Mosque hysteria
Is Mosque Hysteria Being Ginned Up to Bolster Support for the Disastrous Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
By Phyllis Bennis
(source: Alternet)
At its core, the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan is not about religion. It’s about war.
For some years now the fear factor that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001 and fueled public support for the “global war on terror” (or the onomatopoetic “GWOT”) has been diminishing. Along with the long and intense work of the antiwar movement and the rising levels of casualties, fear reduction has played a key role in building opposition to the wars. Part of that process has been the growing normalization of the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. “Ground zero,” the site of the destroyed World Trade Center, is now a busy construction venue in the midst of a hectic commercial district that includes all the usual hodgepodge of convenient and useless, businesslike and tawdry aspects of Manhattan street life: Office buildings and food vendor carts, coffee shops and strip joints. There’s nothing hallowed about it.
That normalization hasn’t yet made possible the kind of serious national debate this country so desperately needs. That debate is not about September 11, but about September 12 – the day George Bush launched a war our country was now going to wage anywhere he chose against whomever he designated for as long as he wanted without any restrictions. The whole world – though most especially the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as those of Yemen, Somalia, Palestine and Kenya, and so many more places – as well as those of us here in the U.S. continue to pay the price.