主题：纽约伊斯兰中心的故事 -- 红绿

纽约我去过，在零区附近建清真寺确实不妥。美国ZF可以表面大度，台面下则连劝带吓把事情顶回去。现在这样，各方都惟恐它不建，可见私利当头，都不把国家利益当回事了。

这不单是奥巴马的陈水扁化，也是整个“共-民党”的夏洛克化，堕落化。“国将不国”，可以用在这里。

这让我想起去年多伦多的“垃圾工人大罢工”，本来我要写一篇《垃圾超限战》专说此事的。现在简单说：垃圾工人罢工，是市ZF鼓励的。罢工计划从周一开始，上周五下班时，市ZF的各级小头头们就下来收市政工人手里的各类工作机械和车辆的钥匙，美其名曰干部自己顶上去，实际是确保周一工人无法上班，所有人只能跟着工会去罢工。你一帮肥佬领导，拆开能打几棵钉？

垃圾工人罢工，市ZF有什么好处？省钱。罢工其间不发工资，罢工结束后堆积的垃圾山靠加班清除，工人急于回家睡觉，不会磨洋工，干得快。最后算下来，去掉加班费，市ZF还省了很大一笔，有市议会议员要求公开这个收支情况，到底是赔是赚？市府赚了应该全分给市民补偿。市府百般推诿，议员估计应该有千万加币盈余（附近的伦敦市------不是英国的那个------几个月前刚罢完，老实承认是省了预算了）。

至于垃圾当道数以月计，市民的惨状，好像极左派（新民主党）的市长和一班领导都不大CARE。工会最后也拿到好处了，这对立的两面，双赢。

纽约清真寺问题，是个“垃圾门”的放大版。表面对立的共和党-民主党，也双赢。骨子里对立的美国主流JY和穆斯林激进派，还是双赢。真输的，只有911遗属，沉默的美国老百姓和温和派穆斯林。

上youtube找找Ground zero mosque的video，好多人都有些歇斯底里了，他们意识到问题的严重性。一些保守派（Rush Limbaugh为代表）觉得，不管建不建清真寺，美国都输了：要是建了，极端穆斯林就觉得胜利了（将建的纽约清真寺叫Cordoba House，Cordoba是穆斯林攻占西班牙后的首都的名字，这个清真寺的名字有点想绿化美国的味道）；要是不让建，那就违反了宗教自由的宪法修正案，而且还给极端穆斯林口实，可以传播仇恨、美国人不接纳穆斯林。

伊斯兰在take 欧美“内部普世”的advantage，在欧洲、美国快速移民、繁殖。很多保守人士已经非常紧张，Mark Steyn的《America Alone》那本书就很有代表性，觉得欧洲伊斯兰化几十年就要成为现实。

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world/26islamic.html?hp

差不多和我想的一样。纽约时报不愧为美国人民的喉舌阿:

Looking at Islamic Center Debate, World Sees U.S.

By THANASSIS CAMBANIS

For more than two decades, Abdelhamid Shaari has been lobbying a succession of governments in Milan for permission to build a mosque for his congregants — any mosque at all, in any location.

For now, he leads Friday Prayer in a stadium normally used for rock concerts. When sites were proposed for mosques in Padua and Bologna, Italy, a few years ago, opponents from the anti-immigrant Northern League paraded pigs around them. The projects were canceled.

In that light, the furor over the precise location of Park51, the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, looks to Mr. Shaari like something to aspire to. “At least in America,” Mr. Shaari said, “there's a debate.”

Across the world, the bruising struggle over an Islamic center near ground zero has elicited some unexpected reactions.

For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.

But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.

The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.

“America hates Islam,” said Mohaimen Jabar, the owner of a clothes shop in Baghdad, Iraq.

“If America loved us, it would help the Palestinians and stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “It would stop Iran and Israel from distorting the image of Islam.”

Interestingly, leaders in Iran, Afghanistan and even occasionally prickly rivals like China and Russia — both of which have their own tensions in some of their heavily Muslim regions — have refrained from making much of the Park51 debate.

China’s state-run news media has used the story to elaborate on the need for a secular state strong enough to police extremism, a matter near and dear to its own ideology.

American diplomats are selling the controversy as Exhibit A in the case for America as a bastion of free debate and religious tolerance.

