InterFaith21

“I am ashamed to say that it took me a week to focus on the facts and it wasn’t until I heard an architect from NY describe where the building was, that it was in the middle of a row on (sic) buildings on a city block, and how it was designed inside that I finally had the facts with which to fight emotion.” — A friend’s email

First, let’s get some real information on board. Such as the actual facts.

Meanwhile, no swiftboating on his watch: President Obama, during the annual Ramadan Iftar Dinner at the White House, lighting another candle against the darkness: The video. The transcript. WPost story. NYTimes report. HuffPost story.

Mayor Bloomberg won’t be fooled again? He remembers falling for the last such trick, when he failed to stand behind the principal of the city’s first Arabic-language public school.  A federal employment commission determined that the Bloomberg administration “succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel.”

Meanwhile, back in Reality USA, a couple of real mosques, Masjid Manhattan and Masjid al-Farah, “have existed for decades, largely unnoticed, blocks from the World Trade Center site”:

One mosque is conservative, and the other is reputed to be among the most progressive in the city — making the downtown Muslim community a quintessentially New York combination of immigrants and native New Yorkers, traditionalists and spiritual seekers.

Perhaps the best for last:  Jon Stewart on the absurdity of it all.

— C.B. Hanif