The ground zero strip club & the great mosque hoax

The ground zero strip club & the great mosque hoax

via Open Left - Front Page by Paul Rosenberg on 8/18/10

So, if Ground Zero is so holy and all, how come there's never been any outcry about the Gound Zero Strip Club (aka "The Pussycat Lounge")?  

That's one of many good questions asked at Mahablog last Friday:

So over the past several days here on this blog I have documented that within a three-block radius of the area called Ground Zero there are at least two strip clubs, plus a number of bars (one popular with lesbians). This morning through googling I found a lingerie and porn video shop about two blocks south of Ground Zero that a reviewer calls "grimy" and "sleazy." Those establishments have existed in close proximity to Ground Zero lo these many years, and no one seemed to care.

Yet talk about putting up a cultural center within this same area, one that won't even be visible from the Ground Zero site, and suddenly people start squawking about "hallowed ground" and "sacrilege." Give me a break.

Here's a typical example of "sacred ground" narrative cited at Mahablog, from Jennifer Rubin, who writes for Commentary:

The left continues to feign confusion (it is hard to believe its pundits are really this muddled) as to the reasons why conservatives (and a majority of fellow citizens) oppose the Ground Zero mosque. No, it's not about "religious freedom" - we're talking about the location of the mosque on the ash-strewn site of 3,000 dead Americans.

Geeze, I know conservatives think public employees are worse then useless, but it's been nine years already.  Look ma!  No ash!  Not even in the strip clubs!

The more you look at it, the more this ginned up rightwing outrage starts to look like the destruction of ACORN, the forced resignation of Van Jones and the character assisination of Shirley Sherrod. What they all have in common--in addition to their rightwing origins: They're all HOAXES!

There are at least five major aspects of the rightwing narrative about the Manhattan mosque that are patently false and misleading, all contributing to a completely false presentaiton of the factual situation:

(1) It's not a mosque,

it's a cultural center, including a mosque as just one part of it.

(2) The people involved in establishing the mosque are not just opponents of terrorism, they are ideological enemies of the terrorists.

(3) The 9/11 victims, as well as first responders included Moslems.

(4) As indicated above, there has been no special attitude of "sacredness" applied to the area where the cultural center is being built. Other structures in the area include bars, strip clubs and betting parlors.

(5) Finally, there is no special opposition to the cultural center from 9/11 survivor families. The only pre-existing family organization to take a stand endorsed the center.

More on that final point on the flip, also from Mahablog:

A September 11 Family Association Supports the Islamic Center
Aug 3, 2010
maha

There's a lot of squawking about how the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan would cause pain to the families of September 11 victims, so it should not be built. But some of those families are Muslim. And notice that most of the people presuming to speak for the families of September 11 victims do not belong to families of September 11 victims, who as far as I know have not been polled for their opinions.

The Families of September 11 have made no statement about the Islamic Center that I could find on their website. The September 11 Families' Association website hosts some news stories about the Islamic Center, but I could find no opinion or position about it on that site, one way or another.

But the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a group founded and steered by families of September 11 victims, has issued a strong opinion. It supports the building of the Islamic Center.

I realize some individuals who lost family members on September 11 have vocally opposed the Islamic Center, but it's a leap to assume that they speak for anyone but themselves. So I say again to Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the buttinskys who don't live in New York and have no personal connection to those who died there - MYOB.

We need to realize that conservatives do much more than just lie.  A lie is a single untruth.  Conservatives never content themselves with a single untruth.  They construct layers upon layers of lies, intersecting narratives, cross-connecting patterns of deceit. These are not always easy to detect in isolation, because lies are often difficult to detect as such on the individual level.  How do you know that person X didn't know fact Y?  

But as former federal prosecutor Elizabeth De La Vega argued, the invasion of Iraq was the product of a deliberate fraud, and proving that does not require proving specific lies.  It's enough to show that there was a deliberate intent to mislead.  And the same is true in the care of hoaxes.  Indeed, one could argue that a fraud is merely a specific kind of hoax.  The intent in both cases is to create a false impression, from which false inferences will be drawn. It is not necessary that deliberate lies be told.  Indeed, sometimes it is most telling how carefully the perpetrators avoid telling lies, carefully avoiding saying something specific, while clearly leading people to believe it.  Creating the false impression of  conneciton between Iraq and 9/11 was a classic example of this.

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