But “the harmonious image of the melting pot, of the ability to integrate all immigrant ethnicities is tottering dangerously,” Federico Rampini wrote in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

That was echoed by Pierre Rousselin, a French columnist writing in Le Figaro: “America is discovering that its Constitution and liberal principles don’t protect her from the debates that the practice of Islam stirs up in our countries.”

In Thailand, which has contended with its own Islamic insurgency, an editorial in The Nation worried aloud that America’s handling of the cultural center would affect relations worldwide between Muslims and non-Muslims. “If the era of former President George W. Bush tells us anything, it is that how the U.S. deals with the Muslim world affects us all,” the editorial said.

Far more common, however, was a sort of shrug of the shoulders from clerics and observers accustomed to far more unpleasant debates. While extremists have presented the controversy as proof of American hostility toward Islam, some religious leaders have taken quite a different stance, arguing against placing the center close to ground zero.

Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Grande Mosquée of Paris and one of the most senior Islamic clerics in France, told France-Soir: “There are symbolic places that awaken memories whether you mean to or not. And it isn’t good to awaken memories.”

A senior cleric at Egypt’s Al Azhar, the closest equivalent in the Sunni Islamic world to the Vatican, said that building at the proposed location sounded like bad judgment on the part of American Muslims.

“It will create a permanent link between Islam and 9/11,” said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of the Islamic Research Institute at Al Azhar. “Why should we put ourselves and Islam in a position of blame?”

That is not to say that the language in the United States has not agitated some observers, like Aziz Tarek, who wrote on the Saudi Web site Watan that America was in the grip of “intolerance and racism.”

He referred to Newt Gingrich’s widely reported statement that there should not be a new mosque in Lower Manhattan until Saudi Arabia allows construction of churches or synagogues.

“How can they compare building a mosque in N.Y. with building whatever in Mecca?” Mr. Tarek wrote. “I thought they viewed themselves better than that country of Saudi Arabia with its many human rights violations, as they love to put it.”

One Cambridge University researcher, writing in the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam, said Muslims could win their case for a center near ground zero in a court of law, only to end up losing in the court of public opinion.

“Provoking the other side will eventually create public opinion that will undermine the very laws that the Muslims evoke today,” wrote the researcher, Khaled al-Haroub, adding that many Muslim states do not tolerate Christian or Jewish houses of worship: “We keep increasing our religious demands vis-à-vis the West, while refusing to meet even a few of the demands made by religious minorities living among us.”

Paradoxically, the public reaction has not been heated in Lebanon, a country with 18 recognized religious sects where Muslims and Christians have a long history of occasionally violent coexistence.

If the mosque were built, many Lebanese commentators said, it would increase the influence of the ideal of the secular state. Many Lebanese, however, seemed more interested that Miss U.S.A., Rima Fakih, a Lebanese-American, had suggested that Park51 seek another location, than in the debate itself.

“Let’s be honest, it is kind of weird to build it there,” said Samer Ghandour, 33. “But the U.S. is also incredibly polarized and does not tolerate Islam.”

Mahmoud Haddad, a history professor at the University of Balamand in Lebanon, said that “the Muslim community should take the high moral and political ground” and agree to move the center, even though it has every right to build near ground zero.

“They should show they are more concerned about the general good of all Americans,” said Mr. Haddad, who studied and taught in the United States for two decades. “American society refuses to accept Muslims, even of the Westernized type, and consider them as a potential risk at best.”

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the project leader, has been speaking about his Cordoba Initiative on a two-week tour of the Persian Gulf sponsored by the State Department, although he has gingerly avoided discussing the Park51 location.

“What’s happening in America is very healthy,” said Muhammad Al-Zekri, a Bahraini anthropologist, after spending an evening with the imam.

The United States, he said, was still assimilating historical influences, including Islam, into its inaccurate self-image as a solely Judeo-Christian nation. The construction of Park51, Mr. Zekri believes, will help shape that.

“We pray for the people of New York, for peace,” Mr. Zekri said solemnly. “And if it matters, we apologize for what those people have done on 9/11.”

Thanassis Cambanis reported from Bahrain. Reporting was contributed by Anthony Shadid from Baghdad, Maa de la Baume from Paris, Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, Nada Bakri from Lebanon, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Mona El-Naggar from Cairo and Thomas Fuller from Thailand. Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.