Some of the September 11th killers flew right over the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant on their way to NYC. Perhaps they didn’t crash into the “Energy Center” (that’s really what it calls itself) because it looks just like a big mosque. You never know.
New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg usually makes sense. I particularly like it when he berates citizenry over common sense issues. “People,” he whines, “You gotta stop [fill in the blank].” Makes me all sheepish and look at my toes and mumble, “Sorry, Mister Mayor.” And I didn’t even do what he’s complaining about!
Of course it’s not cool to like politicians. Especially rich white whiny ones. And he’s certainly not perfect (see: over-development and Atlantic Yards Project). But he’s a good mayor and we’ll miss him when he’s gone. Mark my words.
I watched the whole thing so you don’t have to. The highlights:
1:10 — Tells the “real America” camp to back off.
2:54 — Uses the word “repudiate” correctly.
4:10 — “Islam did not attack the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda did. To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few… is unfair and un-American.”
7:15 — “And there are people… who are hoping that a compromise will end the debate. But it won’t. The question will then become, ‘How big should the no mosque zone be around the world trade center site?’ There’s already a mosque four blocks away. Should it be moved? This is a test of our commitment to American values. And we have to have the courage of our convictions. … We must put our faith in the freedoms than have sustained our great country for 200 years.
9:15 — He reads a quote from the Imam in question. It’s too long to transcribe, but worth a listen.
10:25 — Mike closes with, “We will keep New York the most open, diverse, tolerant and free city in the World.”
Take that, all you haters. Bloomberg makes me proud to be a New Yorker.
The terrorists, Christian Michael Enright, said, “Assalamu alaikum — consider this a checkpoint!” and slashed Muslim American Ahmed Sharif across the neck, and then on the face from his nose to his upper lip. Sharif said:
“I feel very sad. … I have been here more than 25 years. I have been driving a taxi more than 15 years. All my four kids were born here. I never feel this hopeless and insecure before.”
Now I don’t want anything thinking that all Christians are terrorists and banning churches. I mean, there are Christians who believe in peace, too. There must be. But where are the priests? Why aren’t they denouncing this barbaric and cowardly attack?
The Timesalso has an interesting little piece on the Arab neighborhood, Little Syria, that used to be withing “hallowed ground distance” of the World Trade Center site before there was a World Trade Center. Next to was Little Athens.
In the 1940s, the “Arab-American community was almost entirely displaced by construction of entrance ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.”
I wasn’t going to post on this… perhaps other than to say it’s absurd that we’re debating the right of a people in our country to build a house of worship. It’s kind of like debating legal segregation. Haven’t we moved past this a long time ago? (Or not so long ago in the case of racial segregation.) I don’t want to debate freedom of religion any more than I want to debate slavery.
But I do mention this because my wife said that a friend of hers on facebook didn’t even know that this mosque is not being built at the World Trade Center site. Really? Do people really not know this? Are people getting all huffy over a moot point?
45 and 47 Park Place. You can punch it into Google and see where it is. It’s nearwhere the World Trade Center was. Two blocks away, to be precise. So is the Hudson River. So is City Hall Park. I mean, in lower Manhattan, everything is close. If people really want to create a “no-mosque zone,” at want point exactly would it be OK to build a mosque?
See, since the mosque and cultural center isn’t at Ground Zero, I see this much more as an issue for people who hate Islam. That’s not a debate I care to enter. Even though I like pork and drinking, I try not to hate. Islam is not terrorism (and if you don’t know that, you must learn. — But Wahhabism spread by our Saudi [pause for quotes] “allies”? That might be another story.)
So is this “hallowed ground”? No. But why don’t you judge for yourself?
New York Representative Anthony Weiner writes aboutwhy he got angry on the house floor.
Good on ya, Tony. It’s a shame that those who wrap themselves in the flag and take “patriotic” photo-ops in my city won’t put their money behind their mouth.
It’s Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! I love free speech. I also like South Park a lot more than I like religious zealots. I also like being able to write this without being arrested (or killed).
This is the cartoon that started it all:
Since I can’t draw, I’m just going to reprint the drawings of others.
