Charley Socci

They want to build a Mosque downtown a few blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center towers.

Seems many folks are in a tizzy. Well, here’s my two cents.

1 – One of the core values of our founding fathers was freedom of religion. If you’re going to live by that code, than you have to include everybody – even the ones you don’t like. Its also one of a handful of values that still make America great.

2 – You can’t blame an entire religion of 1.5 Billion people for the acts of a fanatic faction. Do we outlaw Christianity because some crazed born again right to lifer killed an abortion doctor? What about the Ku Klux Klan, aren’t they a Christian organization?

3 – There are all kinds of Muslims. I work with some who were refugees from Bosnia when Milosovich was perpertrating his ethnic cleansing. They are fellow countrymen and do not support the attack on the towers and I refuse to hold their religion against them.

4 – The display of American ignorance as to what Islam is, and where the religion comes from is staggering. The lack of comprehension in the United States as to *WHY* so much of the arab world hates us is staggering. We are supposed to be a country that supports liberty, freedom and equality – yet we continue to suport governments like Israel’s (4 Billion dollars per year) who time and again wage a genocide agianst Palestinians in the occupied territories. The US media is too afraid to report it fairly. The politicians are scared of the massive lobbies in Washington, DC and nobody wants to do anything about it. THIS is why we are hated throughout the Arab world. That doesn’t make hijacking planes and killing innocents any better. 9/11 was a horror and I watched it with my own eyes. But we need to understand the situation before we can wage a “war on terror” or anything else.

The lore of Islam – a *Judaic* religion – is as follows: Abraham, the Grand Father of the Jews, had a son with his wife Sarah after God gave her a miracle to make her fertile. That son is Isaac, the Father of the Jewish people. Abraham had another son with his wife’s servent named Hagar, a boy named Ishmael. Ishmael, Abraham’s “bastard” child is the father of the Arab Muslims. Such surrogate arrangements were the custom in the day. There are many pointless rhetorical arguments surrounding this mythology (I consider it all mythology, by the way…).

The Quran, the holy book of Islam, was supposedly dictated by God to Mohammed in the year 610. The angel who dictated the words to Muhammed? Gabriel. Yes, the same Gabriel as in the Bible. Did you also know Islam worships Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, Elias, Jonah, John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ as Prophets?

The countries of Iraq (Mesopotamia) and Iran (Persia) are home to the oldest human civilizations in the world (Iraq in particular). These areas were civilized with agraculture, government, and armies while Europe was still living in barbarism.

So what is all this uproar about a Mosque, that isn’t even *AT* Ground Zero? It is several blocks away – in the company of at least one “Gentlemen’s Club”, and many legit and not-so-legit commercial enterprises.

Sometimes I’m ashamed of the ignorance displayed by my fellow countrymen.

Yet another reason I think “religion” may be the ultimate downfall of humanity.