( Jay-Z's voice)This is America People ( Jay-Z's voice)

For the past few weeks there has been an uproar about the plan to put a “Mosque” at “Ground Zero”. You will note that I bracketed the words mosque and ground zero, I did this because the building that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf wishes to see rise is not a Mosque but a Muslim community center that happens to have a prayer room, and the proposed site would lie in the former shadow of the twin towers, not atop the gash that still mars Manhattan.
In light of these two very salient points one is forced to wonder what exactly the furor is about. This is not like a conquering moor army erecting a Mosque over a razed town on the Iberian Peninsula, which is one example of the incorrect comparisons that I have recently read. It is in fact a mission of peace being undertaken by an individual with strong interfaith ties and a pacifistic message.
So why so serious Americans, really, what is the issue? A frequent ally of the US wants to erect a monument to the peaceful nature of Islam and yet people turn out in droves clutching white signs reading Sharia in a font that could be named blood spatter. It is actually quite sad, it is not as if there has been a misinterpretation of the facts, they are all easily available online; from Feisal Abdul Rauf’s pacifistic track record, to a correct definition of Sharia. It is willful ignorance that is probably fueled by the racist opinions (fair and balanced news it most certainly is not) of Rupert Murdoch’s GOP attack dog.
I’m saddened that a portion of certain segment of the US population is still acts like it does, I will spell it out later in the post, but for now look at who is marching against the community center and who is marching for it.
However, there are other facts that are far more pertinent.
First, the US is a nation of immigrants; even its aboriginal inhabitants were not here when North America was initially formed. Nope, they traveled many miles and many moons (sorry, had to do it) from Asia, when an Alaskan-Siberian ice bridge existed, to populate the Americas. Without these immigrants the US would most likely be as relevant as Togo in the world village: without slaves there would be no basis for America to be a superpower, without fairly constant immigration from Europe until the 19th century the US economy would have probably stagnated, without the influx of exceptional Asian and African students to the US educational system during the later part of the 20th century, who continued on to work in the US after their educational tenure the US ended, the US would most likely not have outstripped its closest rivals as it has.
Second, there are no grounds, legal, moral, or otherwise (barring idiocy) to protest the building of this community center: political hyenas have far too long trampled upon the separation of chuch (Church) and state, like a toddler in a stadium stampede, to appeal to the undereducated and racist. America has no state religion, if it did, wouldn’t that be like exercising Sharia? Yes it would. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the constitution, the same constitution that many of the people who oppose the community center would claim to revere. But more importantly, one nation under God is an affront to the founding fathers (sorta), In God we trust is an affront to the founding fathers (sorta), and barring the erection of this community center is an affront to the founding fathers (again sorta, the founding fathers were for the most part still racist dicks, which led to the extension of slavery and the civil war).
Last, the people who are complaining the most about this “Mosque” have absolutely no right to argue against it, if they do then “Native Americans”(misnomer) have every right to picket churches. What we have here is yet another example of the ignorant portion of white America being suckered into hating “the other” against their interests. It has happened before, whether the other were Aboriginal Americans, African Americans, or Asian Americans.
As such the erection of this “Mosque” may be exactly what America needs. Five to ten years down the line, when the world hasn’t been destroyed by a cataclysm triggered by suicide bombers, Americans may look back and say “damn we were dumb as rocks back then, we should smarten up a little bit.”

Well, one can only hope.