Chief Leader - August 31, 2010

Cite Religious Freedom

But starting with objections by survivors of 9/11 and victims' families and then fueled by tweets from the fringes of the Republican Party, the anger began to grow. The media dubbed the Cordoba House the "Ground Zero Mosque," despite the fact that it will actually be two blocks from Ground Zero, and won't be solely a mosque. A campaign led by Fox News and the New York Post helped convince millions of Americans that the open-to-all community center—a place intended to have a restaurant, a 9/11 memorial, workout space, a swimming pool and a prayer room that is more like an Islamic version of the YMCA than an actual mosque— would feature a muezzin's piercing voice from towering minarets overlooking the World Trade Center site.

Unlikely Allies Against Project

The opposition to the plan has united unlikely allies. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani found himself on the same side as Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy and the coalition of 9/11 victims' family members who fought against his run for President, as they all denounced the plan to put an Islamic center so close to the WTC. They denied being anti-Islamic, saying that its placement so close to Ground Zero rubs salt into the wounds of people victimized by fanatical psychopaths who happened to be members of a religion with more than a billion other people. They had no objection to the mosque that already exists a few blocks north, where lines of Muslim men can be seen on the street praying on Friday afternoons.

And while some of the Cordoba House's opponents—many of them 9/11 response workers—admit that the group has the constitutional right to build the center at the location, they say it should choose another location.

In response, a coalition of interfaith clergy members and civil rights activists that rallied at the Municipal Building Aug. 25 called it a "manufactured controversy." Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center tore into the logic of some of the Cordoba House's opponents, especially the notion that it was incumbent upon its leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, to move to a different location out of respect of the victims.

He likened it to a hypothetical example in Detroit, which has a large Muslim and Arab population. What if Palestinians didn't want to be near a synagogue, because it reminded them of extreme Jewish settler violence in the Occupied Territories, or by a Hindu temple, because some Muslims were still scared by Hindu nationalist violence in India?

'A Balkanized America'

"The result would be a balkanized America," Rabbi Waskow said. "We would end up chopped up into: this neighborhood you can't have a church, that neighborhood you can't have a synagogue, another neighborhood you can't have a mosque. That's not America."

When asked what he thought the backlash was about, he said, "I think some of it is simply out of fear, some of it is after nine years of the American government making war on several Muslim nations there's this feeling, 'there must be something wrong with them if we're at war with them.' Psychologists call that cognitive dissonance."

Rabbi Waskow compared it to anti- Semitism in the 1930s, when fears of the economic depression mixed with the demonizing of Jews by the likes of Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin allowed Nazi sympathies in the country to rise.

Indeed, while many who protested against the center said they did so only out of respect for the "sensitivity" of the victims, a rally against the Cordoba House Aug. 22 featured people claiming that its development was just the first step toward instituting sharia in the United States.

A Hot-Button Election Issue

Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, believed that the anger against the center came not from lower Manhattan residents but from politicians seeking to grab onto an issue for the mid-term elections.

"There was no controversy until a couple of irresponsible politicians decided to gin up a lot of noise," she said. "We have our offices within two blocks of the World Trade Center site. I personally would love to have a community center where I could swim after work."

Ms. Lerner continued, "We're disgusted with the way our neighborhood is being portrayed. It's an incredibly diverse neighborhood. It's a really dense urban space. Good businesses, some businesses some people might not like. There's two strip clubs, there're porn shops. There're great restaurants, there're hole-in-thewalls. It's the gamut of New York."

Although the rally was publicized on a blog for union journalists, no labor leaders attended. The Jewish Labor Committee has declared support for the center.

Some have advocated a middle ground, in which the imam chooses a different site for the center in order to quell the angry reaction against the project. In an op-ed piece in The Post, Mr. Cassidy said that polls showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of the placement of the center.

'Delivers Exact Opposite Result'

"It is incomprehensible that anyone seeking better relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, as Rauf claims, would push forward with a project that offends so many Americans and is certain to deliver the exact opposite result of his stated mission," the UFA leader wrote. "If the mosque is moved, the only group likely to be unhappy are those radical 'anti-American' Muslims that the imam says he is trying to distance himself from. I can think of no reason he would want to placate them."

But Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, saw such an outcome as a defeat for religious liberty.

"If we can't tolerate a community center for peace, and inter-faith communication and swimming and culture as well as praying two blocks from Ground Zero, then where can they go?" she asked. "New York is a great community. We pride ourselves on being cosmopolitan, pluralistic. Let's act that way."