An Aussie living in New York City writes about the Islamic center controversy for the Sydney Morning Herald. His basic point is that most of the hysteria is coming from outside New York City, which is true.

Oddly — but understandably — New York is not the nucleus of American rage over the mosque. The shrillest voices of opposition are far off. And the consequences are enforced in small American towns and cities where there are not the experiences of living tightly alongside the world’s races and creeds and nor the louder voices of tolerance. …

…Yet in New York, which lived through the epic destruction and terror of that day in September 2001 and has tens of thousands scarred by the losses of loved ones and colleagues, one senses the mosque would be allowed to rise without the rancour felt outside the city. Indeed it is possible to envisage that a thriving mosque in the shadow of the tragedy will speak more eloquently of memory, sorrow and forgiveness than a museum that looks to the past and a memorial that is still.

September 11 is different for New Yorkers. It was experienced differently; it is remembered differently. It’s hard to explain how it’s different, but it is.

A lot of righties are pointing to a diary at Daily Kos as an example of leftie obliviousness, and I have to say I was a bit put out with it also. Something the Dog Said wrote,

Given that they are such a small minority in this nation, it is odd that so many of our fellow citizens see them as such a threat. Yes, the 9/11 attacks were horrific, but they were more about optics than actual harm. The economy was already taking a hit before the Twin Towers fell. The reaction of the nation to seeing two major buildings in New York fall on T.V. has boosted the attack out of proportion. While the loss of even a single life is to be condemned and the devastation these deaths caused the families of those killed, more than this number of teens are killed every year incar crashes. These are also tragic losses but we do not make the kind of high profile issue of it that the 9/11 attacks are.

There was genuine massive and deep trauma suffered by people in New York City. It may have been about “optics” for those watching on television, but for some of us it was a real-world experience, and there was actual harm. To say that 9/11 “more about optics than actual harm” is a colossally stupid and insensitive thing to say.

That said, I appreciate the point that I think What the Dog Said was trying to make. The threat from jihadists is indeed blown way out of proportion, in that all the jihadists on the planet put together could not pose an existential threat to the United States. The only way they could destroy the nation is if they frighten us into destroying ourselves.

But we don’t need jihadists for that. We’ve got wingnuts.

If we tried, we might come up with a number of strategies that might effectively undermine the tea party movement. This is not one of them. Although I suspect the real purpose of the F*ck Tea initiative is to raise some money selling coffee mugs and T-shirts.

Remember the Bigger Asshole Rule: To win the hearts and minds of the American public, your first job is to make your opponents look like bigger assholes than you are. Thus, trying to match your opponents in asshole-ness is counterproductive.

A blogger for the American Family Association (AFA) has produced what must be the most ignorant, over-the-top, foaming-at-the-mouth hate post about mosque building yet. He wants mosques banned entirely from the United States.

When I opened the page, I got a pop-up ad for a book about the persecution of Christians.

I take it there’s a document called “An Explanatory Memorandum” attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood that has taken on a role analogous to that of the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The document is not necessarily fraudulent; the Muslim Brotherhood is an extremist Sunni transnational organization that might very well be planning for world domination. Of course, they are about as likely to achieve this goal as Pinkie and the Brain. And the Muslim Brotherhood does not speak for all of Islam. It doesn’t even speak for all Sunni jihadists; I understand there is a nasty rivalry going on between MB and al Qaeda.

Someone here had said that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the main guy behind the Cordoba House Islamic center, is a Sufi. This is a detail I have yet to see in a news story, but I can confirm it is true. He is the imam of a Sufi mosque in lower Manhattan, about ten blocks north of the proposed Cordoba House site.

Thus, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is not connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. I can say this because there is no way the Muslim Brotherhood, or al Qaeda, or the Taliban, or any other organization dedicated to enforcing dogmatic Sunni Islam would have anything to do with a Sufi. In fact, Sufis in the Middle East have suffered terribly from attacks by Sunni terrorists.

