Visiting 30 Mosques in 30 Days
Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq are spending Ramadan on a 12,000-mile road trip, visiting mosques across America and writing about their experiences on 30 Mosques in 30 Days. They were interviewed by NPR at the start of the trip:
... a lot of Muslims that live in small communities across the country, whether it be the Midwest, down South or even on the West Coast, they might feel, "I'm the only one going through this struggle. I'm the only kid in school that has a funny name. Or I wear a headscarf -- I'm a Muslim woman -- and I get dirty looks and, you know, people make me feel uncomfortable."
So this is a way to show that we're not the only ones going through our struggles ourselves, you know. Ramadan is a month to bring people together.
One of the first mosques they visited was the Park51 mosque two blocks from Ground Zero.
They made a stop last week here in Jacksonville at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida on the city's southside.
As they drove to the mosque, they spotted a "hilariously racist" sign for The Sheik, a sandwich shop that describes itself as "Home of the Camel Rider." I've seen that place for years but been afraid to eat there. A CNN.Com reporter accompanying Ali and Tariq was more courageous:
Wayne [Drash] isn't fasting so he decides to go inside and order this place's infamous Camel Rider sandwich. He walks outside showing me what's the sandwich: ham, salami, and American cheese.
"I think this is probably the most American sandwich that you could possibly eat," Wayne says.
If you're as disgusted as I am by the round-the-clock media narrative that Muslims are anti-American subversives who attend "terror mosques," check out Ali and Tariq's excellent adventure.
Do We Believe in Freedom of Religion or Not?
I am one of the 52 percent of Americans who believe that Muslims should be able to build mosques wherever any other people can build houses of worship.
That number should be 100 percent.
When I first heard about the mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero, I thought it was a non-issue. Two city blocks is a long distance. It's not a "Ground Zero Mosque" -- no one called the former tenant the Ground Zero Burlington Coat Factory. The strip club around the corner is not the Ground Zero Strip Club. The community and zoning authorities in Manhattan overwhemlingly approved the project and Faisal Abdul Rauf, the imam in charge of the project, is so respected that Presidents Bush and Obama have sent him to do outreach to international Muslims.
It has been extremely disheartening to watch anti-Muslim fervor sweep the country fed by Fox News, the New York Post and other right-wing media. The people who have fueled this controversy the most, such as the blogger Pamela Geller, are motivated by a fierce hatred of Muslims. They've been telling blatant falsehoods to stir outrage about the project, such as the untrue claim that it was scheduled to open on Sept. 11, 2011. (To give you an idea of Geller's credibility, this frequent Fox News guest has used her blog to spread the claim that President Obama's father is secretly Malcolm X.)
A lot of Republican politicians have opportunistically jumped into this issue, feeding off the media-generated outrage. To my great disappointment, a few Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have joined them.
There are more than 1.1 billion Muslims in the world and perhaps as many as two million living in the U.S. They're neighbors, coworkers and friends. They serve in our government and in our military. They can be found among the dead on 9/11 and in our national cemeteries. The fact they've been able to worship freely here without interference has been a testament to this country's deep respect for religious freedom.
That may be changing.
The controversy over this mosque has inspired protests against other mosques around the U.S. and legitimized the idea that the U.S. is at war with Islam. In Sheboygan, Wisc., some Muslims who fled persecution elsewhere are afraid to worship here.
If you are one of the Americans who thinks Muslims are the enemy, you're giving Osama Bin Laden the propaganda victory he hoped to achieve with the 9/11 attacks.
Photo credit: The photo of a Detroit mosque was taken by Just Us 3 and is licensed for reuse.
How to Join Kurt Vonnegut's Family
Last June, I began writing my first novel, a thriller about nuclear terrorism. I finished the first draft a month ago and sent two copies to people I know who are avid students of fiction writing. I just got back one copy covered in handwritten notes. The other is still out, Wade Duchene.
When I mailed the manuscript, these were the first two people who had seen the novel aside from my wife Mary. I encouraged the reviewers to be critical, stressing to them that I'm already a published author and understatedly handsome man. My self-esteem is not in jeopardy. They could be brutally honest about weaknesses in the novel. I wanted them to be as tough on the manuscript as the first prospective agent or publisher who pulls it off the slush pile.
