Those Freaking Out Over Muslim Community Center Are Spitting on the Graves of 9/11 Victims
Before its destruction in 2001, the World Trade Center featured a prayer space, where hundreds of Muslims would gather every Friday to practice their faith.
We don’t know the precise number of Muslims who died in the attacks on September 11, but it’s somewhere between 28 and 75. Presumably, every one of them had a family.
Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist families who lost loved ones that day — and atheists and Wiccans and the rest – faced a horrific trauma, one that they endured with the support and sympathy of the entire nation.
Muslim survivors of the victims of 9/11 faced the same initial shock, and then had to watch as their brothers and sisters were rounded up and detained without charge. They were forced to register with the authorities, like sex offenders. Their houses of worship were infiltrated by police acting without probable cause. Public figures shamelessly attacked their faith and culture(s) in the most disgusting terms, with complete impunity.
For almost ten years, even as they grieved for their lost family members, they’ve had to endure the white-hot, brain-dead hatred of a significant number of their countrymen — the pathetic, small-minded bigots now incensed by the idea that a Muslim cultural center might be built in the same neighborhood as the World Trade Center site. These families lost a person they loved in those brutal attacks, and then had to watch as people like Liz Cheney and Newt Gingrich desecrated their memories, spat on their graves. I don’t see how they could ever heal in such an environment.
The black-hearted demagogues stirring up this outburst of ignorant Islamophobia are truly the worst human beings in the world. They’re monsters, and should be shamed out of the public square. That they’re not — that they’ll continue to be given a platform to spread their noxious bile — is a dark reflection on our entire society.
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