Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Consistency, Please
I haven't had anything to say about the matter of the Mosque in southern Manhattan, nor am I going to say anything now. I do however wonder if there may not be an inversion of positions, whereby people who support construction of the Mosque in Manhattan in the name of freedom of religion, rather overlap with the people who dislike construction of Jewish institutions or even homes in parts of Jerusalem.
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7 comments:
I think you are exactly right Yaacov.
according to what I know by now of Mosques the London Times gets it right today when she calls what is to be built:
"Islamic centre with a prayer room"
no use looking for a link, the Times is walled off.
i.e. the people fighting for the freedom of religion leave the secular part conveniently aside, but that the "overlappers" do whenever they find it convenient anyway.
Silke
I think in this instance it's a different situation.
People who support building the mosque support it because the mosque has every right to be there and because telling them to move would be insensitive. This is, to them, a matter of tolerance and inclusion.
People who oppose Jewish building in eastern Jerusalem are opposing it because they don't think Jews have the right to build there at all, because they don't believe it's Israel's territory. It's not a matter of sensitivity or intolerance, it's about "legal rights."
I don't like people who oppose Jewish building in Jerusalem, but they're not being inconsistent when they support the mosque but oppose Jews building in Jerusalem.
That being said, I think both positions are misguided if not actively ignorant.
I don't see any inconsistency because the underlying contexts are completely different. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state and is currently locked in a dispute over sovereignty in East Jerusalem. The US enshrines disestablishment in the Bill of Rights and is the uncontested sovereign in lower Manhattan.
Reasonable people can disagree with the premise that splitting Jerusalem will make a two-state solution more feasible (I'm actually sympathetic to your opinion on the subject). What you're suggesting, though, is that it is logically inconsistent to advocate religious pluralism in the United States while simultaneously believing that, in light of a century of violence, Israel and the Palestinians would be better served by separation than pluralism. That view may very well be wrong, but it is not logically inconsistent.
Evan misses the point that building a Jewish synagogue in Jerusalem should be acceptable and represents freedom of religion regardless of who has sovereignty.
Yaakov is right about the inconsistency, in particular the way the anti-Israeli (and often anti-Christian and anti-Semitic) left in the USA seems to adore Islam, ignoring Islam's component of authoritarian, triumphalist ideology.
We are not ignorng Islams "authoritirarian, triumphalist ideology". In any case, it is less arrogant than the breathtakingly triumphalist neocon ideology. Western ideology divides people into nation states, while both Islam and Progressivism want all of mankind united under a single banner. Once we accomplish this, we can have a diolog with Islam and discuss the areas that we differ. Under the current system, conflict is guaranteed with the only victor being the military-industrial complex
Tony
you are disappointing me. Pure nonsense is beneath you, you can surely do better than that
or
are you maybe recovering from a sun stroke?
Silke
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