A US citizen from Pakistan. The story in the New York Times.
Kudos to the NYPD and the bomb squad for doing their job well. That work is no joke.
In her wonderful The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote, “It does not take many incidents of violence to make people fear the streets. And as they fear them, they use them less, which makes the streets still more unsafe.” Jacobs talked about “eyes on the street,” the idea that strangers are not the problem but an essential public-safety asset. In the city, it’s the deserted street that is dangerous. But in our overly fearful society, this idea is often forgotten.
Of course Jacobs was talking about “normal” crime and not terrorism, but the lesson is the same:
First, we must understand that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary though they are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves.
Think of it, in this modern hi-tech age of gadgets and gizmos, what we saw was a scene (minus the SUV) straight out of 1875: a street vendor telling an officer on a horse about a crudely made bomb. There is a lesson in this; there’s no substitute for eyes on the street and good old-fashioned policing.
And yet…
New York City, at least until yesterday, has been trying to push street vendors off the streets under the guise that vendors are a public safety hazard.
Just the other day, the Daily News complained in an editorial that:
Second-rate peddlers wrapping themselves in the First Amendment do not have unfettered license to set up shop in busy pedestrian thoroughfares…. These folks are freeloaders who assert the right to sell what they want, where they want, on the grounds that they’re expressing themselves.
…
In a few key park spots where New Yorkers and tourists tend to gather, a suffocating stream of vendors has descended like flies on a horse.
In this case that fly helped stop an explosion and that horse had a police office riding on it. Of course the vendor couldhave been a tourist and the tourist couldhave tried to flag down a passing police car. But he wasn’t and he didn’t.
Too many cities say that horses are too expensive when we need that law enforcement money to, you know, fight terrorism.
And this vendor may be a military veteran (vendors always claimto be veterans because being a veteran grants them privileged vendor status). But what if he weren’t? What if he were illegal? Most street vendors here are illegal. I’d bet my house that the churrosvendor on the N/R/W subway platform at 59th and Lexington is three times illegal: vendor, food seller, andillegal immigrant. But by standing alertly on that platform, she sees more than any passenger (and the churrosain’t bad). But would she go to police if shesaw something? I hope so. But I wouldn’t place even money on that bet.
“The police are the public and that the public are the police,” wrote Robert Peel back in 1829 when he invented the very concept of modern police, “The police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen.” The more we get away from that ideal, the more dangerous our world becomes.
Police are not supposed to be government agents of fear and repression. In the fight against terrorism, local police can’t be jack-booted thugs. The more things we criminalize, the more groups we push underground, the more people fear interaction with the police… the more likely the next bomb will blow.
If Tennessee Republican Congressman John Duncan is to be believed, we spend $860 million for the Air Marshal Service. They make an average of 4.2 arrests per year. Not per officer. But the entire agency. That works out to $200 million per arrest.
Now I’m the first to say let’s not judge police by arrest stats. But…
I would like to see some evidence that the Air Marshals have prevented anything (except the occasional Qatar asshole with diplomatic immunity smoking in the bathroom.)
Also, if the average Air Marshal makes $100,000 a year in salary and benefits, and let’s throw in $100 million a year for guns and paperclips, where does the other $459,000,000 go?
According the congressman, there have been more arrests ofAir Marshals than arrests made byAir Marshals.
[Full disclosure: Soon after I quit the Baltimore Police Department and was writing my PhD dissertation, I looked into getting a part-job with the Air Marshals. What could be better for a graduate student than–after a careful visual inspection of the plane, the passengers, and any potential threats–being paid to sit around and do nothing? And my offer still stands. Even as a temp. For free! Just pay for my training and give me a free ticket whenever I fly. I’ll keep people safe.
Alas, the Federal Air Marshal Service does not hire part time.]
So what’s the lesson with this guy? Seriously.
It’s damn hard to stop people from doing harm if they’re willing to kill themselves… but that’s no real answer.
Here’s one of many stories.
[poor Nigeria, their rep was bad enough with simply internet scams!]
[update:] Maybe it’s this, from David Brooks’ column in the New York Times.
At some point, it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them — and the spirit to take the initiative.
For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action.