This "Hallowed Ground" Has Nothing To Do With It

From The Washington Post -- August 23, 2010:

Far from Ground Zero, other plans for mosques run into vehement opposition

By Annie Gowen

MURFREESBORO, TENN. -- For more than 30 years, the Muslim community in this Nashville suburb has worshipped quietly in a variety of makeshift spaces -- a one-bedroom apartment, an office behind a Lube Express -- attracting little notice even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But when the community's leaders proposed a 52,900-square-foot Islamic center with a school and a swimming pool this year, the vehement backlash from their neighbors caught them by surprise. Opponents crowded county meetings and held a noisy protest in the town square that drew hundreds, some carrying signs such as "Keep Tennessee Terror Free."

"We haven't experienced this level of hostility before ever, so it's new to us," said Saleh M. Sbenaty, an engineering professor who is overseeing the mosque's planned expansion.

The Murfreesboro mosque is hundreds of miles from New York City and the national furor about whether an Islamic community center should be built near Ground Zero. But the intense feelings driving that debate have surfaced in communities from California to Florida in recent months, raising questions about whether public attitudes toward Muslims have shifted.

In Tennessee, three plans for new Islamic centers in the Nashville area -- one of which was ultimately withdrawn -- have provoked controversy and outbursts of ugliness. Members of one mosque discovered a delicately rendered Jerusalem cross spray-painted on the side of their building with the words "Muslims go home."

The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro became a hot-button political issue during this month's primary election, prompting failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron Ramsey to ask whether Islam was a "cult."

Another candidate paid for a billboard high above Interstate 24 near Nashville that read: "Defeat Universal Jihad Now."

Evangelist Pat Robertson weighed in Thursday, wondering on his television program whether a Muslim takeover of America was imminent and whether local officials could be bribed. (The mayor of the county where the Islamic Center is proposed called that idea "ridiculous.")

The members of the Murfreesboro mosque, who say they have always rejected extremism, have been bewildered by the vitriol.

Sbenaty, 52, who came to the United States from Syria for his doctoral studies three decades ago, gets misty-eyed describing the kindness his neighbors showed his family after Sept. 11. At one point, he recalled, he was in a shopping mall parking lot with his wife, who wears a hijab, and a group of locals made a point to stop and assure them they had nothing to fear.

The other day, however, as he was standing on the mosque's 15-acre parcel of land just outside town, drivers honked and flipped their middle fingers in the air as they rode past.

"It's tough to see that change," Sbenaty said.

Although the overall level of anti-Muslim sentiment hasn't shifted much since the uproar over the mosque near Ground Zero, the change in tone has been striking, religious scholars and other experts say.

The reasons are myriad: rising fears of homegrown terrorism after the Fort Hood shootings and the attempted Times Square bombing, the rhetoric of the burgeoning "tea party" political movement and increasing unhappiness with President Obama. A growing number of Americans -- one in five -- believe the president is a Muslim, according to a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

"It shouldn't be surprising that there's a negative reaction to this mosque," said Richard Lloyd, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University. "Because you can connect it to this global media event in New York, it just reinforces this siege mentality local residents have."

Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University, said a Florida church's plan to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of Sept. 11 is emblematic of the country's new mood.

"Something more is happening," Ahmed said. "We are becoming aware that the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims is wider than it was after 9/11, and that's a frightening prospect."

In the Nashville area, the Muslim population has grown to 20,000 to 25,000, fueled by the arrival of Somalis fleeing strife and the federal government's decision to resettle Iraqi refugees there after the Persian Gulf War. Central Tennessee is now home to the country's largest population of Iraqi Kurds.

The community has outgrown its four mosques, where men often have to pray in the parking lots because of the crowds, leaders say.

'A certain amount of fear'

Murfreesboro, about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, is a quiet town of 100,000 people, largely white conservative Christians. Residents take pride in the historic town square skirting an antebellum courthouse, the site of a famous Confederate raid during the Civil War. Patriotic banners line the lampposts. On the highway, there's a Sonic drive-in every few miles. Gospel music radio stations are as numerous as those playing country music.

