The Mosque Story Is Garbage
So I have been looking around the ‘Net to clarify some things that have been bothering me on this whole deal and what I have found shows how totally bogus the whole thing is.
First off, when I was living in Southern California I did work for people in the development community, and the political scene in San Diego was heavily weighted with development issues. They were having their bubble, so there was a lot of money involved.
One thing I know from the experience is that building in a city is a long process filled with forms, fees, and a lot of public meetings. If you don’t like a particular project, there are a lot of ways to to express your opinion, and the easiest if you have the time is to go to the public meetings.
These meetings are a direct way of sending a message to politicians. You may not get a project stopped, but you can stall it if enough people show up, and you might force mitigation.
So, I was surprised when I read this article from the first week in May in the New York Daily News that quotes two relatives of people who died at the World Trade Center talking about the project being insensitive, but notes they didn’t attend the public meetings where the project was approved.
One individual says that he doesn’t understand how they could approve the project, and my response would be, if no one complained why wouldn’t they? This thing is being built in the Financial District, which is pretty much all commercial property. They will probably approve anything that brings more people to the area.
I would also note that the World Trade Center was built four blocks from the Masjid Manhattan, as in the mosque was there when the towers were built, so there must be a Muslim population in that area, which makes it an obvious area in which to build mosques.
I would also note, that since this project was going forward, I knew that it wasn’t being built at Ground Zero, because after all this time, nothing is being built at Ground Zero.
People who talk about a “compromise” are either ignorant or being nasty. You don’t just move a project to a new location in a place like New York. You have to start from scratch at the new location and re-submit everything again, and attend the same meetings in the new area again. The project has been approved – no developer is going to agree to a change at this stage. Who would pay the costs of the change, including the interest on the construction loans and lines of credit that would have to be in place? The time for a “compromise” was at the beginning of the project, not now. Unless clowns like Congresscritter Peter King of mid-Long Island is going to sponsor a bill in Congress to get the money, you can forget it, because no one in New York government has any money to spend.
3 comments
IT is garbage! And you make some valid points that I hadn’t heard mentioned yet. Everyone is more interested in the political beat up. *shrug*
Thou, it’s been surprising to see several Republicans speak out in support of Obama (I mean, the initial Obama, before he did his usual backflip).
9/11 family member Ted Olson breaks from the GOP on NYC mosque: Obama ‘was right about this.’
A bit of sanity for a change. 🙂
This community center project has been underway since *1999*, when the cleric involved made his first bid for the building. That’s how long it’s taken to get all the bids and permits and everything in place. And as tons of people have pointed out, it’s half a mile from the WTC site and only 100 yards or so from something that *is* a mosque. It’s all a bunch of BS by cynical people pandering to those who hate the 1st Amendment because it doesn’t allow them to create the Christian theocracy they want to create…
– Badtux the Irreverent Penguin
People who have never been involved in a major project have no idea how long they take, a decade is not unusual.
I did an archiving program for a project that went on for over three decades before the ground was disturbed. I wrote the software to track the first two decades of documents, and this was undeveloped land. The guys who owned the land lived in fear that some protected species would decide to move in while the process crawled through the hoops.
When you have to demolish an existing structure in an urban area, it almost double the work because you need an entirely separate process to do that.
In the meantime you have the liability of a vacant building and you are still paying taxes.
Yes, Kryten, there is division among the people most directly affected by the attacks at the World Trade Center.
Badtux, if you look at the people who decided to make it a personal crusade, Pam Geller and Peter King, for example, this is more racist BS, and has nothing to do with what will become an office building and shopping district in lower Manhattan on the “hallowed” ground.