Earlier this year, suicide bombers destroyed a major Sufi shrine in Pakistan, killing at least 50 Sufi worshipers and injuring about 200 others. The Taliban were blamed, although a Taliban spokesman denied the charge. But the Pakistan Taliban have been attacking Sunni Sufi shrines and mosques as vigorously as they’ve been demolishing the remnants of the ancient Buddhist civilization there.

And then there is dogmatic Shia Islam. The Shia regime in Iran has been systematically oppressing Sufism in recent years.

Sufism is mystical Islam. Dogmatists don’t get mysticism. This is true of the dogmatists of all religions. It is often the case that mystics from different traditions understand each other better than the dogmatists of the same tradition.

The idea that all Muslims are somehow part of the same conspiracy is absurd enough, but to put Sufis in the same boat as jihadist is just plain ignorance.

Nice article from a June 2009 issue of time, “Can Sufism Defuse Terrorism?”

In 2001, one of the first things to happen after the Taliban was chased out of Kabul was that the doors of the Afghan capital’s Bollywood cinemas were flung open to the public. The language of cosmic love that animates Bollywood music and enchants millions of Muslims around the world, even if sung and acted out by non-Muslims, is a direct legacy of centuries of Sufi devotional poetry. At Sufism’s core, suggests Oxford University’s Devji, is an embrace of the world. “It allows you to identify beyond your mosque and village to something that can be both Islamic and secular,” he says. “It’s a liberation that jihadis could never offer.”

In a column titled “America Goes Dark,” Paul Krugman writes about the collapsing empire.

… a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.

The question is, why can’t people see what we’re doing to our own country by refusing to invest in infrastructure and education? Of course, a big part of the answer is that people have been soaked in right-wing anti-government propaganda for so long they think rot is normal. But I’d like to think there are a substantial number of Americans who would support investing in infrastructure and education if someone would stand up and show some leadership in that direction.

In fact, I think that’s why a lot of people voted for Obama, but he’s gotten bogged down somehow. Maybe The System is just too big, too entrenched, for even a president to shake it.

BTW, on Right Wing News our buddy William Teach criticized Krugman’s column, and then in the comment thread wrote,

A person is only an expert as long as they are usually correct in their assumptions/predictions/etc. Krugman has been wrong time and time again, as has Obama and Co.

So I asked for a list of ten examples of Krugman being wrong, and of course they can’t come up with ten examples. One guy provided a list of Krugman’s most recent columns, but of course there was no proof that Krugman said anything wrong in those columns, just that the guy disagreed with the columns.

What’s actually come out of the experiment is that the wingnuts can’t tell the difference between opinion and fact. In other words, an opinion they agree with is the same thing as a fact in their world. I keep pushing for real-world examples, and they obviously have no idea what I mean by that.

But that’s part of the problem, I think. Apparently this crew is still insulated enough that they can live in their fantasyland, but one of these days the real world is likely to bite them in the ass. And then maybe they’ll notice what the difference is between fact and opinion.

Truly, the anti-mosque hysteria sweeping the country bears an uncanny resemblance to the know-nothing movement of the 19th century. From Wikipedia:

The Know-Nothing movement was a nativist American political movement of the 1840s and 1850s. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to Anglo-Saxon values and controlled by the Pope in Rome.

I’m not finding it now, but I recall reading that mobs of know-nothings would occasionally burn down Catholic churches, because somehow Catholicism was seen as a threat to American liberty. If Catholics took over, they would run the country under orders from the Vatican. (This sentiment still existed when John Kennedy was running for president in 1960; I remember some of the old folks saying that if Kennedy were elected, he’d be taking orders from the Pope, and the Pope would be running America.) The know-nothings tried to stop immigration, especially from Germany and Ireland, because, um, they were German and Irish. Whatever.

Fast forward to 2010:

In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law.

These local skirmishes make clear that there is now widespread debate about whether the best way to uphold America’s democratic values is to allow Muslims the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans, or to pull away the welcome mat from a faith seen as a singular threat.

