Cuba rejects plans for first mosque
Posted on November 21, 2014 by creeping
Despite media attempts to spin Erdogan’s revisionist history. via Cuba rejects plans for first mosque | Worldbulletin News. h/t bella
Cuba’s communist government has turned down a plan to open a mosque in the capital Cuba.
Pedro Lazo Torres, the leader of Havana’s Muslim community, revealed that his joint efforts with Turkey’s Religious Affairs Foundation (TDV) to open a mosque in Havana was rejected.
Torres expressed his dismay at the decision, noting that Russia was granted permission to build an Orthodox church in the country but 4,000 Muslims in Cuba still have no official place of worship.
Cuban Muslims have until now had to make do with performing congregational prayers in Torres’s living room.
In April, TDV assistant manager Mustafa Tutkun sought permission to begin work on a mosque, which was to be designed after the famous Ortakoy mosque in Istanbul.
The plan was part of a wider project by the TDV in building mosques for Muslims who live in the Caribbean.
A similar project in Haiti is due to be complete by the end of this year.
A dose of reality at the all-things-Cuba blog babalu, Ignorance on parade: Turkey’s president attracts world attention with mosque-in-Cuba story
A claim made yesterday by Turkey’s president is so insanely stupid and so connected to that October 2nd story that it needs to be covered here, especially because First World news publications are eating it up.
Go to “Cuba News” on Google and you will immediately encounter many versions of this latest Turkey/Cuba story.
Erdogan’s claim is that Muslims discovered Cuba centuries before Columbus, and that they built a mosque in the eastern part of the island, on top of a mountain, and that good old Admiral of the Ocean Sea Cristoforo/Cristobal actually saw that mosque and wrote about it.
Erdogan admits he is telling this tale so that Raul Castro and his minions will reconsider their decision and allow Turkey to build a mosque in Cuba.
The report below sets the record straight. Columbus saw no mosque, he simply used the word “mezquita” (mosque) as a metaphor for an oddly-shaped mountain peak. And, let’s not forget that Columbus thought he had reached a corner of Asia where he expected to find some Muslims. Guarding one’s delusions is a natural reflex. It took Columbus some time to admit he was nowhere near Cipango or the Kingdom of the Great Mogul or any other place where mosques might exist because he had much more riding on his delusions than most of us ever will.
The strongest connection that Turkey ever had with Cuba was the emigration of thousands of Sephardic Jews from the old Ottoman Empire to Cuba. These Jews–whose ancestors had been robbed of their property and expelled from Spain in 1492– still feared Spanish anti-Semitism, and preferred to call themselves “Turcos” or Turks, just as the Ashkenazi Jews preferred to call themselves “Polacos” or Poles. One member of this community of Jewish “Turcos” was none other than Lina Ruz, mother of Fidel and Raul Castro. Ironically, most of these “Turcos” ended up being robbed of their property and expelled from Cuba by Fidel and Raul.
The First World news media never report on that story, however, which is far from fantasy, and far more interesting.
Columbus-bashing is so politically correct, and so fashionable that any chance to join in the assault proves irresistible to the First World news media. Not even the anti-Erdogan riots in Turkey or Erdogan’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas have received so much coverage.
https://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/cuba-rejects-plans-for-first-mosque/
