TPM Reader MK, a New Yorker, has had enough with out-of-towners like Sarah Plain protesting the mosque near the WTC site:
I first heard about this project a month or two ago, and the thing that struck me the most about it was the overwhelming support it had from the local community board in Lower Manhattan. As you are probably familiar it is nearly impossible to have a community board agree on even the most mundane issues, so to have a community board agree 29-1 on ANY this particular issue is quite an accomplishment.
Furthermore, why is land use in New York City the business of anyone else but the citizens of New York? If so, I would really like to know Sarah Palin’s opinion of the Atlantic Yards (or Hudson Yards or the expansion of Columbia University) project, an issue that is 1,000,000x more controversial than this project. That’s all this is: a land use issue.
Following her logic (no small feat, I might add), do I now have the right to protest the construction of a new office building in Anchorage because it may house the offices of an oil company and might insult the people who suffered from the BP oil spill?
Or can I have a say the next time some city in the “heartland” (because apparently that is the place that has veto power over land use in New York) decides to build more sprawl at the expense of more livable communities with mixed-use development, walkable streets, and public transportation? I think I should because it really “stabs me in the heart” when places do that.
This is a local issue, plain and simple. The people of New York, the ones actually attacked on 9/11 and who had to live through the aftermath, are the only ones who are effected by this and don’t seem to have a problem with it, so no one else should. It is no one else’s business. Sarah Palin and the “heartland” do not have permanent veto power over what gets built in Lower Manhattan. If they want a say over what happens there, my advice would be to move to New York. They might even learn something about the values of living in a multi-ethnic, multicultural community.
