Scary Fanatics

There’s been a whole lot of hoohah in recent weeks over plans to build a community center, which would include a mosque, near the ruins of the World Trade Center.

The hysterical masses are up in arms over the audacity of Muslims to dishonor those sacred grounds by building within eye-shot of where some crazed terrorists, who hailed primarily from our ally Saudi Arabia (and who incidentally were Muslim) blew up almost 3000 of our fellow citizens on 9/11. (Did you know that some of those victims were...Muslims?)

I don’t now what’s sacred about Lower Manhattan or its environs, which is where the proposed Community Center That Includes A Mosque would be built. Wall Street’s a pretty sleazy neighborhood, given the rape and pillage that’s been inflicted upon the common folk of this nation by the big banks, hedge fund managers and super wealthy hucksters over the last 30 years.

I don’t think there’s much left in that neighborhood to sully.

Whether the mosque gets built or not, the disturbing undertone in this flap is an irrational fear and intolerance of Islam. You can see it in the mistaken notion that our President is a Muslim. That’s patently absurd, since just three years ago the anti-Obama crowd was complaining about his Christian preacher Jeremiah Wright. You can’t have it both ways, folks. He’s either with the Rev. Wright, or he’s facing Mecca.

But this is an appropriate moment to ask: What if he WERE a Muslim? Would that preclude him from being the POTUS?

In the latest example of Islamophobia, a Florida fundamentalist preacher plans to hold a Koran-burning ceremony Saturday on the anniversary of 9/11. Hoping to forestall the “reverend” (whom I refuse to name as it just feeds his attention-seeking agenda) from igniting a powder keg, Gen. David Petraeus, Hilary Clinton and other sentient beings are pleading with him to cancel the ceremony.

Petraeus warned that a public Koran burning that’s likely to go viral worldwide on You Tube would endanger U.S. troops in Afghanistan and undermine our efforts to win hearts and minds there. So far that plea has fallen on deaf ears, but the pastor did say he is praying about it and waiting for God to give him instructions.

My prayer is that God will answer swiftly and tell the psychopath to crawl back under his rock.

Fanatics of any faith are frightening, whether Muslim or Christian. But some in this country seem to feel that the Constitution only protects the civil liberties of the Christian fanatics. The First Amendment does NOT read “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof (except for Islam.)”

We should be very, very careful. If we want our religious freedom to be preserved, we had better be willing to extend it to those of other faiths. Or it might come back to bite us in the butt someday.