Staten Islanders don't know the MAS's nature
Reader comment on item: Mahdi Bray's Slippery Evasions

Submitted by Bruce, Jun 11, 2010 14:12

As a Staten Islander, I've been educating myself about the parties in this issue. Of course I already know a bit about my fellow New Yorkers in the Midland Beach neighborhood where the Muslim American Society seeks to buy a church and convert it into an MAS mosque and facility. But until a few days ago, I didn't know anything about the MAS.

While I experienced 9/11 close at hand, like so many New Yorkers, and while I knew that radical Islamism was about, not just in the Middle East or in Europe, but here, too, I was nonetheless shocked to learn that what I consider to be jihadists were trying to move in so close to where I call home.

Another key lesson for me is that most of my friends and neighbors have no idea of who the MAS is, of what the varied and textured (if you will) expressions of radical Islamism look like, such that, through their still-overly-rose-colored-lenses, the local skirmish does not form an integral part of the overall war, such that, to them, there is one local battle between phobic locals and "different" others who may be "radical" in the conventional sense, but are, first and foremost, adherents of the Muslim faith; and another "political net" battle, between the "Islamophobe thinktanks" and some ultra-radical Muslim activists, none of whom are really hereabouts.

That is, they don't get it. Or, it's the Islamism, stupid.

-- a needed object lesson, I suppose.

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