“What’s different is the heat, the volume, the level of hostility,” said Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky. “It’s one thing to oppose a mosque because traffic might increase, but it’s different when you say these mosques are going to be nurturing terrorist bombers, that Islam is invading, that civilization is being undermined by Muslims.”

‘

I like this part —

Recently, a small group of activists became alarmed about the mosque. Diana Serafin, a grandmother who lost her job in tech support this year, said she reached out to others she knew from attending Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies….“As a mother and a grandmother, I worry,” Ms. Serafin said. “I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that.”

Really, if you replace “Islam” with “Catholicism” and “sharia law” with “papal authority,” you’d be right at home with the know nothings. Same stuff.

The fear that somehow a Muslim majority — the most recent Pew survey says Muslims make up .6 percent of the U.S. population — could exist in 20 years and could implement sharia law for everyone reveals a gross ignorance of both human biology and how the government thing works. And it seems contemporary stupid Americans are no less ignorant than 19th century stupid Americans.

By now you may have heard that Fareed Zakaria has returned an award given him by the Anti-Defamation League because of the ADL’s backward position on the Islamic center near Ground Zero. It’s good to see someone display principle.

On the other hand, the “listen to us DFHs next time, bozo” prize goes to Joe Klein, who has concluded he was wrong to support the invasion of Iraq. what he says is mostly right, and it would have been brilliant if he’d written it eight years ago. It would have been commendable if he’d written it six or seven years ago. Now it’s just — yeah, Klein, right. Thanks for catching up.

And the “WTF?” prize goes to a person named Neda Bolourchi, who claims to be a Muslim opposed to the building to a mosque (it’s not a mosque, bleepit) near Ground Zero. Her mother was on one of the planes that slammed into the towers, and no doubt she has profoundly deep emotions about the 9/11 attacks. However, she writes,

From the first memorial ceremonies I attended at Ground Zero, I have always been moved by the site; it means something to be close to where my mother may be buried, it brings some peace. That is why the prospect of a mosque near Ground Zero — or a church or a synagogue or any religious or nationalistic monument or symbol — troubles me.

This is puzzling, Ground Zero is surrounded by prominent churches. I can’t see how anyone could go there and not notice. Some of the larger churches are marked on this satellite image of lower Manhattan. The churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel is directly across the street from Ground Zero, for example. Unlike where the Islamic center will be, St. Paul’s is very visible from Ground Zero, and Ground Zero from St. Paul’s. Likewise St. Peter’s Catholic Church and several smaller churches.

And if we want to talk about nationalistic symbols — again, going back to the satellite image, you see that right across Vessey Street from where the World Trade Center used to be is a big huge honking and fairly ugly federal building that houses the New York offices of several state and federal agencies. That building is festooned with nationalistic symbols, including American flags, as I recall.

So while I don’t want to disrespect anyone who lost a loved one on September 11, I have to question if Neda ever actually went to Ground Zero. Or maybe she went there just once several years ago and doesn’t remember it well.

“I know Ground Zero is not mine alone; I must share this sanctuary with tourists, politicians, anyone who chooses to come, whatever their motivations or intentions,” she writes. Well no, Neda, what you need to realize is that Ground Zero is a big hole in the middle of a vibrant and living city, and the people who live in that vibrant and living city, and who travel past that hole and have seen it every bleeping day, for nine bleeping years, are way past ready to bring that misbegotten bit of real estate back into the land of the living, and fill that barren space once more with the daily life of New York.

Life does go on, if we don’t get in its way.

Glenn Greenwald has a depressing, but probably prescient, post up called “What collapsing empire looks like.” Among other things, he points to an article in the New York Times about what city and state governments are cutting because they have no money —

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.

Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

The United States came into being officially in 1781, with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, which of course were replaced by the Constitution in 1788. At the time, conventional wisdom in Europe was that republics might work OK in a small country, but U.S. needed the strong hand of a monarch to govern it. There was no way, they thought, that a people scattered over such a large area could govern themselves through elected representation. It wasn’t until after the U.S. successfully pulled itself back together after the Civil War that Europe stopped expecting the U.S. political system to crumble apart at any moment.