The 250 or so families -- about 1,000 people -- who worship at the existing Islamic Center come from around the globe and include doctors, car salesmen and students from nearby Middle Tennessee State University. Members of the mosque have raised about $600,000 to buy land and prepare the site for a 10,000-square-foot gathering place. Plans for a school, pool and cemetery are expected to take years to complete.

But the vision of a large-scale complex has caused consternation among locals.

"What I sense is a certain amount of fear fueling the animosity," said Jim Daniel, a former county commissioner and former county Republican Party chairman, sitting down for lunch one day last week at City Cafe. Residents worry that "the Muslims coming in here will keep growing in numbers and override our system of law and impose sharia law."

Daniel and his dining partner -- the local Democratic Party chairman, Jonathon Fagan, 32 -- say they're uneasy about the proposal but agree that Rutherford County followed the law when it approved the plans for the Islamic Center in May.

"We have to allow them freedom of religion," Fagan said with a tight smile. "It takes courage to live in a free country. We have to have the courage to do that, even if we don't agree with it."

The man leading the fight against the mosque is a stocky 44-year-old correctional officer named Kevin Fisher. After he heard about the proposal, he voiced his opposition with an op-ed in the town's alternative weekly.

Fisher spent his formative years in Buffalo, where a homegrown terrorist cell of Yemeni Americans was uncovered in 2002. Its presence in a place so familiar haunts Fisher to this day, he said. He is well aware that clerics at U.S. mosques have been accused of espousing radical views in the years before and after Sept. 11.

And he pointed out that one of the Murfreesboro mosque's board members was suspended after the discovery of a MySpace page where he had posted Arabic poetry and a photo of the founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas. Leaders of the mosque said their internal investigation showed no wrongdoing, and they are cooperating with federal authorities looking into the matter.

"So many things about Islam are disconcerting," Fisher said. "As they get bigger, there will be concerns about the ideology, what they preach and what they believe."

Fisher, who is African American, chafes when the mosque's supporters "dial up the rhetoric from the '60s" to attack opponents by accusing them of bigotry against Muslims.

"It's offensive to me," he said. His stepmother "was dragged off restaurant stools in the 1960s and has cigarette burns in her arm. That's discrimination."

One recent hot day, the two sides met at a protest rally in the Murfreesboro town square. Opponents of the mosque marched, prayed and sang "God Bless America." They were greeted by a line of counter-protesters with peace signs. Fingers pointed. Words flew.

About 1,000 people were there, and afterward, one of them, Sherry McLain, told a local radio station that she was worried about plans that had surfaced this spring for new Islamic centers in her town and two nearby communities.

"That frightens me," she said. "Something's going on, and I don't like it. We're at war with these people."

Fisher said the protest was a "a beautiful example of our democracy at work." But Lema Sbenaty, Saleh's 19-year-old daughter and an MTSU student, didn't see it that way.

"I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that," she said later. "You could see the hatred in their eyes."

On Friday night, Lema and her mother, Fetoun, 47, a preschool teacher, gathered with about 200 others at the existing Islamic Center for iftar, the feasts held during the holy month of Ramadan to break the daily sunrise-to-sunset fasting.

The mosque, housed in a low-slung office building, is divided into two suites, one for men and one for women. In the women's room, about 35 women listened to prayers via closed-circuit TV streaming from the men's side and then sat cross-legged on the floor for a dinner of rice and lamb with yogurt sauce. One of the men had pulled his Dodge Ram truck up to the door of the mosque and cooked the lamb -- butchered according to halal guidelines -- in a huge pot just outside.

As dozens of children played, Lema, Fetoun and the others said they were dismayed that their hopes for a larger worship space had garnered such negative attention nationally. They said they hoped it would be resolved peacefully and soon.

"God will decide," Fetoun Sbenaty said. "It's his house."

FOX News -- The "Fair and Balanced" Republican Propaganda Network

Shouldn't the GOP be paying Fox?

