(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The NYT took a question that was meant to point out the hypocrisy of those who are opposed to the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center that is near Ground Zero and used it to poll New Yorkers. Good going, NYT’s Editorial Board, just feed the fear and hate. And one more thing, it is NOT a “house of worship”, it is NOT a Mosque. Get your damned facts straight.
The furor over the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque near ground zero keeps giving us new reasons for dismay. As politicians and commentators work themselves and viewers into a rage, others who should be standing up for freedom and tolerance tiptoe away.
To the growing pile of discouragement, add this: A New York Times poll of New York City residents that found that even this city, the country’s most diverse and cosmopolitan, is not immune to suspicion and to a sadly wary misunderstanding of Muslim-Americans.
The poll found considerable distrust of Muslim-Americans and robust disapproval of the mosque proposal. Asked whether they thought Muslim-Americans were “more sympathetic to terrorists” than other citizens, 33 percent said yes, a discouraging figure, roughly consistent with polls taken since Sept. 11, 2001. Thirty-one percent said they didn’t know any Muslims; 39 percent said they knew Muslims but not as close friends.
Click on the title to view the poll
h/t Adam Serwer subbing for Greg Sargent @ The Plum Line
(But) the Times did something interesting, which is that it quantified the extent of the area Matt Yglesias coined the “mosque exclusion zone.” Seven percent of those who oppose the project think the exclusion zone should be five blocks, 18 percent think it should be between ten and 20 blocks, and 20 percent think it should be more than 20 blocks. Nine percent said it couldn’t be far away enough, which I’m guessing means — as one of my twitter followers suggested — that they think the Mosque Exclusion Zone should look something like this.
The frustrating part about this is that, as I understood it, the mosque exclusion zone was initially meant as a joke emphasizing the absurdity of arbitrarily banning a religious group from a particular space based on “sensitivity.” Yet people answering the question about how far away the mosque should be don’t seem to recognize the absurdity. This is why we don’t put fundamental rights up to a show of hands. In line with what I wrote earlier this week about how Americans from groups once subject to religious persecution quickly tend to forget what that’s like, the Times writes that most Jews and Catholics oppose the Park51 project.
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The NYT should have the guts to run the John Stewart companion study.