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Thursday, August 26, 2010

AP Checks The Facts For Us, Can't Figure Out Nuthin!

Calvin Woodward of the AP, "who has the standing assignment of "factchecking", took a stab at trying to splash reality in the face of rubes like you and me who have no clue about what's going on in the world. Here are his results on the 100 million dollar Ground Zero Victory Super-Mosque (GZVSM) fact checking:

A look at some of the claims and how they compare with the known facts:

_"The folks who want to build this mosque — who are really radical Islamists who want to triumphally prove that they can build a mosque right next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists — those folks don't have any interest in reaching out to the community. They're trying to make a case about supremacy." — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a potential 2012 presidential candidate.
_Some of the Muslim leaders associated with the mosque "are clearly terrorist sympathizers." — Kevin Calvey, a Republican running for Congress in Oklahoma.
_"This radical is a terrible choice to be one of the faces of our country overseas." — Statement by GOP Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Peter King of New York.
_"Mr. President, ground zero is the wrong place for a mosque." — Rick Scott, Republican candidate for Florida governor.
_"Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center." — Gingrich.
_"Just a block or two away from 9/11." — Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, another 2012 GOP presidential prospect.
THE FACTS:
No mosque is going up at ground zero. The center would be established at 45-51 Park Place, just over two blocks from the northern edge of the sprawling, 16-acre World Trade Center site. Its location is roughly half a dozen normal Lower Manhattan blocks from the site of the North Tower, the nearest of the two destroyed in the attacks.
The center's location, in a former Burlington Coat Factory store, is already used by the cleric for worship, drawing a spillover from the imam's former main place for prayers, the al-Farah mosque. That mosque, at 245 West Broadway, is about a dozen blocks north of the World Trade Center grounds.
Another, the Manhattan Mosque, stands five blocks from the northeast corner of the World Trade Center site.
To be sure, the center's association with 9/11 is intentional and its location is no geographic coincidence. The building was damaged in the Sept. 11 attacks and the center's planners say they want the center to stand as a statement against terrorism.


Thanks Cal. Now how about we look at the pertinent facts?

THE PERTINENT FACTS
The area is a business district. There is no Islamic community in the immediate region that has need of this mosque. As part of the wheel gear of one of the doomed aircraft crashed through the roof of the building, it is in fact a part of the area destroyed by the Islamic terror attack and is properly called a part of Ground Zero. The story that the building will be a part of a community outreach project is somewhat undermined by the fact that infidels cannot enter the mosque. No effort is being made on the part of the islamist backers to do anything for the Christian or Jewish communities. The name of the mosque project was the Cordoba House Mosque, a clear reference to the mosque built in Spain over the ruins of a Christian cathedral that stamped the region as being subjugated under Islam. The name you refer to was only taken as a replacement name in July. The day selected by the Islamic committee for the start of construction of the Cordoba House Mosque was September 11th, 2011.

Now the AP may view this as incidental and irrelevant. I actually hold that very same view about the AP.

"There should be no mosque near ground zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. ... America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization." — Gingrich.
_"This religion's plan is to destroy our way of life. ... If we have to let them build it, make them build it nine stories underground, so we can walk above it as citizens and Christians." — Ron McNeil, a House GOP candidate in the Florida Panhandle, in an exchange reported by The News Herald in Panama City.

THE FACTS:
Such opinions are shared by some Americans, while others are more reluctant to paint the religion with a broad brush and more welcoming of the faith in this country. Bush himself, while criticized at the time for stirring suspicions about American Muslims, traveled to a Washington mosque less than a week after the attacks to declare that terrorism is "not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace."
In any event, the U.S. armed forces field Muslim troops and make accommodations for them. The Pentagon opened an interfaith chapel in November 2002 close to the area where hijacked American Airlines flight 77 slammed into the building, killing 184 people.
Muslims gather there for a daily prayer service Monday through Thursday and hold a weekly worship service on Fridays, drawing no complaints. Similar but separate services are provided for other faiths.


THE PERTINENT FACTS
Muslims in the US military have been the source of devastating bloodshed, from Sergeant Hasan Akbar's attack against his fellow 101st airborne comrades on March 23, 2003 which killed two and wounded fourteen, to Major Nidal Hasan's Ft. Hood Allah Akbar massacre that killed 13 and wounded 30. The fact that the US Armed Forces attempts to accommodate muslims , and even opened an interfaith chapel near where the Islamo-terrorists crashed a jet liner of innocents into the Pentagon says quite a bit about the US Armed Services leadership, and not all of that is good. As to your intended point, the chapel in the Pentagon does not inform us about the national and political fidelity of Muslims in our military.

As hard as the AP works to make the case, the more clear it is they are choosing to ignore the real experiences we have suffered. Our national attempt to treat all people equally and to assume a person's loyalty is to this nation is not necessarily a correct view when it comes to the religion Islam, which pointedly makes the claim to be first in the lives of its adherents.

It is as though Woodward purposefully avoids the reality before him, and calls it a "fact check exercise". How is that useful? Just sounds like being a dimwit to me.

2 comments:

  1. While much attention has been focused on questions surrounding the Ground Zero mosque and the appropriateness of the State Department funding Ground Zero mosque imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s trip to the Middle East, little attention has been given to the fact that U.S. taxpayer money is funding mosque development around the world.

    http://dailycaller.com/2010/08/24/u-s-government-funds-mosque-renovation-and-rehabilitation-around-the-world/#ixzz0xmwLnJR1

    Sure. We notice that whenever the "Mainstream Socialist Media" conducts a "fact check," everything is done to hide the actual facts. The problem for them is that more and more people have noticed too.

    And btw, Are we supposed to call you James now? It seems rude to have called you by your last name for so long now. It may not have mattered before because that's all we had--but now?

    ReplyDelete
  2. nicholas is one of my middle names (my confirmation name, actually) My friends call me Jim, but Nick and nicholas have been good fun too. You can call me "Hey you!" if you like, Darrell.

    ReplyDelete