This was, of course, a pack of lies.
When I encouraged tough criticism, I only did so in the belief that my novel contained no weaknesses.
Somewhere in the mail, the book acquired some significant flaws. I've been hearing about them at great length over the phone and dutifully taking notes.
Most notably, as it turns out, a man and woman in bloom of first infatuation would not stop to make out when they're minutes from nuclear catastrophe. Even if the man is a decent guy beset by incredibly hard times and she is a beautiful and ballsy college student with corrected vision -- thinly veiled author's wife alert! thinly veiled author's wife alert! -- the imminent death of thousands is a mood killer. It's hard to enjoy having your esophagus grouted by the protagonist's tongue when his skill set is perfectly suited to saving the world.
So I'm now working on the second draft.
One of the things that kept me from writing a novel was the nagging suspicion that I might prove myself a bad novelist. By spending almost 43 years successfully not writing novels, I have kept that dire possibility at bay.
In 1989, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to first-time novelist Mark Lindquist, who had thanked him for being an inspiration. Although Vonnegut makes clear he did not read Lindquist's book, he offers this encouragement:
The fact that you have completed a work of fiction of which you are proud, which you made as good as you could, makes you as close a blood relative as my brother Bernard.
My new goal is to finish the book, making it as good as I could, and become Kurt Vonnegut's blood relative.
Google's bin.clearspring.com Warning Explained
Several web sites I've visited today, including Time Magazine and Planet 107.3, are triggering a malware warning in Google Chrome:
The website at www.planet93.com contains elements from the site bin.clearspring.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer. For detailed information about the problems with these elements, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for bin.clearspring.com. Learn more about how to protect yourself from harmful software online.
Twitter users report the same problem on Fast Company and the Chicago Tribune, so it's presumably hitting a lot of media sites. I've encountered these warnings before when a third-party advertising service was hit with a malware attack. Every site using widgets or ads from the domain bin.clearspring.com is probably triggering Google's warning.
A blog post on Clearspring states that their widget delivery network was hit Saturday with a malware attack detected by Google:
We noticed early this morning via Twitter that a large number of folks using Chrome were being warned of malware when visiting sites with Clearspring Launchpad widgets. To summarize the event, our portion of the Content Delivery Network (CDN), the service we use to efficiently host all Clearspring widget internals, was compromised with files that redirected users to a certain malware domain (which we won’t link here). We quickly fixed the issue and are now back to normal operation as far as the CDN is concerned. Because of Google's aggressive malware prevention policy, users may continue to see warnings until Google completes its re-review process. ...
Note that this issue had no affect on the AddThis sharing platform, only on widgets served via the earlier-generation Clearspring Launchpad platform.
When Google thinks a web site may be serving malware, it displays a warning in place of the site. Although it's possible to ignore the warning and continue to the site anyway, that's a monumentally bad idea. Within 24-48 hours, the bin.clearspring.com warning will likely go away if Clearspring has cleared up the problem.
I've never heard of Clearspring before, but letting its servers become infected with malware files and delivering those files on third-party sites is a massive PR disaster. The company also was criticized in a Wall Street Journal piece Saturday for putting 55 different Flash-based tracking cookies on the computers of people who visited Comcast's web site:
Clearspring, based in McLean, Va., says the 55 Flash cookies were a mistake. The company says it no longer uses Flash cookies for tracking.
CEO Hooman Radfar says Clearspring provides software and services to websites at no charge. In exchange, Clearspring collects data on consumers. It plans eventually to sell the data it collects to advertisers, he says, so that site users can be shown "ads that don't suck." Comcast's data won't be used, Clearspring says.
Laura Linney Puts the Comedy in Cancer
There's an interesting cover story on the actress Laura Linney by Frank Bruni in the current New York Times Magazine. Linney's had a remarkable career in movies, television and Broadway, but it didn't begin taking off until she was 35. Now she's one of the small number of actresses over 40 getting meaty roles.
After losing close friend Natasha Richardson last year in a fluke accident that occurred on a ski trip, Linney's taken the lead role in the mortality-themed The Big C, a Showtime comedy about a woman with terminal cancer that premieres Aug. 16.