From Media Matters For America -- August 21, 2010:

In April, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of Fox News parent company News Corp., responded to a question from Media Matters' Ari Rabin-Havt by stating that he doesn't "think we should be supporting the tea party, or any other party." Yet on Monday, Bloomberg News reported that News Corp. contributed $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. The large donation caps off more than a year and a half of pro-Republican activism during the Obama administration by Fox News hosts, reporters, and "political analysts."

Because it might be hard to keep track of Fox News' pro-GOP activism in all 50 states, here's a brief recap:

GOP fundraisers / events. Fox News hosts and "political analysts" have frequently spoken at or hosted fundraisers or events for Republican organizations and candidates. Recently, Fox News employee Dick Morris -- who's received money from GOP parties -- announced that he's planning to stump for more than 40 Republican candidates.

On-air endorsements. Fox Newsers regularly make on-air endorsements for Republicans. Fox Business host Eric Bolling, for example, told viewers they could "save" the country in 2012 by putting "a Republican in there. Turn it over in 2010."

Endorsing statements. Fox Newsers regularly release statements in support of candidates through their political organizations or social media accounts. Sarah Palin, for example, makes endorsements through her Facebook page, while Mike Huckabee endorses candidates on his Huck PAC website. Fox News has promoted both Huckabee and Palin's outside ventures.

Behind-the-scenes / campaign roles. Last year, Dick Morris worked as a paid consultant for unsuccessful Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Christy Mihos. Fox News contributor Karl Rove, meanwhile, has been offering campaign advice to Republicans, such as the House Republican Conference and Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul.

Political fundraising groups. Fox News hosts and contributors are raising money for Republican candidates and causes using political action committees, 527 and 501(c)(4) organizations. These fundraising groups are also promoted on Fox News.

Frequent softball candidate promotions. Fox News has frequently opened its airwaves to promote Republican candidates such as Republican gubernatorial candidates Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell, and Senate candidates Marco Rubio, Mark Kirk, Scott Brown, Sharron Angle, and Rand Paul. Angle summarized Fox News' friendly haven for GOP candidates when she suggested that she prefers to appear on Fox because they let her raise money.

GOP in exile. Fox News boasts a long roster of possible 2012 presidential candidates on its payroll, such as Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Fox News, in turn, gives them exposure and air time while they decide whether they want to run for office.

GOP issue advocacy. Fox News has frequently pushed conservative misinformation about the Obama administration and various other issues. Perhaps most notably, Fox News became the voice of the opposition against health care reform earlier this year.
GOP events advocacy. Fox News has heavily promoted pro-Republican and anti-Democrat events such as the April 15 Tax Day Tea Parties, the Tea Party Express bus tour, and Rep. Michele Bachmann's anti-health care reform rallies.

As The Daily Show's Jon Stewart noted, "If anything, the Republicans should be paying Fox News millions and millions of dollars."

Tom B. Exposes The Tea Partiers

Every time the Tea Party takes a stand on just about anything it shows how dependent they and many on the Right Wing [Republicans] are on the uneducated and uninformed populace of this country. Why so many would not take the time to educate themselves on critical issues is beyond me. If they see or hear it on Fake News, it has to be true. To depend on the likes of Palin, Limbaugh and Hannity for your best interests without seeking out opposing views is beyond belief, when most of what they preach is detrimental to the majority of the country and only serves the wealthy to condense power even further into the hands of large muti-national corporations and further erode the middle class in both wealth and size. They will not be happy until they control everything and everyone. Please take the time to seek information on everything that affects the lives of you and everyone you love. The right wing propaganda machine depends on your being distracted from the real issues that affect all of us. Take the time to view the concentration of wealth in the top few percent of the population since Reagan and you need look no further. And they want more Tax Cuts for the wealthy? Have they no shame? They claim it is their money, without mentioning how it was shifted away from the middle and lower class with salary and benefit reductions. Now they don't want to be taxed on it. Shameless thieves, in my opinion.

