Sound, Fury and Baseless Protestation

Living in New York City, I've been hearing rumblings about the proposal by prominent New York businessmen (who happened to be Muslim) to build a $100 million facility in lower Manhattan for quite some time. But back in the spring, these reports were always greeted with an air of "who cares" if not out right celebration - while the 9/11 aircraft may have only flattened the WTC, the ensuing business flight from the neighborhood has been slow to bounce back. Adding a major fitness/ cultural/ arts center seemed to most of us like an excellent compliment to the 9-years-late WTC memorial and reconstruction efforts.

As this local issue gained more distant headlines, business competition mingled with blatant intolerance to raise a sudden ruckus over something as ridiculous as historical preservation and zoning laws. The more a simple matter of city red tape turned into a national-spotlight debate, the more and more I've heard about the"ethics" and "unamericanism" of the so-called "9/11 Mosque." For a time, I let this all pass. Bigots will be bigots, and while the ignorant should be educated, it's not always a task I feel up to when facing such tidal waves of ill-informed opinion. In short, I was quite happy to sit back and let the crazies spew their hate-speak, trusting that more rational heads (and the founding laws of our country) would prevail.

But in recent weeks, a local zoning non-issue has turned into a toxic national political debate, and I realized something profound - unlike many of the issues that divide our country in which both sides have valid reasons for their own impassioned differences (ex: abortion, gun control, death penalty, etc.), the argument against the legal construction of an Islamic-based community center on property legally purchased by an accredited non-profit organization is entirely baseless. On the grounds of New York state law, the principles of the US Constitution, and the simple morality of equal treatment without prejudice, no argument could be sustained in favor of such an unlawful prohibition. What there is - and apparently in droves - is fear, hate, intolerance and ignorance washing over our public opinion like a tsunami.

I have had the displeasure of being exposed to an extremely high level of mass media coverage in the past week due to some tedious temp receptionist assignments, and I must admit to being shocked not only by the woefully poor diversity of the coverage provided, but by the blatant misinformation, convenient omissions, and willful misdirection employed by pundits and politicos from across the political spectrum.

On Monday, in response to CNN anchor Rick Sanchez's prompt that - legally - the Muslim community of New York has every right to build this center in the location they've chosen, a writer from Red State Blog quipped, "My point is not if they have the Right, it's if the should [be allowed to build it]."

That's right. A super-conservative, small government, gun-toting champion of private property and Laissez-Faire business policy formally states that while it is 100% legal to build this Islamic center - there is no grounds upon which the government could block it - that the government should step in and block a private development project - with the only imaginable motivation being intentional abrogration of the 1st amendment freedom of religious practice.

The next 3 minutes involved the CNN talking head repeating things with the phrase, "This is about Freedom!" and the Red States blogger disagreeing by repeating things about, "The good of America."

So common sense is clearly out, and has been replaced by common talking points that are meaningless and serve only to prop up the otherwise root-less house-of-cards "logic" used to deny a group of US citizens their "inalienable" right to the free practice of their private property and religious rights.

But first, two clarifications:

1. The structure in question is not a mosque. It is an Islamic cultural center, called Park 51 - more akin to a YMCA or a JCC - that will have a prayer room incorporated into its design, as do most US universities, military bases, and airports.
2. It's not at the World Trade Center, it is near it. Park 51 will be built at 51 Park Place, yes, approximately 2 blocks away from the NW corner of the WTC footprint. While 2 blocks might be close in most of America, I assure you, in NYC it's practically a world away. It's not even within line-of-sight. The blocks between them are full of such non-patriotic edifices as the Equinox Sports Club and the University of Phoenix.

With that out of the way, the offending talking points I which to address are as follows:

1. The World Trade center is "sacred" ground.
2. The current buildings at 51 Park Place are historic and deserve preservation.
3. Even if they have the right to build this center, they should not be allowed to do so.

I want to address these in turn, because when the real merits of these talking points is brought to light, it becomes crystal clear that 99% of the "arguments" against the construction of this community center are baseless. The remaining 1% - that many Americans blame all Muslims for the attack on 9/11 because they are not educated enough to distinguish between a small sect of radical extremist terrorists and the largest single religious group on the planet - is not really a problem that the Islamic center needs to fix; that one is on the rest of us.

Talking Point #1 - The WTC site is "sacred ground."

No "sacred" site in the history of the world has seen as much sacrilege, secular pride, or irreverence in the immediate aftermath of its sanctification as the WTC "crater" that will (someday soon?) be the 9/11 memorial. For 9 years the site went to waste, filled with shifting amounts of leftover debris, rainwater runoff, and various eternally-parked construction vehicles. Plans were stalled, changed, redrafted, and squabbled over in a manner that would make even the most corrupt medieval Pope blush.

