When members of New York City’s West End Synagogue were recently disinvited at the 11th hour from a long-anticipated Friday gathering with Muslims at Harlem’s Masjid Aqsa, some involved in organizing the meeting feared that hard-line mosque members were behind the cancelation. But at the synagogue the next morning, the mosque’s imam, Souleimane Konate, showed…
Phew! It turns out you can oppose the so-called Ground Zero mosque and can keep your Justin Bieber poster. After a boycott of several days, the singer is back in the good graces of Andy Sullivan, an activist who launched the anti-Bieber campaign based on pro-mosque comments the 16-year-old allegedly made in an interview with…
It’s not every day that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cites a rabbinical student, but Rachel Barenblat won that distinction on Sunday, when the writer mentioned her recent success raising money so that a vandalized Queens mosque could replace its damaged prayer rugs. On August 25, a drunk man entered an Astoria, Queens mosque,…
Trade Martin — a country singer who will surely go from obscurity to notoriety and back to obscurity before you can say “publicity stunt” — did something that is either too offensive to be hilarious or too hilarious to be offensive, depending on where you stand: He recorded a completely serious ditty called, ever-so-subtly, “We’ve…
In the midst of the never-ending storm about the Park51 — the Islamic cultural center formerly known as Cordoba House — in Lower Manhattan, which is causing more than a little controversy due to its proximity to Ground Zero, The Daily News ran a funny piece about other interesting “cultural centers” that lie a mere…
Taking on conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and other voices on the right, Slate blogger Tom Scocca makes a reasoned case against comparing the Islamic center planned for Ground Zero to the now-shuttered Catholic convent near the Auschwitz death camp. He writes: The Auschwitz convent is a recurring theme in the…
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