It Was Insensitive that the Twin Towers Were at Ground Zero

by Eric Martin

The fact that there was a Muslim prayer room or, if you will, a mosque in one of the twin towers was very insensitive to the victims' families, especially the Muslims who prayed there and died:

Sometime in 1999, a construction electrician received a new work assignment from his union. The man, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, was told to report to 2 World Trade Center, the southern of the twin towers.

In the union locker room on the 51st floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam went through a construction worker’s version of due diligence. In the case of an emergency in the building, he asked his foreman and crew, where was he supposed to reassemble? The answer was the corner of Broadway and Vesey.

Over the next few days, noticing some fellow Muslims on the job, Mr. Abdus-Salaam voiced an equally essential question: “So where do you pray at?” And so he learned about the Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower.

He went there regularly in the months to come, first doing the ablution known as wudu in a washroom fitted for cleansing hands, face and feet, and then facing toward Mecca to intone the salat prayer.

On any given day, Mr. Abdus-Salaam’s companions in the prayer room might include financial analysts, carpenters, receptionists, secretaries and ironworkers. There were American natives, immigrants who had earned citizenship, visitors conducting international business — the whole Muslim spectrum of nationality and race.

Leaping down the stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he had been installing ceiling speakers for a reinsurance company on the 49th floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam had a brief, panicked thought. He didn’t see any of the Muslims he recognized from the prayer room. Where were they? Had they managed to evacuate?

He staggered out to the gathering place at Broadway and Vesey. From that corner, he watched the north tower collapse, to be followed soon by the south one. Somewhere in the smoking, burning mountain of rubble lay whatever remained of the prayer room, and also of some of the Muslims who had used it.

They should have never been there in the first place!  Or something.  But given that a Muslim prayer space was actually in one of the towers, how is it again that it makes any sense at all that one should not be built blocks away from where the towers stood?

Comments

[Hogan]

Hey, they had their mosque and they blew it up. Why should we let them have another one?

(NB: This is true only for wildly unstable values of "they." Also for very strange values of "we" and "let." But I still expect to hear some version of it somewhere.)

[Eric Martin]

Word.

[wj]

"...how is it again that it makes any sense at all..."

Of course not. Making sense never was the point.

[efgoldman]

wj beat me to the point.

"make...sense..." and the GOBP should never again appear in the same context.

[Countme?]

I expect investigations in the next Republican Congress into the role played by the WTC Muslim prayer room in guiding the planes to their target.

Inside job indeed.

[chmood]

I don't expect another Republican Congress; I believe we're seeing the twilight of their implosion. I'm really going to enjoy the next 8 weeks.

[Countme?]

That would be nice.

But I expect episodes of violence from those in favor of second amendment solutions if they don't at least retake the House.

[Countme?]

If they win the Presidency in 2012, I expect internment camps for Muslims and other enemies of the State and then nuclear Armageddon.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/09/newterdammerung.php#more?ref=fpblg

[Gary Farber]

To emphasize Countme?: This is the trailer for Newt Gingrich's lastest movie hatefest on Islam, which is the sort of propaganda that enables Brett's thinking.

[Gary Farber]

Newt's Islamophobeporn is the sort of propaganda that feeds the lacuna of knowledge of Islam of most Americans, and turns them fearful, just as The Eternal Jew did to Jews.

Muslims are all comin' to getcha! It's the core of their ideology! They're all violent!

Ignorance.

[CaseyL]

No, not ignorance; not by a parsec leap.

They know exactly what they're doing.

It's damnable, and vile, and beneath contempt... but one thing it is not is ignorant.

[Gary Farber]

"They know exactly what they're doing."

I wrote, emphasis on what's now italicized:

Newt's Islamophobeporn is the sort of propaganda that feeds the lacuna of knowledge of Islam of most Americans, and turns them fearful [....]

Yes, most Americans are ignorant of Islam.

No, most Americans do not know exactly what they are doing when they are resultingly fearful of Muslims.

Most Americans are not, in fact, Newt Gingrich and friends.

[Tony P.]

I know "beneath contempt" is just an expression, but trust me: Newtie is not beneath MY contempt.

--TP

[Dr X]

You mean the WTC was actually a mosque? So 911 was a mosque attack?

