Last Month I wrote about an American flag that was mysteriously hung over the front door of a mosque in Boonton, New Jersey. It was a mean and childish thing to do, and the perpetrator may well have been a mean child, but the act was met with such consternation by members of the mosque that it propelled an otherwise minor local event into the national spotlight.
An official of the mosque, Hamida Amanat, who requested that police investigate the incident as a bias crime said, “It was very discomforting to see something blocking the door.” The nailing of an American flag to a door may or may not be the result of bias towards local Muslims – it’s hard to say without any other evidence – but assuming that it was motivated by bias, it is hardly of the same magnitude as, say, burning churches in Alabama. Amanat’s reaction was way out of proportion to the “crime.”
Anyway, a Boonton resident left a comment on that post that reads:
Boonton is at least 37 miles from the twin towers. Go to Mapquest.
NO ONE of Middle Eastern or West Asian decent celebrated in the streets on 9/11. Whether it was fear or perhaps disgust, I cannot say.I cannot speak to the accuracy of the rest of your comments, but the inaccuracy of the few facts I do note, may all you say questionable.
I want to address these comments because, in my estimation, they are a great example of the use of obfuscation to discredit critics.
I originally guessed at the distance to NYC, having been a long time resident of that area of New Jersey, and admittedly got it wrong. According to my Hagstrom’s map, it’s about 22 miles, not 15 as I wrote in the post. The point is not 15 miles or 22 miles or 35 miles but that unlike the rest of the United States, people in Boonton and the other communities of North Jersey were very much a part of those horrible events. It would be unusual not to know someone who died that day.
Concerning the celebrations in the streets, our mysterious commenter is just plain wrong. While it’s true that, as news of these celbrations grew, fact was replaced with rumor and exageration, there were plenty of eyewitness accounts of two such celebrations in the city of Paterson.
The question has never been whether these gatherings took place but rather, what the nature of them was. Many witnesses say they were celebrations while a few others claim they were anguished protests. One witness, U.S. Congressman Bill Pascrell, who relies heavily on the ethnic vote in Paterson, said he saw participants throwing candy into the air and when he asked a bystander what was going on he was told it was a wedding. With all respect to the Congressman, a wedding at 5:00 PM on a Tuesday just after the most horrific attack in the history of our nation strains credibility.
The whole point of the post was that given the events of that day, it may not be wise for Muslims in that part of the world to rub salt in the wound by feigning such indignation over what is most likely some teenagers hanging an American flag on your door.