Linney was approached about The Big C in the summer of 2009. The first episode -- the pilot, really -- was shot in November, long before all the others, and Condon remembers that when she asked him to direct it, "she talked about how she felt almost this kind of compulsion to do this, because Natasha’s death had really, really brought so much into focus for her about the fragility of life, and figuring out what to do with it."
What her character on The Big C does with expressly numbered days is eat more desserts. Sneak cigarettes. Dig the backyard pool she has always wanted. Insist that her son spend time with her. And hammer certain life lessons into him before she loses the opportunity to.
I hope the show is funnier than Bruni makes it sound -- the Times has a tendency to make everything sound like an AP English homework assignment. Apparently, laughs are going to be mined from the life changes Linney makes, going from being a sensible wife and mother to someone who lets "her freak flag fly."
Showtime's example of the depths of her unleashed freakiness: "Who says you can't eat dessert as an appetizer?"
That still doesn't sound remotely entertaining. Linney has a tough job ahead of her.
A Mulatto, An Albino, A Mosquito, My Libido
Ladies and gentlemen, the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain.
They also rock Shaft, Psycho Killer and Teenage Dirtbag. When they played London's Royal Albert Hall in 2009, the sold-out crowd of 6,000 included 1,000 people who brought ukeleles to accompany them on Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
The Destruction of Andrew Breitbart
We here at Studio B did not run the video and did not reference the story in any way for many reasons, among them: we didn't know who shot it, we didn't know when it was shot, we didn't know the context of the statement, and because of the history of the videos on the site where it was posted, in short we do not and did not trust the source.
-- Fox News anchor Shepard Smith on Andrew Breitbart
By virtue of publishing the Drudge Retort, I've been following the career of Andrew Breitbart for more than a decade. His rise to prominence from Matt Drudge's uncredited collaborator to liberal-hating firebrand has been quite remarkable, given the fact that he's just a self-made web publisher who never held a job of any importance in media, politics or academia.
By his own admission, he was an aimless and frustrated college graduate in the mid-'90s when he discovered the Internet and decided to reinvent himself on it:
"I said to myself, 'O.K., you are going on a date tonight, and you are not going to bed until you have gone all the way.' And I remember hooking up to the World Wide Web that night, and it was a revelation. It was just like shooting yourself into outer space, and trying to latch onto anyone else who was out there. I remember finding weather sites and earthquake sites, and being able to monitor earthquakes in real time, and that was weirdly invigorating."
I did not expect that Breitbart would rise as far as he has, but now that he's obliterated his reputation with an ugly racial smear against a decent woman in government service, I think the seeds of his destruction have been in place for years.
A little over a year ago, I wrote about how enraged he is all the time:
All external indicators would suggest that Breitbart has a lot to be happy about, but I've followed his work for years and he operates in a constant state of anger at the perceived mistreatment of conservatives, particularly in Hollywood. Since he's around my age, he's lived during an era in which the right wing was ascendant in American politics. I'm not sure he could have survived the '60s and '70s, back when conservatism was the marginalized ideology of Barry Goldwater and washed-up B-movie actors.
Four months ago, I documented how Breitbart has been lying to the media for years:
... Breitbart [has] the good fortune to work in online agenda-driven journalism, where no one is ever held accountable for being wrong. Breitbart lied back then, lied about the ACORN sting and will probably lie in furtherance of the next scoop he peddles to the mainstream media.
He can't be trusted.
I wonder how long it will take the Times and the rest of the major media to figure that out.
There are political points I could score here, since Breitbart's hatred of liberals makes it satisfying to enjoy his fall from grace. But as a self-made web publisher myself, I find it disappointing that he won't simply apologize to Shirley Sherrod and admit a mistake.
He managed to turn his association with Drudge into a huge media platform and doesn't have to answer to anyone. There's no reason he has to be as nakedly self-preservational as the major media, the way the New York Times and USA Today acted when caught publishing Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley's fictional news stories, as if the entire reputation of the papers would collapse like a house of cards if they engaged in open self-criticism.
Breitbart is his own boss. He appears to be rolling in dough. He has Founding Father hair. What good is being a self-employed media mogul if you can't admit you screwed up and try to make it right?
Related:
- Scott Rosenberg: "The problem with Breitbart is not that he is an activist in journalist clothes, but rather that he is a serial purveyor of deceptions who is somehow still viewed as a legitimate source by some of his colleagues in the media."
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