One long-running story is illustrating perfectly how frighteningly good certain sections of the American media and (mainly) right-wing interest groups are at bending the truth for their own purposes.
This infuriates me. The so-called 'Ground Zero mosque' is not a mosque, rather an Islamic cultural centre designed to promote inter-faith understanding no less, and it is not 'at' Ground Zero at all but two blocks away.
For voices of sanity, read Nick Kristof here ("Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a...paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it") and Howard Kurtz on the mindless media stampede here.
I also liked a reader comment in the Economist last week "In all fairness, we've been building ground zeros near Mosques in Iraq since March 2003."(Via liebejessy on Twitter, thanks.)
It's classic Adam Curtis 'Power of Nightmares' stuff, and almost as crazy as the recent poll which shows that nearly 20% of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim. Comedian Andy Borowitz has a funny take on this, but really, its pretty damn depressing...
23 August 2010
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