Monday, August 23, 2010

Monsters

It doesn't take long for the anti-muslim rally to become anti-non white people type thing:



A man walks through the crowd at the Ground Zero protest and is mistaken as a Muslim. The crowd turns on him and confronts him. The man in the blue hard hat calls him a coward and tries to fight him. The tall man who I think was one of the organizers tried to get between the two men. Later I caught up with the man who's name is Kenny. He is a Union carpenter who works at Ground Zero.
As John Cole points out, he also delivers the line of the decade to the protesters: “All y’all dumb motherfuckers don’t even know my opinion on shit.”

They didn't care about his opinion. He wasn't white, and that's all they needed to know. He wasn't the only one:
At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.

“Get out,” others shouted.

In fact, the two men — Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face. But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.

“I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here,” a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.
It isn't about the mosque, it's about bigotry towards anyone who isn't white.

It's really, really depressing.

2 comments:

  1. Makes you glad their coming here this weekend. I'm assuming you've seen this: http://dcist.com/2010/08/welcome_to_dc_tea_party.php

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  2. Haha, wrote a post last night on that, should be going up soon. So sad I'm gonna miss them this weekend!

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