Mosque, Moscow; What’s the Difference?

But first, thirsty El Chupacabra, fact or fiction? When I initially heard of the Chupacabra (literal translation from Spanish; "goat-sucker") I thought perhaps the Puerto Ricans had carried their penchant for romance an unnatural step too far, but it turns out the Chupacabra is something of cross between a wolf and Pete Lorre which performs vampiric exsanguinations on innocent livestock in the dead of the lonely, black tropical night. First identified in the mid 1990's, the Chupacabra is allegedly found in many locations throughout Latin America and even as far afield as Russia and the State of Maine. It has been linked by some "knowledgeable" sources to UFO's sightings and by others to secret government experiments, such as invisibility cloaks and health care reform. Many supposed Chupacabra corpses have been trotted out over the years, but the ones that have been scientifically analyzed have all, every one, turned out to be mangy coyotes, really. Seems like the Republicans would notice some of their Congressional leadership missing, doesn't it?

 Speaking of Republicans, Sarah Palin's world is sort of similar to the Chupacabra in that it is a fabrication from superstition and ignorance that invokes evil to explain the mundane. Invoking evil is important, because then you get to oppose evil, which makes you good. Let's take these evil Muslims who want to invest $100 million in a 13 story building in lower Manhattan a couple of blocks from the site of the World Trade Center to house an Islamic and Interfaith Religious Center, including a Mosque. How dare they bring their vile anti-papism within some unspecified distance of whatever the former site of the World Trade Center is supposed to represent?! Sarah wants to know. In fact, she is morally outraged by the prospect of such an indignity. Well, they dare probably because they can afford to buy the land and pay for the construction of the building and the law says they can. Sounds reasonable to me.

Last time I checked, America was a capitalist nation, and there is no greater monument to capitalism than Lower Manhattan itself. To suggest that someone's right of property use is contingent upon the popularity of their religion is beyond absurd; it is Unconstitutional. After 20 something years in local government Planning and Zoning, I can testify as an expert that hate and fear are not zoning districts; but simply dark corners of the human soul. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the front man on this project, has been accused of everything from anti-Semitism to drinking the blood of babies, but not a single exsanguinated (there's that word again) baby has been produced thus far, and even if he is anti-Semitic, which I do not know, at least he doesn't have to get drunk to hate on Jews like Whoopi Goldberg's friend Mel Gibson. I can say with some confidence that if having popular ideas or just being generally decent were a prerequisite for developing property in New York, the island of Manhattan would look like Manhattan, Kansas. Does anybody really believe that Donald Trump and the late George Steinbrenner don't worship Gog and Magog? Really?

According to always reliable Internet sources, there were 28 Muslims killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, excluding those ten holier-than-thou Muslim douche-bags on the two planes. I can only imagine that there are still 28 grieving Muslim families and hundreds or even thousands of law abiding Muslim citizens who felt the loss of those 28 people, but Sarah Palin and her Tea Party fellow travelers seem to think that only white, Christian working class people died in the tragedy. The great irony here is that if the World Trade Center were still standing, Sarah and her moose herd would probably be down there protesting against the Jewish/Bolshevik conspiracy and the Zionist control of world capital markets. Aside from the janitorial and clerical staffs, most of the people working in the World Trade Center were those very stockbrokers and commodities traders that everyone now wants to string up for collapsing the economy. Maybe Mohammed Atta really wasn't an angry Islamic fundamentalist; maybe he just lost a lot of money day trading and decided to launch a retaliatory strike.

Islam says to acknowledge God and his prophets, pray, fast, do works of charity and visit Mecca every once in a while if you can afford it. There is not much more of that "pluck out thy enemy's eyeballs" junk in Islam than there is in the Old Testament or the average Sunday morning service down at the Church of the Rock. In the opinion of this humble wormhole repairman, there is nothing wrong with Islam that isn't wrong with every other religion on Earth. I seem to recall that Jesus said something to the effect that "all men fall short of the glory of the Kingdom of God". Muslims are just flawed humans like everybody else who sometimes make stupid choices or do very bad things. In 2008, there were over 16,000 murders in the United States, and I am willing to bet that about 90 percent of them were committed by people who were raised as Christians. Does that mean Christianity is a murderous religion? Answer it for yourself. The Islamic world is in turmoil, and much of it is the fault of their political leadership, but the vestiges of European colonialism and the Western politics of oil are also partly to blame. I don't see Sarah Palin and the Tea Moose Party pushing for hydrogen fuel cells or higher fuel efficiency standards for automobiles so that that Persian Napoleon Ahmadinejad doesn't get three cents from every gallon of gas sold in America to fund his nuclear arsenal. All I see is fear and ignorance, and in the calculus of civilization, FEAR X IGNORANCE = the magnitude of the horror we will all have to endure when public outrage supplants the rule of law.

There are names for nations where conjecture, rumor, speculation, prejudice, paranoia and political convenience control government policy; right now one of those names is North Korea and I don't want to live there. Powerful, the Dark Side is; it clouds everything. We need to get our heads out of our collective asses and focus on something important rather than the symbolism of foolishness and prejudice masquerading as patriotism. Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone, because what goes around comes around. And Mrs. Palin, we know you can see Russia from your back porch in Alaska, but have you also looked for Pyongyang? Wherever you are dear, it can't be far.