I’ve already gotten a lot of angry blowback over my column. Here’s the opening:
Here’s a thought: The 70 percent of Americans who oppose what amounts to an Islamic Niketown two blocks from Ground Zero are the real victims of a climate of hate, and the much-ballyhooed anti-Muslim backlash is mostly a myth.Let’s start with some data.
Here’s a friendly one from a longtime liberal reader from Manhattan:
On this one, you could not be more wrong. Like 180 degrees wrong. You are either horribly insulated or willfully blind. Nine out of ten working class people think Muslims are either terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, and we ought to kill ‘em all, deport them, lock ‘em out, whatever. The only compassion Muslims get is in minority communities.
I await the data to back up any of these claims because I think they are the product of horrible insulation.
More later, but I’ve got to hit the road again.