Popehat

A Group Complaint about Law, Liberty, and Leisure

Is The @Park51 Twitter Feed A Hoax, Or Run By a Twit?

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Today I encountered a web site ostensibly operated by the entity opening the "Cordoba House" facility a few blocks from Ground Zero. Perhaps you've heard of the project; I understand that a couple of people have commented on it. I will refer to it as "The Project" to avoid tiresome disputes about other names.

Anyway, I also noted that multiple people were engaged in a "dialogue" — to the extent the word applies in the medium — on Twitter with a @Park51 Twitter feed, purportedly authored and operated by the organizers of The Project.

Count me as skeptical. The incident in which Patrick panicked hapless Norweigians into thinking that North Korea was declaring war on Cyrpus via Twitter still weighs heavily on my conscience. The @Park51 twitter feed strikes me as off in some way, and I suspect it may be a hoax or political satire or public relations sabotage. If so, it's fairly well executed.

But if it's real, it suggests that the leaders of The Project are hypocritical twits with a tin ear. Those promoting the Project have asserted that its purpose is to promote interfaith dialogue and dialogue between Americans and the Muslim community, and that therefore the public should not focus on whether its location is an affront to some.

Recently a number of commentators, including Greg Gutfield, began promoting the concept that someone should open a gay bar catering to Muslims next to The Project, in order to test their tolerance for the concept that people ought to be able to open what they want where they want even if others are offended. Some deride this as juvenile baiting, but I think it's a useful rhetorical device to tease out whether and when we should actually care about opening facilities that give offense.

Gutfield pursued the @Park51 Twitter author, seeking their position on the hypothetical Muslim gay bar. @Park51 eventually responded with this:

.@greggutfeld You're free to open whatever you like. If you won't consider the sensibilities of Muslims, you're not going to build dialog

That was the point at which the needle on my skepticism gauge twitched a bit more towards "hoax." It's just too perfectly hypocritical, clueless, and tone-deaf. Of course it makes no sense whatsoever for the organizers of The Project to say (1) we want to open a dialogue, but need not be sensitive to sensibilities of other Americans, but (2) if you want to open a dialogue with Muslims, you need to consider their sensibilities. It's just a little too breathtakingly contradictory to be really credible to me. If it's not a hoax, then someone over there is talking out of his or her ass.

Of course, American principles of free speech, free exercise, and limited government protect everyone — even hypocrites, even people who would not extend the same benefits to others if they had their way. Let people build their gay bars and their Cordoba Houses where they will, and let opponents exercise their free speech to object, and let critics critique those objections, and so on to eternity. But if The Project does start whining about people building a bar or a pork products palace or something, they better be ready to be ridiculed.

Last 5 posts by Ken White

Comments

  1. A tin ear and spoonful of hypocrisy, to be sure, but I'm not sure I would say "breathtakingly contradictory." After all, they noted that he's free to build whatever he wants, something that few anti-mosque advocates in New York or elsewhere would concede. If Cordoba House starts showing up at community board meetings to condemn the proposed bar, that would be breathtakingly contradictory.

    The real lesson here, of course, is Internet Rule #1: Don't Feed the Trolls.

  2. Who ever said that the Cordoba House Park51 Project's planners aren't cursed with a political and cultural tin ear? I think that much has been painfully obvious from the start. Thing is, you have a right to act on your highly misguided political, social, cultural, or other impulses in this country — and you don't have a right to freedom from ridicule after you make a public ass of yourself and set back the cause you're ostensibly trying to advance. I, for hone, have said all along that the… er, "Project" must be tolerated and permitted. I've never said it had to be endorsed.

  3. We'll know whether it's fake in 72 hours, when it's shut down, goes silent, or doesn't.

    Even by webtime, twittertime is fast.

  4. I see a couple of signs that this is a hoax, though none dispositive:
    1. The "official launch" announcement is a tweet dated July 15. It links to a July 13 "press release" from "Free-Press-Releases.com" announcing the project. Seeing as the project had been starting to creep into the media for several days at that point, that they would have chosen that day (on which Peter King really started to blow the story up by calling their funding into question) to issue their official "launch" press release seems a bit….unlikely. That they would have chosen to make that release on "Free-press-release.com" rather than via some other outlet (like, I dunno, every major New York media outlet) seems even more unlikely.
    2. Notably, that press release is nowhere to be found on either the park51.org website or the cordobainitiative blog.
    3. Maybe this is just my amateurish understanding of twitter, but the time-stamping and frequency of tweets before today seems a bit odd to me.

  7. I think the LDS church (one of the richest entities in the good 'ole USA) should just offer them a lot of money for their land and build a huge temple there.

  8. Nah. This is an easy one, and I'll be happy to help — just have Obama summon both sides to the White House and settle it all over a beer summit.

  9. …it makes no sense whatsoever for the organizers of The Project to say (1) we want to open a dialogue, but need not be sensitive to sensibilities of other Americans, but (2) if you want to open a dialogue with Muslims, you need to consider their sensibilities.

    You're right that it doesn't make sense, but it's become quite obvious that our responsibility as infidels is to tolerate Islam as well as Islam's intolerance.

    Related note: read Bruce Bawer's book "Surrender."

  10. Brian, are you claiming that is the view of every single Muslim and every organization related to Islam? You could substitute "unbelievers" and "Christianity" in that sentence with no loss of context, yet I think most of us would agree that it's unfair to assume that every Christian or even every Christian group is synonymous with theocratic evangelicals.

  11. No, I never claimed that it applied to every single Muslim. But as we keep seeing, the quiet, ambivalent ones tend to defer to the very vocal, threatening and violent segment that demands that we "understand" and "respect" their sensitivities. Comedy Central's "South Park" Mohammed debacle is a good, recent example. Or the fact that cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is still in fear for his life. Theo Van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn are dead for apparently not showing enough respect to Muslim sensitivities. And so on and so forth. So I don't lump all Muslims into a pile, but I do see a significant difference between the radical Muslims who kill & threaten people, and radical Christians who will send you a creepy letter about how awesome Jesus is, or in the worst-case scenario stand around holding placards with insane crap like "God Hates Fags."

  13. Brian, what about radical Christians who set bombs off at sports events, murder doctors, issue death threats to judges whose rulings they don't like, or plot to kill police officers?

    Your comment @12:39 was not a condemnation of radical Islam, a call to support moderate Muslims who respect other faiths (you know, like the ones trying to build that community center?) or an observation that Islam needs something like a Reformation. It was in fact lumping all Muslims together. I'm not sure how doing that is supposed to encourage moderate, pro-America Muslims to see you as an ally.