Tom B. -- August 21, 2010

Republican Ignoramuses Are Attacking the Very Muslims America Needs to Win the War On Terror -- GOP Rabble-Rousers are in Bed with Al Quaida

The Money Behind the Mosque

by Asra Q. Nomani

From The Daily Beast -- August 20, 2010:

Far from a fundraising juggernaut with ties to Ahmadinejad, the planned Islamic center near ground zero has less than $9,000 in the bank—raised by a group of Muslim-American moms. Asra Q. Nomani reports.

In recent days, critics of the proposal to build a mosque and Islamic center near ground zero have linked the plan to everyone from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Islamist organizations Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. But the plan's real fundraising effort, thus far, is much more innocuous: a PayPal account with less than $9,000 in it, mostly from New Yorkers, raised by a group of Muslim moms in Manhattan whose original aim was to host a peace march.

Just this week, the New York Post ran a piece questioning the fundraising ties of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, spiritual leader of the Cordoba House, now dubbed Park51. The piece speculated that the fundraising effort could extend to Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, Politico reported on a less-sophisticated operation—noting that the Cordoba Initiative's latest fundraising report shows just $18,255. The piece accurately concluded that the mosque remains a long shot, as fundraising for the $100 million project has hardly even begun.

The list of donors numbers only in the dozens, according to people familiar with the donations, and many are New Yorkers living in the neighborhood of ground zero.

But the mystery of the mosque funding is both more complicated—and considerably less sinister—than the early reports suggest. Rauf's group, the Cordoba Initiative, isn't even directly handling the fundraising for the proposed cultural center. In recent weeks, the business developers of the effort, Sharif El-Gamal, and volunteers decided to make some changes so that the new center isn't tied just to Rauf's organization. (For that reason, the effort has been rebranded as "Park51," rather than the Cordoba House.) So now, a group called Muslims for Peace, which I helped found with a group of moms four years ago, is handling the fundraising, and so far it has collected less than $9,000.

It's a long way from a fundraising juggernaut with ties to Ahmadinejad, as the New York Post speculated. On the Park51 website, the "donate" button leads to a PayPal page titled "Muslims for Peace c\o Park51." The list of donors numbers only in the dozens, according to people familiar with the donations, and many are New Yorkers living in the neighborhood of ground zero.

Our group, Muslims for Peace, became the fundraising arm of Park51 through a string of informal personal connections. Muslims for Peace began in the summer of 2006, when two other Muslim immigrant moms and I responded to a call by Ameena Meer, a straight-shooting Muslim-American single mother of three who wanted to organize a Muslim march for peace and tolerance. One of the other moms, Sharbari Ahmed, a Bangladeshi-American writer, had written a play, "Raisins not Virgins," asserting a theological argument that the "virgins" martyrs believe they are going to get in heaven is more accurately translated as "raisins." We founded our nonprofit organization to speak out against the violence that had been happening in the name of Islam. That summer, British police foiled a plot by Muslims to blow up trans-Atlantic flights. Since then, the little business of getting our children through school has gotten in the way of organizing a march, and the most we've done for the group is design an ad campaign that Meer created, launch a now outdated website, and file the papers to get our nonprofit status. Before Park51, we weren't in the fundraising business.

Earlier this year, Meer got interested in the mosque effort near ground zero. She knew the organizers well. She had been going to Masjid al-Farah, the progressive mosque where Rauf preached, for years. And she knew his wife, Daisy Khan, from her work in the Muslim community. She knew El-Gamal too, the new owner of the former Burlington Coat Factory building at 51 Park Place, the site for the new mosque and Islamic center.

While the plan had grabbed headlines, there wasn't any money set aside to make it reality. Rauf, the spiritual leader of the effort, and his wife were spearheading much of the community effort, calling the vision "the Cordoba House," but they haven't appropriated any money from the Cordoba Initiative and the Asma Society organizations that they run, according to people involved in the effort.

The business organizers found themselves in a quandry: Ramadan, the season of charity giving, was fast approaching, but they hadn't organized their effort yet as a nonprofit organization. Meer, the engine behind Muslims for Peace, asked the other mothers and me if we could support the effort and allow Park51 to collect money through Muslims for Peace. The others agreed. (I told them, sadly, I had to recuse myself from our support of the effort because I was worried about the hurt feelings of 9/11 victims' families to the location, and I also knew that, as the fundraising operation grew, I wouldn't know where the donations were coming from).

