The Joys of Knight Rider

• An embryonic Jason Bateman chucking doughnuts in KITT.
• Recognising LA as a city I have visited, not just a televisual background.
• The music!

Forbearance

While I was in Canberra last week, I spent much of my time at the National Library of Australia, where I was able to search a database of newspaper stories from the state of Texas just after 9/11. What I was after, as you've probably guessed, was the context for this part of Ms Moon's posting about Park51:

"But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they've had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing...but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues--and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack--but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a "peace and reconciliation" program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque--but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was--totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence."

I don't know exactly where Ms Moon's local area was at the time (and it's none of my business). Some of her grievances here may be legitimate - although if so, they're the responsibility of the schools, the police, and her church, not just the mosques.

What I'd like to do here is to use some of the news stories I dug up to put her recollections into context. The weeks after 9/11 were a terrible time of shock, confusion, and fear. For Texan Muslims, on top of that, it was a time of blame and hate: bomb threats against schools, firebombs and bullets aimed at mosques, vandalism, beatings, shootings, arson, and murder, and the repeated refrain: "You're not Americans". But it was also a time of support and understanding, with people of other faiths rallying to support their neighbours, and Muslims reaching out to their community.

ETA: Looking at the dates, for Ms Moon's local mosques to have asked for protection "even before anything happened", they would have had to do so before the windows were shot out of the Islamic Center of Irving on 12 September. Well, that could be the case; the threatening phone calls probably started before any actual attacks. What is hard to believe is that local mosques didn't condemn the terrorism; the news reports quote one Muslim after another doing so. On 12 September a press release from Dallas religious leaders, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, denounced the attacks as "evil".

( Here is the news )