And speaking of the Pope, did he consecrate the WTC site on his visit, as a location of religious importance to all Catholics? Or the Protestants? What would it take for a site - any site - to be declared "sacred" in such a manner as it would be respected by all US citizens regardless of their denomination? What single other site in the US is "sacred?" Not Gettysburg. Not Independence Hall. Not the Japanese internment camps.

The WTC is a site of sacrifice - of innocent death metered out by a merciless enemy. It is a place of memorial, as we remember those who needlessly died, and yes, it is a place of patriotism in the odd way that so many fields of battle and death become immortalized in our perception of what it means to be an American. The Alamo is a good parallel. Those who died had either renounced their US citizenship, or never had any, but their death defending a valueless outpost for no strategic advantage has gone down in our history as an adage about how "Americans" defend their "values " to the death.

And that's what the WTC is - it's a place of national memory-identity based in memorializing the dead. That is important, and deserves considerable respect - more than it's been shown - but that doesn't make it a place of religious importance, pilgrimage, or power. That doesn't, in short, make it "sacred." It's a simple matter of misuse of vocabulary, no less brilliant than the "refudiate" episode.

And if it's not sacred to one religious group, how could the presence of another religious infringe? If it is, instead, a place of patriotic memory, then only the presence of anti-Americanism could be offensive - and that is not the case.

Talking Point #2 - the Historical Preservation maneuver

This was obviously a desperate attempt by either business competitors or self-styled 'patriots' to block the Islamic center project through bureaucratic red tape. Mayor Bloomberg chased this phantom around City Hall for a few weeks before taking the initiative and inspecting the dilapidated ruins himself. What he found was an old building - not unlike any of the other structures in lower Manhattan that are routinely leveled to make room for the next Old Navy, Starbucks, or corporate megalith. On August 3rd, after carefully reviewing the case, and with cameras rolling, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 9 - 0 against granting the building any protections as an historic landmark. It was, in their opinion, not historically remarkable in any way, and certainly not up to the standards necessary to block urban renewal efforts in an important commercial center.

Talking Point #3 - The "Moral" Question

This is the knife upon which the mugwumps in this issue are cutting their throats (I'm glaring at Nevada). Unable to provide one single reason why the Park 51 project cannot legally proceed, they seek to argue that it should not proceed, employing a range of feigned compassion, moralist rhetoric, or bombastic patriotism (thank you, Sarah Palin, for lowering the bar). Each of these arguments are founded in two assumptions - both not only untrue, but in fact the opposite of accurate.

Assumption 1 - Any Islamic presence near Ground Zero either "dishonors the fallen" or is a "victory for the terrorists." This would only be true if: 1) All 1.5 billions Muslims in the world support the acts of two dozen brainwashed al-Qaeda suicide bombers; 2) it was the stated objective of al-Qaeda to integrate with American lifestyles and adopt the local culture of co-ed prayer, modern bathing suits, and religious toleration; 3) the people who died on 9/11 were uniformly Muslim-haters, for whom such a presence would be a personal affront.

In case it isn't obvious, not a single one of these three assumptions are even remotely close to being true. In fact, the opposite is true in all three cases.

Assumption 2 - (Lower) Manhattan is currently devoid of any Muslim presence, and must be kept that way in perpetuity so as not to "lose ground" to our "enemy" - apparently Islam, rather than terroritst.

Not only are there 2 other mosques already near the WTC site, they've been there longer than the WTC itself. As the NYTimes points out, the Masjid Manhattan (which is known to lean toward a conservative interpretation of Islam, but nothing nearly as radical as the Jihadis) was founded in 1970 and is a mere 600 feet further away from the WTC than the proposed center. That's right - this entire battle is not about whether or not there can be a Mosque near the WTC site, but whether a newer mosque can be built 600 ft closer. That's about 1/9 of a mile, just to be clear. One and a half (short) blocks.

Oh, and not all Muslims in the world are our "enemy." We were once fighting an ill-begun "War on Terror," but at no point did we declare "War on Islam," despite Huntingdon's ridiculous re-appropriation of the Clash of Civilizations argument (scholarship note: the entire "proof" that Christianity and Islam have an inevitable cultural hostility was originally conceived by the venerable colonial historian Bernard Lewis in the 1950s, only it wasn't about religion. Lewis coined the term as a way to explain how Russians and Americans could never cooperate, and how we would - for all time - seek the annihilation of each other because of our entirely incompatible cultural values. In the 1990s, Lewis revised his opinion to apply to "Christendom" and "Islam." Samuel P. Huntington picked up on this and translated it into a prediction of near-apocalyptic 'civiliazation war.' Neither scholar is especially respected for their logic or record of successful prediction. The definitive refutation is by the renowned Edward Said in an article called "the Clash of Ignorance.")

