What’s left to be said about the Cordoba House Project/Ground Zero Mosque brouhaha? Not much, so I’ll make this quick.
Now, call me a no-good, hockey playing, multiculturalism loving, bobble-headed Canadian, but watching the debate rage on about whether or not to have a Muslim edifice built near Ground Zero in New York reminded me of a lot of the confusion that I found in writing this post. Namely, it seems that many opponents of building the edifice near Ground Zero think that doing so is as good as admitting defeat to Osama Bin Laden and the agents of radical Islam. Or, that at the very least, the edifice would act as some kind of victory flag for those who perpetrated 9-11.
I couldn’t disagree with this more.
Just the opposite, I think that the edifice and its proposed location stand to act as the ultimate symbol of American victory over the forces of radical Islam. And again, I think a review of commentary from the world’s pre-immanent radical Islamist, Osama bin Laden, bear this idea out.
After a lot of overblown talk about calling Americans to his particular brand of Islam, bin Laden cuts to the chase about why he attacked American and what he and his fellow terrorists want in 2002′s Letter to the American People:
We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.
Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.
This snippet is small but telling. Short of a mass American conversion to radical Islam, what bin Laden and his cohorts want is a complete separation of the West and the Muslim world. America and the West are, by bin Laden’s lights, a cancer on the body of the world that needs to be isolated so that it can’t spread. Th best way to do this is to cut off all forms of contact whatsoever. Bin Laden says as much in perfectly plain language: leave us alone.
The Muslim edifice that is proposed to be built near Ground Zero repudiates bin Laden’s desire outcome in no uncertain terms. Its existence and proximity to the site of bin Laden’s most devastating attack stand to demonstrate that being Muslim and being America are not mutually exclusive identities. The edifice promises to remind us that separation of the kind that bin Laden so badly wants isn’t just not possible in an interconnected world, it isn’t even preferable.
Such an edifice and its proximity to Ground Zero spit in the face of bin Laden’s ugliness. I can’t think of a more fitting sign of victory for the best of America and its values. But, of course, none of that is possible if opponents of the project like Newt Gingrich get their way and give comfortably into the very kind of separation that bin Laden extols.
There is an opportunity here and one hopes that, collectively, Americans will have the chutzpah to embrace it.
Will Truman 
Patrick Cahalan 
Cornelius 
wardsmith 
Tod Kelly 
Tom Van Dyke 
Murali 
James Hanley 
Borat: “I do a picture, only small, of the Tishnik Masacre. Where many Uzbeks…crushed!”
Kindly Gray Hippie: “How did you feel when you drew this?”
Borat: “Very proud!”.
KGH: “I’m just listening with sadness…a little sadness for your people…?”
Borat: “Yes…no, it is not sad. It is us who do the kill!”
When in doubt,
{ 20 comments }
Wow no responses to this very good post. Must be nice to be Canadian.
@greginak, That’s because the answer is self-evident to the question, “Why do you hate America?”
I mean, c’mon! He’s Canadian! They have single-payer health care, for Palin’s sake!
The reality, Mr Payne, is that people of good will don’t think this project is a good idea. Sorry that bothers you. Yet you in your infinite You Know Better Than All Those People wisdom, can’t seem to get your head around that simple fact. What are the polls again on this question? Oh, I forget, the standard underlying premise to your response is: Everyone Who Disagrees With You Is A Bigot. You are operating on a conceptual level, abstract, part and parcel of your Internet land: “Or, that at the very least, the edifice would act as some kind of victory flag for those who perpetrated 9-11.” Give us a cotton-picking break, will ya?
Canada Dude, doing this Mosque thing isn’t respectful of what is hallowed ground. Does your post-postmodern mind process “hallowed ground” in a way like people who drink Dunkin Donuts might? Start there. The feeling of people who don’t spend their time searching for The Narrative to write a blog post about is something akin to: Nothing remotely related to 9/11 (and, sorry, but a Mosque is) should happen in that area until the footprint of the towers is replaced with whatever it is to be replaced by, Freedom Tower, etc. So incriminate the pathetic lack of progress of NYC to build something in replacement, as well. Better target than reasonable people who, in the same way they don’t think soymilk belongs in their morning coffee, don’t think a mosque belongs so near to the site of mass murder predicated on extreme views of the religion that populates said mosque. Are not there plenty of mosques elsewhere, in NYC and beyond? Criminy.
