Friday, August 13, 2010

Explaining Bloomy

A New York Times scribbler tries to account for Mayor Bloomy's confounding support for a GZM. According to Michael Barbaro, the mayor is so gung-ho for the project because:
  1. He's Jewish: "He is a Jew whose parents asked their Christian lawyer to buy a house and then sell it back to them to hide their identity in an unwelcoming Massachusetts suburb."
  2. He's become palsy-walsy with Iman and Missus Rauf: "Mr. Bloomberg, for instance, has come to know the husband and wife who are among the principals behind the proposed center — a multipurpose religious and cultural institution that would be built two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center."
  3. He wants New Yorkers to get over it (9/11), already: "And for years he has, with a mix of care and impatience, been encouraging New Yorkers, including the families of 9/11 victims, to emotionally move beyond the tragedy of nine years ago. "
Left out of the mix is the real reason why Bloomy's being so blooming stubborn: he's no Rudy and he "gets" Islam/jihad/sharia/mosque optics not at all

Update: Intrepid gal detective Claudia Rosett ponders The Mystery of the Disappearing Imam.

Update: Hugh Fitzgerald has a go at 'splaining Bloomy:

In New York, at the Court of the Mayor, there have recently been the Raufs, Feisal Abdul and Daisy, who so cleverly courted the naïve (there are few so naïve as the very very rich) Mayor Bloomberg and his current public consort, deploying the usual weapons - soft voices, liquid brown eyes of great sincerity - and artfully hiding their deep of contempt for the Infidel. How this deeply impressed Mayor Bloomberg, with his own private demons from his youth, and memories of anti-Semitism. They played on that, encouraging his emotional - and intellectually confused - conflating of the victims of antisemitism in childhood Medford with today's leading carriers of antisemitism, who in Bloomberg's simpleminded understanding, should be seen as "the new Jews" who are themselves victims of a cruel and baseless "Islamophobia."
The rich are different--they're more credulous?

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