The Masjid Manhattan website, for example, explicitly states the following:

"Masjid Manhattan and its members condemn any type of terrorist acts. In particular, the attacks of 9/11 where non-Muslims as well as Muslims lost their lives. Islam always invites for peace; therefore Islam is not responsible for the actions of some ill individuals who, independently from what Islam advocates, have hatred against humanity. As Muslims and as Americans, we will never forget the beloved ones who perished that terrible day of September 11, 2001."

In fact, many Muslims were killed on 9/11 as they went about their daily jobs as federal employees in the WTC. Some Muslims are even so vehemently against the actions and ideology of the Jihadis that they spend their life promoting the US image abroad and touting the US as a champion of religious tolerance; a place where Muslims can enjoy all the same rights and priveledges as everyone else.

One such Muslim is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. He is a Columbia grad with an MS in Plasma Physics who has devoted his life to Sufi Islam - a difficult-to-describe alternative interpretation of Islam that focuses on inner peace and social harmony. Sufis are considered heretics by Islamic fundamentalists like al-Qaeda, and as such hated with a passion that even exceeds the venomous anti-American fervor with which we are familiar. Despite the personal danger Imam Feisal has gone on 4 international missions at the invitation of the US State Department as a goodwill ambassador, spreading his positive assessment of US freedoms and tolerance to other Muslims through the Middle East and Asia.

How ironic, then, that one of the most active anti-terror pro-US Muslim advocates of religious tolerance is himself the victim of American intolerance because of his religion. Imam Feisal is one of the chief architects and proponents of the new Islamic cultural center in New York.

What is most disturbing to me is the selectivity over the past decade with which we, as Americans, have become comfortable applying the constitutional guarantees. As a grade schooler I learned that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness." Those same inalienable rights were further spelled out in the Bill of Rights, and these included rights of privacy, free speech, legal counsel, religious practice, etc. The funny thing is, when I asked my teacher the definition of "inalienable," she told me that they were rights which could never be denied anyone - for any reason. They were endowed by "the creator" on all mankind - every human being walking the planet. Our founding fathers formally declared the existence of certain rights that belong to all living people, regardless of religion or citizenship (and I think we did them one better by - eventually - adding race and gender to this list).

As I grew older, I understood that there could be mitigating circumstances - jail time, for example - when some of these rights could be restricted, but even then only within clearly defined limits. While many of the rights were specific to citizenship - like voting - many others seemed to express human universality. I was shocked, then, when the decision was made during the Bush administration that non-citizens were exempt from what I understood to be basic human rights. Torture (by name or not), privacy invasion, and legal limbo all became de jur abuses that could never be enacted against a US citizen, but which could be repeatedly inflicted on non-citizens without remorse. Then suddenly, US citizens - especially those of the Muslim faith or Arab decent - were subject to the same abuses without much more social protest than the batting of an eye. Apparently, the rights bequested to us by the founding fathers were indeed quite alienable, and easily so.

I bring this up because I see in the current event yet a further step down this dangerous disgusting path. There is no reason to block this project. There is no legal means to block it. They have every right imaginable to do exactly what they plan. And yet there are calls by US citizens - even policy makers - to do just that. To override the basic laws of our country - of our society - in what I can only attest to misplaced blame and ignorance-based retribution.

the only good news I take out of this issue is that - this time - the directive to trample the constitution, willfully break our own laws, and engage in morally corrupt actions is coming from the fringes, and not from the upper echelons of government power. This time, the people entrusted with protecting the constitutions aren't the ones trying to subvert it.

But the volume we're hearing from the fringes, and the influence that they're being allowed to have over mainstream politicians and our reductionist mass media is more than disheartening - it is disappointing.

I have long said, in respect to the ups and downs our country experiences, that America usually gets what she deserves - for better and for worse. But do we really deserve to bankrupt our own moral heritage?

I hope not, and greatly anticipate being impressed with the open-mindedness of American public opinion when this is all over. Plus, their plans look like a beautiful building, and New York could really use fewer broken down warehouses, and more vibrant cultural centers. In fact, it might even make a nice complement to the WTC site as a tourist draw.

All this flap about Park 51 has actually sparked in me a desire for something even more radical. What I'd really like to see is not an Islamic athletic club located 2 blocks away from the WTC, but instead a full-blown mosque, church, synagoge, and various other temples right at the center of the new memorial. I want to see hundreds - thousands - of local and tourist faithful offering prayers to the God of their choosing that the terrible events of 9/11 never be repeated - anywhere - and that those who foster hatred and intolerance be wiped aside by the better aspects of human compassion and mutual respect. I want to hear a khutba (sermon) about the blasphemy of killing innocents echoing by loudspeaker all the way from Times Square to Battery Park. I want a living testament to the ideals of religious freedom and the conquest of moral fiber over ignorance and fear.

More than even that, I want to live in an America that would support that kind of project - an America where people uphold Freedom of Religion even for religions other than their own. The row caused over the Park 51 project only demonstrates how far our America is from the one I want to live in.

Weber

::(lame)Texpatriot