Mosque spokesman defends Twitter tactics, but cuts down on the snark

The organization behind the contentious Muslim community center and mosque to be built in Lower Manhattan near Ground Zero came under fire this week for filling the group’s official Twitter page with snide, snarky and what some have called anti-Jewish remarks, despite recently softening their tone after an internal shake-up.

The small staff at Park 51, a New York-based group that teamed up with the Cordoba Initiative to build the much-debated center near Ground Zero, agreed Tuesday in a meeting to take a more “conservative” approach online, according Park 51 spokesman Oz Sultan.

The most recent offending tweets — which have since been removed from the feed — were written in response to a Haaretz story reporting that Park 51 may move the project to a new location further from the site of the 9/11 terror attacks. Park 51 denied the story on Twitter, saying, “Official: Reports by Haaretz are completely false. We are committed to plans of building Park 51 to serve the community of Lower Manhattan.” A follow-up tweet read, “…if Haaretz likes publishing fables, perhaps they could go back to the Yiddish ones with parables.” (Haaretz is a an Israeli news source.)

The Park 51 team issued an apology a short time later and said they were taking one of the interns off the team that handles social media. Despite previous media reports that employees at Park 51 had been fired, Sultan said that with such a small team they could not afford to let anyone go and that the offending intern had simply been “repurposed.”

Sultan, a social media veteran who usually works with cosmetic brands and big-name corporations, has presided over the official Park 51 Twitter feed since mid-July, and has used it to fight smears and defend the organization’s brand, regularly using sharp and defensive language to make his point. Often writing in first person, (a strategy not regularly used when communicating through an institutional Twitter account,) Sultan’s team regularly went after Twitter users who made malicious online attacks on the project.

“Honestly, I think you need to get laid,” one Park 51 tweet read in reaction to a Twitter user who had filled his feed with posts condemning Park 51. “Your anger spouts in every direction. Have you tried a hobby?” A second tweet directed toward the same person: “If you won’t simmer down and be polite daddy will have to put you in the corner.”

“God you’re dense,” another Park 51 tweet read, responding to a different user that had been attacking the project.

“Where’s all this venom stem from?” asked a Park 51 tweet in response to a similar online attack. “Tell me about your mother?”

The feed also regularly reposted other users’ tweets, including one that called Fox News host Greg Gutfeld a “pussy.”

Some Twitter users pleaded with the group to stop using such language, arguing that it was only hurting their cause. The Park 51 team responded to calls that they calm the language, saying that they would not sit back and just let people insult them. It was not long before the official feed spawned a series of unofficial spin-off accounts, some of which were intended to poke fun at the project’s unorthodox strategy.