only person not criticizing Jones (?) is Jones.” (I think his name is Jones but I forget). She wasn’t mentioned, so that had to be corrected.
I’ve heard criticisms of conservatives based on their being too authoritarian. I think the problem isn’t authoritarianism - it’s their inability to tell a valid authority from an invalid one.
You’re on to something here, Dave.
The trouble with legitimate v. not legitimate authorities, I think, is that conservatives generally, and those of the anti-intellectual stripe specifically (see John McKay in the St. Edwards thread), tend to connote authority onto anyone demonstrates any experience at all with a subject matter.
Much like McKay’s assertion that non-parents can never possess the same level of knowledge about childrearing that parents do (even if those non-parents have advanced credentials and actualy field experience studying child development), the conservatives seem to regard the illiterate ravings of Sarah Palin more highly than say, Paul Krugman, if the topic were economics.
Same thing with Beck and his nonsensical sermonizing at the DC rally, or “Dr.” Laura on interpersonal ethics, or Rush Limbaugh on immigration policy.
Not a single one of these anti-intellectual lames actually has any formal training in the disciplines on which they opine, and the MSM is complicit in the arrangement by continuing to write stories about and cover individuals who have no expertise with whatever it is that they’re talking about. Those people being covered know how to talk a line of inflammatory rhetoric, which is just the sensationalism the MSM wants for ratings. It doesn’t matter if the reporting is actually true or factual in any sense, just as long as someone is watching and advertisers are paying for the airtime.
As ignorant and obnoxious as book burning is, they would have to try hard to find a better target.
And the reaction sure as hell has vindicated their idea that if you really want to make statement to draw some attention, you burn some Korans. GG media et al.
As ignorant and obnoxious as book burning is, they would have to try hard to find a better target.
Only because thinking is, for them, really hard in the first place.
Pastor Jones is back in the news today (first he says he will, and then he won’t), and Mr Older and I have decided to donate $20 to the local mosque for the express purpose of providing a copy of the Quran to someone who wants or needs it. We’ll inform our local newspapers, also, in the hope that other non-Muslims will follow our example. Maybe we can out-weigh the “pastor’s” destruction, for a net increase in the number of Qurans.
I keep hearing that burning the Q’uran is exactly the same as building a Muslim community center in Manhattan. I have heard no reasonable description as to how these things are equivalent. I look forward to the half-governor’s analysis.