Racists attack Mosque in NY

[Checkmite]

course its racism....the "muslim is not a race" argument just annoys me the 468th time you see it. where race is defined into nonexistance by using virtually species level deliniations.

Oh, come off it. "Race" is a delineation based on physical attributes; it always has been. Disliking or being biased against an idea isn't "racism".

 

[Cainkane1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/nyregion/01mosque.html?src=me&ref=nyregion

fired a shotgun. sideswiped a worshipper with a car. yelled obsenities.

but Islamophobia is just a myth.

Were they racist or just anti Muslim? Muslims riot in other people countries and it seems to me they are merely getting a taste of their own medicine. I disagree with this derogatory behaviour because I know some fantastic muslims and most of them are just fine but I do believe in leau of the events of 911 building a Mosque at ground zero is in very poor taste.

If an innocent person gets hurt I'll be very compassionant and sorry.

 

[marksman]

If an innocent person gets hurt I'll be very compassionant and sorry.

A worshiper was hospitalized after being sideswiped by the car. I think "innocent person gets hurt" has already happened.

And can we take the discussion of the Islamic Center in lower Manhattan to the threads for that discussion? Anti-Muslim bigotry was going on before the flak about the Center erupted and will likely continue even if that issue goes away.

 

[quadraginta]

Were they racist or just anti Muslim? Muslims riot in other people countries and it seems to me they are merely getting a taste of their own medicine. I disagree with this derogatory behaviour because I know some fantastic muslims and most of them are just fine but I do believe in leau of the events of 911 building a Mosque at ground zero is in very poor taste.

If an innocent person gets hurt I'll be very compassionant and sorry.

It is completely pointless to set the stage for a semantic quibble about the term "racist". That is dishonest and disingenuous. Their attacks were prompted by intolerance. Bigotry, in other words. "Anti-Muslim" is no less so. Making baseless assumptions about individuals because of unfounded prejudice against some group is the very essence of bigotry. Pick a name you like better if you feel you must, but don't try and pretend that that changes the nature of the act.

Bringing up the behavior of someone else who happens to be Muslim in some other country as a defence is an equally dishonest, and equally bigoted argument. So is trying to justify these deplorable actions by whining about a proposed community center in NYC. These are merely feeble excuses, and worse still they are feeble excuses for bigotry, not for any justifiable act.

This passage from the cited article starts to put an even darker complexion on the episode.

The fifth teen, 17-year-old Mark Vendetti, was charged Aug. 31 with felony criminal possession of a weapon. He was accused of twice firing a shotgun into the ground during a confrontation outside the mosque the night before. He told police he fired the gun because he was afraid mosque members might go after him, prosecutors said.

This seems a little more intimidating than the earlier, very unspecific "discharging", which left the impression of someone shooting randomly in the air to make noise.