Jon Stewart, you are my hero.

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

-Sinclair Lewis

I have nothing to say. I am so disappointed in our society in this moment.

After seeing the video, I put my hand on my forehead and blurted out something like, “what a f*cking idiot.”  I mean, really, Newt pretty much sealed it for me there.  It was pretty much already sealed before, but now, it’s like plastered into a safe which is covered in cement at the bottom of the ocean sealed.  He really sealed it for me – he’s a divisive ignorant blatherer social nitwit, reinvigorating wretched thoughts of the likes of  islamo-racist, Daniel Pipes (I’m convinced that a muslim or arab dude must have stolen this guy’s girlfriend in college or something).

To which my mother replied, “I still don’t think they should be putting that mosque at ground zero, …it’s just insulting to the victims.”

I went on to explain that just because the attackers claimed Islam, does not mean that muslims are bad; she agreed.  And after a few more anecdotal statements, I got her to more or less see the issue in a bigger picture.

Still not feeling like I articulated my thoughts as well as I could have, I wanted to show my mother an example of arguments against the arguments against the new muslim community center.  Knowing that she can’t stand reading and that she loves sensationalism, like most good citizens, I posted a clip of Keith Olbermann on Countdown, deriding arguments against the mosque on her Facebook wall.  Of course, I know that Keith’s divisive arguments and use of emotional symbolism doesn’t really do much to bring the differing sides of the debate eye to eye, but it does show my mother that I am not the only person that is for the freedom to build the mosque, and it is pretty entertaining.

The next day, I looked on her wall and saw that my uncle had responded to my post, with a charismatic, fox news amalgamated retort, as shown below:

“Olbermann said Muslim’s have been at far greater risk of terror attacks in the US than non Muslims since 911.” Guess he didn’t here about the shoe bomber, underwear bomber, bomber caught crossing the Canadian border and on and on. He must have missed the massacre at Fort Hood, 13 killed at the hands of a Muslim extremeist. He compared oppenents of the Muslim communitgy center to Nazis, wow Keith!

There are hundreds of mosques in New York and no one argues the legal right for the center, just that the loaction is incenitive to the victim’s families and for that opponents are compared to Nazis. This is the new crazy in American politics (yes, we hear it on both sides) and it does nothing to move us forward.

In America, Nazis do have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, a Japanese citizen could unfurl a banner of the rising sun at Pearl Harbor and the KKK could build it’s headquarters next to the 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing but how would you feel about those things?

Bitter, partisan politics have taken over any honest debate in this country.”

I agree with him that bitter, partisan politics have taken over any honest debate, but I don’t agree with his framing of this “mosque debate” against the backdrop of all of these terrible events.  If all you think of are events like these when you think of muslims, then yeah, you aren’t going to have the greatest opinion of muslims.  People don’t like to be heard that they are prejudice or racist, but that’s exactly where these thought torrents come from.  Also, thinking in this way really gets away from the bigger picture of the world (e.g, the Islamic empire is one of the main reasons Western Europe was able to make it out of the Dark Ages when it did, muslims are people too, etc.).

I looked at my uncle’s post and I immediately closed the page, I did not feel like dealing with this.  Eventually, I came back and crafted a response that I felt was free of the dangers of getting myself entrenched in a go nowhere debate about Nazi symbols and Right vs. Left:

This is truly disappointing. Islam, nor muslims, are synonymous with terrorist. Nor is Islam directly linked to those attacks, although the attackers unjustly call themselves muslim. And for those that believe Islam, and those that use Islam to find god, are synonymous with the attacks on 9/11, they really need to look at the world through a broader scope than the pigeon hole they see it in. Notwithstanding, I’m not going to bring myself down to the level of comparing anything in today’s politics to hitler or nazism – and not even ultra nationalism (unless you want to talk about elements within the Tea Party, which are far right ultranationalist in nature – the elements away from the anti-federal deficit base).

This is America, where we have social freedom – that includes freedom of religion. We don’t have to wait “until Saudi Arabia allows a synagogue,” or whatever else some idiot calls for, because we have or own American values – not saudi values. Not Israeli values, nor Chinese. We have a moral right to allow people with values and views different than our own their freedom. We have a right to show the world that we are tolerant of differences, even embracing of them. We also have the duty of proving to everyone that we are not waging a war on Islam – which much of the world thinks. Not allowing this mosque, barely in the vicinity of the yet rebuilt tower, reeks of intolerance and hate. It also gives the impression of an America against Islam – not just Islam, but its practitioners. Practitioners that are people just like you and me, with fears, money problems, families and aspirations. So just think about that next time you think you are somehow just in trying to limit the freedoms of other people.

Will my uncle get what I am trying to say and cast aside his unyielding conservative pundit-fed views*?  Probably not.  But I do have hope.

*Just as a side note, on local political and administrative issues, my uncle is actually pretty well schooled and he is even a major player in local activism and in performing his civic duties.

Ricky Ross donning his favorite capris. He must have used the sailboat to smuggle drugs on this day.*

Let me just say that I really enjoy this mixtape put out late 2008 by Colin Munroe. I don’t know when this dude’s next album is coming out, but if the production is at all similar to this mixtape, I won’t be disappointed.

Colin Munroe Is The Unsung Hero by UnsungHero