Nazi Wannabe of the Week: Robert McCarthy
Robert McCarthy — town supervisor, Sidney Center, NY — has already received Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” award and been ridiculed by Stephen Colbert.
Most cities and towns already have enough problems to deal with, without some dickwad trying to manufacture a problem where none existed.
Near Sidney Center, there’s a 50-acre farm, which is owned by an order of Sufi Muslims. They’ve been at this farm for eight years. The acreage also includes a mosque and a cemetery. The cemetery is completely legal, all the right permits were obtained, etc. But that didn’t matter. The cemetery made a perfect scapegoat for Robert McCarthy and his fellow inbreds on the board of supervisors.
Fired up by the hysteria and pantytwisting over the Ground Zero Mosque in New York City (which was actually four blocks away from Ground Zero), the Sidney Center Board of Supervisors voted to “investigate” the Sufi cemetery. They said the bodies might have to be disinterred. Robert McCarthy was the ringleader, but the vote was unanimous.
A local attorney, who is representing the Sufis free of charge, said:
“It was sickening. McCarthy was acting like this was Selma, Ala., in the '60s and he was Bull Connor.”
On the bright side, Robert “Bull Connor” McCarthy ended up uniting a lot of local residents. They came out against him and on the side of tolerance. One longtime resident said:
“At first I felt so ashamed of my town. And then I saw how the community reacted and I thought how amazing the way we pulled together to do away with something so wrong and make it right.”
The supervisors’ display of bigotry caused such an uproar, they quickly dropped their “investigation” of the cemetery. But you can’t un-ring a bell; you can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube. The townspeople were pissed. About 150 of them attended a board of supervisors’ meeting just so they could jeer them and demand an apology.
And some of them are even reaching out by visiting the Sufi center and talking with the people there. The Sheik told a group of visitors:
“What is happening right here in Sidney can show the whole world, that we can live peacefully as Muslims and non-Muslims, that we can share the same land, that a small town in America can show that the whole country is not mired in Islamophobia.”
Labels: Robert McCarthy, Sidney Center New York, Sufi