Symbol status
August 8th 2010 07:04
A friend of mine once described his native Brazil as a place where “if you don’t laugh, you cry.” I’ve never visited that country, but I understand the feelings that drove him to say what he did. The last time I felt it was not long ago, when I was reading news discussion of the so-called Ground Zero mosque.
What brought it on? New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proclamation that he doesn’t care where Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s organization got the funding for the mosque. It wasn’t so much the proclamation in and of itself – more the contrast with, say, the aftermath of the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, when authorities appealed for aid from any country “except Israel.”
The Iranian government believed that accepting aid from Israel would set a dangerous precedent for them, a symbolic acknowledgment that interacting with that state was acceptable under certain circumstances. By our standards, their infatuation with opposing Israel may be myopic or even deranged – but if they acknowledged openly that certain transactions could cause damage to their perceived political and/or strategic interests, why exactly is Bloomberg afraid to do the same?
What brought it on? New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proclamation that he doesn’t care where Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s organization got the funding for the mosque. It wasn’t so much the proclamation in and of itself – more the contrast with, say, the aftermath of the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, when authorities appealed for aid from any country “except Israel.”
The Iranian government believed that accepting aid from Israel would set a dangerous precedent for them, a symbolic acknowledgment that interacting with that state was acceptable under certain circumstances. By our standards, their infatuation with opposing Israel may be myopic or even deranged – but if they acknowledged openly that certain transactions could cause damage to their perceived political and/or strategic interests, why exactly is Bloomberg afraid to do the same?
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