Monday, June 14, 2010

Unfreedom Tower at Ground Zero

Just for fun, let’s assume a really fanciful, almost unimaginable set of circumstances - a real screwball fantasy:

Let’s say that a group of religion-drunk psychopaths with dreams of paradise fly a pair of commercial aircraft full of screaming passengers into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on, say, September 11th, 2001. Let’s suppose they kill, oh, thousands of people.

Naturally, it could never happen. No group of people is that deluded, that self-destructive, that murderous. No religion would sanction - and sanctify - such a thing. But play along with me.

And let’s say that a few years down the road, a group of their co-religionists, led by a fellow who has opined in the past that the events of that date were not orchestrated by his peers, but by 1) the Jews, 2) the U.S. government, 3) unknown but definitely NON-Muslim parties, or 4) some combination of the above - let’s say that this group wants to build a massive “Islamic learning center” and mosque as close as possible to the two holes in the ground that are the footprints of those towers.

Of course, nobody would stand for that. The city council would vote him down. The public would run him out of the city. But let’s just pretend.

Let’s pretend that this fellow gets, say, $100 million in financing to build the thing (from undisclosed sources); that he plans to open it on the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001 (no symbolism there); and that - hold onto your seat - he wants to call this abomination “Cordoba House.”

Now, we know that something like this could never happen. Because we are reminded that Cordoba (Cordova) is the city where Muslims built their first huge mosque at the beginning of their conquest of Spain.

We are reminded that wherever Muslim warriors have conquered others, they have built gigantic mosques to demonstrate their conquest of, and superiority to, the conquered. And they’ve built them as close as possible to the conquered peoples’ sacred ground - often right on top of it.

The building hovering over Ground Zero would be a triumphalist mosque that would say, “We’ve made our mark in America - right here. We are conquering the land of the infidels. America is weak, and on her last legs. We’ll have the whole country groveling at our feet soon. This triumphal building is a symbol of our strength, and of the ongoing subjugation of America.”

Of course none of this could ever happen.

The only way to imagine it would be to first imagine a group of people who maintain and indeed nurture a hair-trigger sensitivity to the slightest inkling of a provocation, while expecting us to remain unprovoked; who tolerate nothing, yet expect us to tolerate this.

And we would have to imagine the local government and citizens of New York too numb and too feeble to be offended even by this outrage; too hobbled by political correctness and multiculturalist claptrap to object to even this: an Islamic victory tower standing in the bone dust of Ground Zero, celebrating the religious philosophy that turned that place into both mass grave and sacred ground.