A furious debate is raging over the so-called Ground Zero mosque. Asra Q. Nomani on why Muslims like her share the same fears about their own community as Tea Partiers do.
Asra Q. Nomani
The Daily Beast
8/10/2010
Not long ago, after my 7-year-old son had battled the fierce dragon Latias at a Pokémon tournament in New Jersey, I took him to the hallowed site of another epic battle—Ground Zero—for a pilgrimage of sorts.
American flags flapped in the wind where the World Trade Center had once stood, the space now eerily empty, except for the construction beams traversing the sky. The bridge I had crossed every morning as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal hung in mid-air, going nowhere. The Greek church, in which I had found moments of quiet solitude during earlier times, was gone.
Born in 2002, my son is part of our world’s first post-9/11 generation, and this is the world he will inherit. My son Shibli has one word for the hijackers: “Nimwits.”…
…We’re not being honest in our Muslim community about the violent ideology inside of our Muslim world that needs to be defeated, and so the war has spread beyond our community to include the Tea Party activists. In the name of political correctness, too many inside our Muslim community have been apologists for Islam, feeling defensive, but not being as brutally honest as the world needs us to be about this problem.
The Tea Party activists actually express the sentiments of Muslims such as myself who believe we have a serious problem inside our Muslim communities…
Read the complete article, with video, at The Daily Beast.