[Troy]

So 911 was a mosque attack

There was a mooslim prayer center in the Pentagon, too.

Victory Mosques everywhere!

Republicans have a relatively easy time in this country because they've got a lock on the ~50% of the population who actually believe in the supernatural to the extent of buying demons and Satan and all that crap. Once someone mind is gone to that extent pushing them around ideologically is relatively simple.

[Hartmut]

And there was no mosque at the White House (then at least) and it survived. Coincidence?
I like the beacon theory. I tell you, the last thing New Yorkers will see is Obama bin Ahmadinejad riding the Big One down from his huge Iranian drone to Park51 wildly waving his keffiyeh and singing We'll meet again in Urdu.

[Ed Haines]

No terrorist will ever be able to rescind a single one of our Constitutionally ensured freedoms. We, on the other hand, have that capability.
This is a paraphrase of a statement by former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

[Jim Treacher]

There was a a mosque in one of the twin towers? Oh no. Were the Korans okay?

[Chris J]

I understand and appreciate your Quixotic attempts to point out how illogical the GOP is on these things. But, as others have said upthread, their logic is of a different sort -- it's of the Machiavellian variety. And they are doing very well with that approach. They are impervious to irony or ridicule from us elitists because they're laughing all the way to the polling stations.

Ridicule (aka just straight reporting) from the ordinary media would help, but it appears they know from whence their blessings flow and refuse to do it.

[Tony P.]

Slightly OT: freedom of religion means, among other things, that "pastor" is not a government-licensed occupation. Evidently, any pompous jerk can call himself a "pastor". To what extent does good journalistic practice require that pompous jerks be accorded their self-proclaimed honorifics?

--TP

[CaseyL]

This country used to be very big on self-improvement as well as upward mobility (in fact, self-improvement as a path to upward mobility). The idea, or ideal, was to be more knowledgeable, more self-aware, less likely to be taken in by charlatans. We wanted better lives, of course; but we also wanted to be better people.

Besides the whole "damage to America" problem with today's bottom-feeding Zeitgeist, I wonder what drives the people who so willingly and eagerly sign up for it. Why would so many people want to be less than they could be?

[Countme?]

Anti-American and barely human Moe Lane writes a post and oversees a thread larded with bacon and pig insults directed at peaceful Muslims -- American and otherwise.

Does he read these threads to his child?

http://www.redstate.com/moe_lane/2010/09/11/koran-burning-called-off/

[Eric Martin]

There was a a mosque in one of the twin towers? Oh no. Were the Korans okay?

Unlikely, and that is a big no-no.

Which is one of the reasons al-Qaeda is not popular in the Muslim world. That is, there blatant disregard for human life, and attacks on Muslims and Islam itself.

So, yeah.

[Mike D.]

I'm not defending any of it, but isn't the issue that people have with the proposed thingamabob (holy shit, that word actually passes the spellchecker. That weirdly brightens my day(night, or it could be that I'm in the middle of my fourth weizen)) what happened on 9/11, (ostensibly) not inherent intolerance for Muslims? There was a prayer room in the Towers; Muslims knocked down the Towers; now some people aren't cool with Muslim prayer spaces anywhere in the vicinity. Before/after, get it? 9/11 matters to people in terms of how they feel about Islam. So what was in the Towers before 9/11 is irrelevant -- 9/11 is what did the trick. The collective blame/bigotry in all that is plain to see, but let's not let their stupidity infect us, huh? Or do, whatever.

[sekaijin]

Re CaseyL: there indeed was a time, in another universe, when Americans actually seemed to care about reading between the lines, seeing beyond the pale, looking for the face in the crowd that was different as a lodestar for something positively alternative...

But that was another universe. The one we're living in right now is larded with fat (figuratively speaking), self-satisfied, politically ignorant and in terms of civic awareness, soft and lazy people, around half of which (on average) can't be bothered to vote, and who seem to be comfortable with being told what to do and what to think because going outside the box is too burdensome for them. The people, in other words, that Frank Zappa warned us about.

I can only imagine that he is rolling in his grave right now with what is going on.

[Marnie]

Karma!

There were not just Muslims in the TTs but there was Muslim "Hallowed" flooring in t he TTs.

This is just so right. Let the hypocrites chew on this bone.