Now, on the Park51 website, donors can give directly to Muslims for Peace. Meer goes occasionally to check the status of donations, but overseeing the donations is the accountant at Soho Properties. According to a person familiar with the situation, PayPal hasn't released the money yet while it conducts its own review of the legitimacy of the nonprofit organization. In the long run, of course, the question of donations will only get more complicated.

Inside the Park51 effort, the organizers recognize they have to beef up their public relations. The team has relied on a hip young marketing specialist, Oz Sultan, who has made his mark with social marketing but may be in over his head in this debate. Sultan set off a storm of criticism when, in reply to a question from a New York Post reporter about whether the fundraising effort would extend to Iran and Saudi Arabia, he said, "I can't comment on that," adding, "We'll look at all available options within the United States to start." Meer, whose advertising agency, Take-Out Media, is handling the branding of Park51, responded internally with an email that the group had to take a strong stand against foreign funding.

The planners have also conducted internal debates about the public image of the campaign, with Sultan's @Park51 Twitter feed taking potshots at the usually respectable Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and posting juvenile items like, "If my younger brother asked your sister to prom, would you picket him?" As part of its burgeoning PR strategy, the team has decided to lay low until after the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, when it is thinking of holding a feast to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah and the Muslim holiday of Eid, marking the end of Ramadan.

Meanwhile, the Park51 organizers would like Meer to act as their spokeswoman. From my perspective, making such a change would be a good thing for their effort at building bridges, whether the center is built or not. She knows the language of Islam and America, sending Ramadan greetings and signing emails with "xx," electronic shorthand for "hugs."

Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are Osama Bin Laden's Best Friends and Allies

From The Washington Post -- August 18, 2010:

Mosque fight helps al-Qaeda, says former FBI interrogator

By Jeff Stein

Ali Soufan, reputed to be the FBI’s most skillful terrorist interrogator after the Sept. 11 attacks, asserted Wednesday that opposition to building a mosque near Ground Zero is helping al-Qaeda.

“There are many reasons for supporting the Muslim community's right to build a cultural center and mosque on private property, not least of all the First Amendment of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion,” wrote Soufan, a supervisory special agent with the bureau from 1997 to 2005, in an essay for Forbes and published online Wednesday.

“But from a national security perspective, our leaders need to understand that no one is likely to be happier with the opposition to building a mosque than Osama Bin Laden. His next video script has just written itself.”

Soufan, a Muslim himself who cracked some of al-Qaeda’s top operatives by rejecting harsh interrogation methods, noted that no American Muslims participated in the Sept. 11 plot.

But the current opposition to the mosque, mixed with “poor (and even harmful) leadership within the American-Muslim community and failed strategies from our government in dealing with the [terrorist] threat,” could be undermining young American Muslims’ support for their country.

“When demagogues appear to be equating Islam with terrorism, it's making young Muslims unsure about their place in the country,” he wrote. “It bolsters the message that radicalizers are selling: That the war is against Islam, and Muslims are not welcome in America.”

The proposal to build an Islamic center four blocks from a hole where the World Trade Center once stood in Lower Manhattan has fueled a Web-based furor driven by conservative activists, now joined by some influential Republicans and Democrats.

President Obama inserted himself into the debate, saying last week that the project has the right to go forward. Since then, the White House has been struggling to contain the domestic political fallout, but so far seems little concerned about the effects on the Muslim world.

“As President, what President Obama can do is make sure that we communicate exactly how we're feeling to the Muslim world, and we're focused on that,” Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton told reporters Aug. 12. “But I don't think that the boundaries are shifting in such way that that's dangerous.”

A half-century ago, another Democrat in the White House was slow to apprehend the threat of civil rights resistance to his foreign policy.