Wait till the tower’s done, maybe at that point try to build the All Important Mosque That Must Be Built Else Internet People Won’t Have Anything to Write Bout…maybe it’ll be more palatable under such circumstances, I dunno. Worth pondering.
@Matthew Dallman, wow, that’s what you take away? That Scott’s calling people bigots? Did you actually read the post?
And by the way, what the hell does soy milk have to do with it?
@Matthew Dallman,
The site of the two towers did not attain spiritual power on 9/11. If the weight of human misery by human action grants a location the status of “hallowed ground”, you can’t build anything almost anywhere you want to build anything. If it’s worthwhile land, it’s been bled over by more than 3,000 people at some point in its history.
“The reality, Mr Payne, is that people of good will don’t think this project is a good idea.”
I don’t care whether your will is good or not. You can have all the intentions in the world, and you may perceive them to be good, and a bunch of people may agree that your intentions are good, but that doesn’t mean that your intentions *are* good, or (even supposing that they *are* good) that the actions you believe to be dictated by your intentions are good, or that the outcome (including unintended consequences) of your actions are good.
“Better target than reasonable people who, in the same way they don’t think soymilk belongs in their morning coffee…”
Yeah, it’s just like that. Which exposes the ridiculousness of your entire premise. You can believe that soymilk doesn’t belong in your morning coffee. You can believe it in exactly the same way that you believe that building a particular building in a particular place is inappropriate. You can even hang a placard around your neck and picket Starbucks and look like a loony ranting about soymilk. You don’t get to use the power of the legislature to prevent people from putting soymilk in their coffee.
“like people who drink Dunkin Donuts might” There’s yur problem right there. Scott’s Canadian, he would eat Tim Horton’s.
So are you okay with the strip clubs around the area? There used to be a dozen of them although i think they are fewer now. Those places were packed with businessmen at all hours.
@greginak, “Damn right he would!”
-Rufus (lives two blocks from the first Tim Horton’s)
Depends on the brand of Islam, if you ask me.
Put a female cleric there at the Mohammedening or whatever the hell they call it and have her pray for more understanding between all peoples and I’ll be 100% in support of the Mosque and what it stands for.
If, however, it’s one of those Muslim heresies that doesn’t believe in Grrl Power, I’m afraid that we’re asking people to be open-minded in service to people who are spectacularly closed-minded (like Catholics! Ew!) and folks will respond to that pretty much as you’d expect them to.
Tolerance in service to intolerance strikes me as fairly unsustainable.
Busting the multiculturalist myth of diversity bringing ‘cultural enrichment’: http://crombouke.blogspot.com/2010/01/multiculturalism-does-islam-bring.html
Islamists are already trying to restrict and destroy our culture – see additional links under ‘Cultural Jihad’ at http://crombouke.blogspot.com/2010/01/everything-you-need-to-know-about-islam.html
@Trencherbone,
Wow what a balanced and insightful source. I am sure we can get everything we need to know from it.
Or not.
Look I don’t like Islam, I think it is a stupid and backward religion. But then again I think that about all three Abrahamic religions, so if I am not going to oppress the Christians and the Jewish people then I ain’t going to oppress the Muslims. I’m not going to let you do it either.
If you are really afraid of Muslims trying to take over the government then why don’t you help me keep the wall between church and state nice and strong? That way no-one can use the state to force people to follow their religions tenets.
I make a big distinction between asking our government to prevent the expression of religion and public protest against the ideas of a particular religion. To the extent anyone is asking the US government to take action against private citizens constructing a building, this is wrong. To the extent people are peacefully protesting the construction of the building and religious beliefs of the owners of the building, then this is proper. Anyone who wants to take the opposite position and support the construction has every right to do so.
