Bottom of the anti-mosque barrel

[and-justice-for-all]

If conservatives had a reasonable case against the supposed "Ground Zero mosque," they wouldn't need to rely on blatant falsehoods to make their arguments. However, when you are working backward from the thesis "Muslims are all terrorists and terrorist sympathizers," then you are bound to make some leaps of logic in support of your "point."

This week, conservative media figures focused much of their ire on Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's upcoming State Department trip to the Middle East to "discuss Muslim life in America and religious tolerance." Several of the usual suspects complained that Rauf was going on a "taxpayer-funded fundraising jaunt" to finance his proposed Islamic cultural center. As we noted, the State Department has made explicit that fundraising of any kind is prohibited during the trip.

Perhaps more importantly, conservatives' attacks on Rauf's trip amount to an accidental indictment of a program the Bush administration felt was useful in fighting terror. Rauf began participating in the outreach program during the Bush administration. Of course, people like unhinged right-wing blogger Pam Geller ignored such inconvenient facts when they were calling the trip "disturbing."

Sean Hannity repeatedly took Rauf's writings out of context to paint him as "anything but moderate" and falsely claimed that Rauf wants to "shred our Constitution" and replace it with Sharia law. Glenn Beck joined Hannity in smearing Rauf by saying that Rauf "employs" an imam who blamed "the Jews" for 9-11. He doesn't.

But the anti-mosque discourse bottomed out (hopefully), as it often does, with our friends at NewsBusters. This week, Mark Finkelstein uncovered a "chilling" fact about the Islamic community center as he discussed Geller's anti-mosque ads on New York buses -- which tastelessly depict the image of a plane hitting the World Trade Center on 9-11, falsely suggest that the mosque is opening on September 11, 2011, and add an imaginary star and crescent to the artist's rendering of the building. I'll let him explain his discovery:

Have a look at the screencap below showing the mosque's proposed design . Sure looks a lot like the WTC towers themselves, doesn't it? Hard to imagine that's a coincidence. A certain implicit triumphalism involved?

Here's the "chilling" artist's rendering that Finkelstein linked to:



I can think of no better encapsulation of both the ineptitude of NewsBusters and the ongoing desperation of conservative media figures struggling to find a not-overtly bigoted reason to oppose the Islamic center than parsing the "certain implicit triumphalism involved" in shaping it like a building.

[Scurrilous]

1. K & R

:thumbsup:

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. knr

[azurnoir]

3. K&R

:kick:

[aquart]

4. So when will he raise that money?

Because until he does, that eyesore isn't going to soar.

[starroute]

5. Any influence actually goes the other way

There is a resemblance -- but according to this article which appeared in Slate after 9/11, that's because the WTC architect borrowed freely from Islamic sacred architecture is a way that might be particularly offensive to devout Muslims.

http://www.slate.com/id/2060207

The Mosque to Commerce
Bin Laden's special complaint with the World Trade Center.
By Laurie Kerr
Posted Friday, Dec. 28, 2001, at 11:58 AM ET

We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex's name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center's architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family's patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences. . . .

For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. . . . Yamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area." True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's. . . .

Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra. The shimmering filigree is the mark of the holy. According to Oleg Grabar, the great American scholar of Islamic art and architecture, the dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca. After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where "the entire surface is meaningful" and "every part is both construction and ornament." A number of designers from the Middle East agreed, describing the entire façade as a giant "mashrabiya," the tracery that fills the windows of mosques. . . .

Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that Bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality. Such mixing of the sacred and the profane is old hat to us—after all, Cass Gilbert's classic Woolworth Building, dubbed the Cathedral to Commerce, is decked out in extravagant Gothic regalia. But to someone who wants to purify Islam from commercialism, Yamasaki's implicit Mosque to Commerce would be anathema. To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.