09/10/2010
In the year 2000, a year before the current war began, a group that The New York Times felt was responsible for the deaths of many Americans, some of them in New York, wanted to open a centre in Times Square, which is an ordinary commercial location — in the year 2000, it had just stopped being an open-air whorehouse.
The group was the NRA.
The NRA, "America’s oldest civil rights organization," wanted to open an "NRA Sports Blast" cafe to "celebrate the shooting sports" with a virtual (electronic) shooting gallery. It couldn’t have a real shooting gallery because of New York City’s savage and arguably unconstitutional gun laws.
It was immediately met by savage and arguably unconstitutional (the First Amendment, this time) hysteria, in the style that New York politicians have mastered:
"If the NRA was looking for publicity, the gun lobby got it after NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre first disclosed the plan for a theme in May. The idea was to build a theme restaurant, where patrons could feast on elk steaks and buffalo, or buy camping gear and clothing with the NRA logo.
"The New York City Council unanimously voted against the idea, and the gun lobby’s most strident foe, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., suggested tax breaks used to restore the once seedy area might be rescinded. 'We didn’t clean up Times Square so that the gun lobby could move in,' Schumer said."
Gun lobby insists it plans to open Times Square cafe, By Lance Gay, Scripps Howard News Service, July 1, 2000
The New York Times editorialized against the restaurant:
"The reason is not that this newspaper, which has long opposed the N.R.A.’s policies, happens to be in the same neighborhood — a mere two blocks, actually, from the $275-per-square-foot space the N.R.A. has its eyes on. The main reason is that the cleanup of Times Square over the last few years has made it a favorite destination for parents and children. The last thing these kids need is somebody trying to disguise the fact that guns represent a tremendous public health threat, especially for children and especially in urban areas like New York.
"The New York politicians who have commented on the N.R.A. invasion don’t like the idea, in part because they resent the N.R.A.’s efforts to block sensible gun control legislation whose main purpose is to keep guns away from the wrong people, including children. Senator Charles Schumer said he hoped landlords would not rent to the N.R.A. [emphasis added — JF] Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he doubted the N.R.A. could survive in a neighborhood where ground-floor rents can top $7 million a year.
"That seemed another way of saying he did not think the N.R.A. was peddling a very attractive product."
(The N.R.A. in Times Square, May 24, 2000)
You'll notice that there was nothing about "property rights" or respecting other peoples beliefs here, the way there is in the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. In practice, it seems that no New York business owner has any property rights that the City government is bound to respect. However, in the case of the Ground Zero Mosque, the Mayor is Michael Bloomberg, and he wants to respect it.
Of course, from the point of view of the clueless urban anti-gun liberals on The New York Times editorial board, the NRA is some kind of "death cult" which has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers. Islam is nothing like that — no, wait, it’s exactly like that.
The NRA is not responsible for gun crime in New York. New York has a large minority population, including a large immigrant population. Its police force has been described by Nicholas Stix as a
"diverse, urban police force, an agency that hires unfit people based solely on their race or ethnicity, promotes them when they cry racism — as unfit diversity hires inevitably do — and shields them when they commit crimes. "
It has liberal judges, no death penalty, an active Mafia, and an even more active ACLU. The ACLU is a particular scourge — when they finally restored the death penalty to New York, the ACLU immediately set up a Death Penalty Project, in order to stand in the courthouse door, chanting "Murder today, murder tomorrow, murder forever!"
Crime in New York is not caused by the fact that the citizens of states like Florida, Georgia, and Vermont are living in a free country in which guns are legal. But New York City doesn’t believe that — it was acting the same way in 2004, when it called on the Republican National Convention, meeting in New York, to repudiate the NRA. This time the NRA was "racist" as well. [New York to Gun Owners: Drop Dead!, By Michelle Malkin, February 10, 2004]
Terrorism in New York, however, is precisely caused by Muslims. 9/11 was a Muslim crime committed by Muslims for Islamic reasons. The Ground Zero Mosque is a crazy idea, no matter how many liberals or neoconservatives say it isn’t.
The pastor who wants to burn the Korans (note spelling) as protest against Islam has been overpromoted by the Main Stream Media, which has proven quite capable of keeping its mouth shut about mass murders committed by minorities, even if it can’t keep any military secrets. People all over the world are hearing that a man whose church has fifty families is going to hold a bonfire on Saturday in Florida.
The Reverend Terry Jones turns out to be a very poor white person, described by one scornful commentator as a man who "looks like Jed Clampett wearing a Hulk Hogan mustache, who uses words like 'tragical,' who earlier this year launched a 'No homo mayor'' campaign against a candidate in Gainesville." [What if media had ignored Terry Jones?, by Mike Thomas, Orlando Sentinel, September 8, 2010]
That makes Terry Jones one of the people who do not count.
Mike Thomas goes on:
" Last year Jones sent the kids of the congregation off to school in 'Islam is of the devil' T-shirts. Of course they got booted…"
Of course they did. The Supreme Court said in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) that students had the right to wear symbolic clothing as a political protest, but it’s proven very difficult over the years to make High School principals believe that they're living in a free country. (Try it with a Confederate T-shirt some time.) Oh, and Pastor Jones’s church website was shut down by his internet provider (Rackspace) for violating the "terms of use." Apparently, it thinks he’s committing hate speech.
So you can see where Pastor Jones might get the impression that he’s not living in a free country.
Howard Kurtz tweeted "Fringe preacher tries to tie his stunt to moving the mosque. As if they're comparable!" Well, they are — except for the millions of dollars of Saudi money, the backing of the Mayor, and the help of the editorial board of the New York Times. However, I'd say Jones’s stunt has been more successful than the Mosque stunt.
Governments burning books that citizens own is evil and destructive. Burning books that you own yourself is a legitimate form of protest. And Jones’s effort has been very successful, even if he’s only a poor white American.
David Weigel tweets from a blog conference that Newt Gingrich said: "Islamophobia is the lie that the media tells us to get us to shut up because they follow Camus’s rule that you can’t say 2+2=4."
This is a Gingrich Big Idea (he’s used it before), but it’s an actual thing that Camus said in The Plague: "But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that
two and two make four
That’s a very familiar story to us at VDARE.com.
There’s a whole list of things that Gingrich or Glenn Beck can’t say either, and one of them is that Islam is a Bad Thing — and that the mass immigration that has brought Islam to America is worse.
Sure, Islam is a problem. But it could and should be a problem that’s taking place overseas.
The only justification the Gainesville school had for "booting" the children wearing anti-Islamic t-shirts is that there were Muslims around who might be offended. But the problem with mass immigration is now there’s everybody around in America, so every American is supposed to walk on eggshells to avoid offending everybody. Which can’t be done.
There is a reason "some guy" called Terry Jones in Florida is making headlines protesting Islam: it’s because all the other, more respectable people in society who are supposed to be protesting against Islam — say for example, all the Bishops and clergy of the other Christian churches, or the elected representatives of the American people — have abdicated their responsibility to do so.
That’s another familiar story to us at VDARE.com — our protests about crime and immigration are only the protests that MSM is supposed to be doing.
Maybe, if we keep it up, we can get an Obama cabinet secretary instructed to call to call us up and ask us to stop.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.