Islam has a lot to answer for regarding their religion, just as Christians have to answer for the worst elements of Christianity. There’s no righteous moral superiority in defending Islam just because it’s from a different culture. Islam should be judged on its actions and ideas, and, historically, it’s been a rights-violating religion, oppressive of women and adherents in general, and it’s been intolerant of other religions. The moderate faction of Islam says this is not true regarding their expression and understanding of Islam, but the conflict between the two expressions is still strikingly real when we look around the world at Islamist countries, and until that can be resolved, Islam deserves to be critically analyzed before we lovingly embrace its foreign-ness for the sake of multi-cultural feel-good harmony. It’s perfectly valid to reject its ideas and values, just as it’s perfectly valid to reject the ideas and values of Christianity. To the extent any religion is forced on others, it should be resisted and criticized by anyone who values freedom. Is Islam forced on many people around the world? Yes. The moderate, peace and love Muslims should be fighting tooth and nail against this other “expression” of Islam, if they are serious.
@Mike Farmer,
“Islam should be judged on its actions and ideas, and, historically, it’s been a rights-violating religion, oppressive of women and adherents in general, and it’s been intolerant of other religions.”
Technically correct, but you can make this same statement about… well, just about any organized religion that’s been around for more than 100 years. You can even make a subset of those accusations about most of the religions that have been around for less than 100 years. Organized religion has a tendency to become tightly coupled to political power, and you get all sorts of morally reprehensible consequences out of that symbiotic relationship regardless of the religion or the government.
Now, one can make a general argument against organized religion like TPG does, or you can make a less general argument that Islam is specifically “more bad” than other candidates but that means you’re going to have to bust out some serious chops.
I’m very unconvinced that the sum burden of historical evils attributable to Islam outweigh the historical evils of Catholicism (or, to quote Ferris, “any other -ism, for that matter). Today’s clumps of reactionary fundamentalist Muslims aren’t any more oppressive than large chunks of the early Christian churches. Today’s ecumenical (in fact, largely secular) Christians aren’t much more open-minded and secular than Muslims around 1000 A.D. Women’s rights are a relatively recent development across the board.
You can’t take a snapshot of a religion in time and expect it to compare well with a snapshot of another religion taken at another time. There’s very little evidence (IMO) that organized religions generally follow anything resembling a path to enlightenment; them seem to fall into a cyclic relationship of advancement/retraction with their links to the general body politic. Just like most other human organizations, really.
@Mike Farmer,
It’s erroneous to think of Islam, or any other religion, as monolithic. There is not a single Islam nor is there a single way to practice Islam. To use an analogy from scientific classification schemes, it’s the class to the individual believer’s species. Mammals tend to have things in common, but simply because they have enough in common to group them together does not mean that we can claim that everything that is true of kangaroos is true of humans.
Even if Islam’s greatest detractors, claiming that nearly every instance of Islam both in the past and today is barbaric, it still wouldn’t be necessary proof. Belonging to a group does not necessitate having all of that group’s characteristics.
In short, this grouping mechanism is bad logic and worse politics. Individuals are the only ones we can evaluate with an appropriate level of confidence.
@James Vonder Haar,
Did either of you read what I wrote?
Listen you Wayne Gretzky-loving, Burton Cummings-worshipping, Kids of Degrassi Street-watching, maple syrup-injecting, Steve Nash-cheering, Alanis Morissette-listening, Red Ensign-waving, Yann Martel-reading, Gaspe-portaging excuse for a North American… sorry, lost my train of thought.
I’d just like to note that I love the build a gay bar next door idea.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/08/name-that-bar.html
@ThatPirateGuy, Seconded.
@Mark Thompson, Third, though does New York need another gay bar? Well maybe if it’s fab. They could call it the Pink Imam.
@North, “All?t, al-’Uzz? and Man?t’s Intercession.”
It’s oblique but, hey.
@Jaybird, er, Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat.
Well that joke now officially sucks.
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