In the years after the Civil War, the U.S. enjoyed a remarkable degree of political stability given the diversity of our people and regions. Federal and state governments managed to function more or less as they were designed to, in spite of the usual elements of corruption and idiocy common to all human enterprises.

However, the system does seem to require that some critical mass of elected officials be adults, emotionally as well as physically. Some critical mass has to be able to keep their natural larceny and self-delusion within accepted parameters. Some critical mass has to be observant enough to know chickens from toasters.

What we’re seeing is what happens when we lose that critical mass.

Today the idiot children Republicans are squawking about job losses in June and July. Matt Yglesias writes, —

The new unemployment report highlights the fact that the economy remains lousy and John Boehner is going to be the next Speaker of the House of Representatives. Ironically, it also demonstrates the bankruptcy of Boehner’s way of thinking. The new conservative orthodoxy has been that somehow teachers, police officers, guys who repair street signs, bus drivers, librarians, etc. don’t have “real jobs” and that police departments, roads, trains, buses, libraries, etc. don’t contribute to economic growth. In those terms, the unemployment report was actually fine—the private sector added 71,000 jobs, which isn’t the greatest number in human history but it’s okay.

The big losses were government jobs, and that was both predictable and preventable. We just have to have the will to pay for those jobs. While a big chunk of the job losses were from laying off the temporary census workers, we see that essential jobs, as well as services, are also being cut for lack of money. We’re essentially choking ourselves to death because we’ve developed a phobia about paying taxes.

Republicans seem to think that the money required to run police departments, schools and libraries come from the Good Money Fairy. Or maybe it grows on trees. If we Believe hard enough, the money will just be there, and we can go on as we always have taking a basic level of infrastructure and services for granted. Matt continues,

But because in the Senate a minority of members can get their way, action wasn’t taken. Consequently, we have a horrible jobs number. Which would be bad enough, but the way the American political system works, the minority party that prevented the majority from addressing the crisis will accrue massive political benefits as a result of the collapse.

Conservatives won’t admit it today, but what we’re looking at is a major breakdown of the logic of the American political system.

I’ve said before that America was able to coast for a long time on the investments in people and infrastructure made during the New Deal and during and after World War II. Well, we ain’t coastin’ no more. We have stopped. And we can either find the will to re-invest, or we can let the country rot. It’s our choice.

Righties like to tell us that freedom isn’t free, meaning that they require the blood sacrifice of other people going to war for their freedom from time to time. Well, folks, little about a nation is free. Roads aren’t free. Police cars aren’t free. Armies aren’t free, for that matter. National parks and monuments aren’t free. Schools, from kindergartens to universities, aren’t free.

This nation still has wealth, natural resources (most of ’em, anyway), and a reasonably skilled workforce. There is no natural reason why the economy is this bad. The righties can argue whether nature or mankind causes global warming, but there’s no question nature didn’t screw up the economy. We did this to ourselves, but we did it to ourselves because movement conservatives sold Americans on the fairy tale that we can keep the same prosperous, stable and safe America we’d come to expect in the 20th century but not have to pay for it.

Righties can argue all they like about how their tax-cutting, supply-side economic theories aren’t to blame, and the fault belongs to “tax and spend” liberals. Never mind that the historical evidence says otherwise.

Paul Krugman has a must-read column today on the allegedly innovative economic ideas of Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. However, “Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce,” Krugman says. It’s the same old, same old — just relieve the rich of their tax burdens, and everything will work out.

Oh, of course, we’d have to dismantle Medicare, but that’s OK. We’ll give the old folks vouchers they can take to insurance companies to buy their own insurance. Of course, if the health care reform act is repealed the insurance companies will refuse to insure old folks anyway, so the vouchers would be worthless, but at least the old folks will die knowing that their corpses will be buried in a land where the free market prevails.