Now is the time for us to stand up adamantly for our Muslim brothers and sisters. They are about to be hit by a flood of hatred, fear, and discrimination. Mark my words.
Watching the news, reading commentaries and blogs, and having conversations ... it's clearer and clearer that the resistance to the lower Manhattan community center is just the tip of the iceberg of a mass of anti-Islamic sentiment brewing in America. We seem intent on incorrectly blaming mainstream Islam for the acts of a handful of angry nutballs who just happen to reference the Koran and revere Muhammed as moderate Muslims do.
From the conversations I've had, mainstream Muslims have no more fond feelings for the terrorists than mainstream Christians do Timothy McVeigh or the various Michigan militia groups that claim Christ as their inspiration. Imagine if the world insisted on viewing those loonies as our standard-bearers!
Forces on the far right are doing their best right now to whip up fear and antipathy against the Manhattan project and, by extension, mainstream Islam. There are actually calls being made in the last couple of days to block the building of ANY new mosques in America, and remarkably, a few have begun calling for Islam to be outlawed altogether.
For compassionate lefties, ACLU free-rights huggers, and conservative Constitutionalists alike, there's now a single mandate. We MUST both protect our First Amendment freedom of religious expression as well as do our best to dissuade those who would make life difficult to impossible for Muslim-Americans.
To ignore this, and allow fear-mongers to frighten us into retreating from our Constitution and principles, is to allow un-American activities, plain and simple.
The truly patriotic thing to do is to defend the Manhattan mosque and free practice of Islamic faith in our nation with all our might.