President John F. Kennedy was at first enraged by the sit-ins and "Freedom Rides," seeing them as undermining his ability to deal with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

But events, particularly the images of white cops unleashing attack dogs on black demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., caused him to change.

“What a disaster that picture is,” Kennedy moaned. “That picture is not only in America but all around the world.”

Kennedy’s eventual support of civil rights legislation was inextricably linked with America's struggle against Soviet-backed liberation movements.

"We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home," he said in a major speech in 1963, "but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other, that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?"

Likewise, Soufan argued that inflammatory rhetoric against the mosque proposal and the struggle for the Muslim minds around the world are linked.

“The potential damage to our national security is not only to our work abroad," he maintained, "but at home too.”

“Some young Muslims are finding themselves increasingly isolated and marginalized -- and are becoming easy prey for radicals."

Republicans Are Willing to Destroy America to Win Elections

This isn't about Ground Zero - This is about America

Over the last week we've heard a lot from DFA members around the country asking for action to protect the rights of religious freedom for all Americans and I couldn't agree more.

I don't get upset much. I mean, I get ticked off at Republicans and Democrats (and at really bad customer service!), but that's why I work with you at DFA. Because when we get upset, we don't stew in it and hope it goes away. We do something about it.

The controversy around the building of a Muslim Community Center at 51 Park in New York City should upset all of us. It definitely upsets me. Shortly after the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks, much of this country came together. But there were a number of other, smaller tragedies occurring all over the country as a result of the attacks. People who "looked like terrorists" were victims of harassment, intimidation, and outright violence.

That includes me, and every member of my immediate family in different instances. My response was to protest the coming wars. My family did something different, though. They started going to Mosque. It did more than renew their faith -- it provided a sense of community and safety during a very dark time for us. But for the last nine years, at least, people have been trying to block the construction of mosques all over the country.

Now, let's be clear, the subject of the highest profile Muslim structure, 51 Park in New York City, will have a basketball court and a culinary school. Two floors will have a prayer room. The other eleven will host movie nights, performances, group dinners, etc -- it's basically a Muslim YMCA, open to everyone. These moderate Muslims are doing everything we could ask of them. They're trying to build a bridge in the communities they live in, trying to show the world that Muslims are cool and interesting and diverse, and proving that being a Muslim does not equal being a terrorist.

But they're being thrown under the bus by our elected leaders, egged on by some of the ugliest elements of the right-wing. Well-intentioned leaders of the Democratic Party are getting caught up in the fray as well, some of them seeking to find common ground with an implacable opposition. It's not helping.

This isn't just a Manhattan problem. Right now, there is opposition to mosques in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Southern California, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Illinois, and dozens of other locations across our nation. Where would they move? If public pressure can be brought to bear to take down the most high-profile Muslim community center in liberal NYC, then these other places don't even have a chance, Ground Zero connection or not.

Frankly, this isn't about Ground Zero. This is about America. This is about freedom. This is about people and there seems to be no place that Muslim people can go without being harassed.

The harassment has to stop, and that starts with you and me.

I think most people agree that Muslims have the right to worship. But these efforts to harass Muslims are based in fear, prejudice, and ignorance. Removing a community center doesn't solve these problems. But talking about religious freedom -- really engaging people -- can open people's minds, and blunt the prejudice.

I pledge to do it myself.

I pledge today to stand up for religious freedom right now. We cannot wait another day to defend the rights of all Americans to worship if they want, where they want, and when they want. I will not wait for the conversation to come to me; I will start the conversation now. Please join me in making the pledge to fight for our universal American values of acceptance and respect for religious freedom.

I need you, in your community, to have those challenging conversations with people you know.

Take the pledge right now.

It's time to be pro-active in support of the values that define what we stand for and who we are as Americans. After you take the pledge, please follow up and share the conversations you've had. I think we'll all find them inspiring to share.

-Arshad

Arshad Hasan, Executive Director
Democracy for America

What Vile Disgusting Un-American Slimeballs Some Republican Leaders Are

From The Washington Post -- August 19, 2010:

To New York Muslims, Islamic center near Ground Zero would be more than a mosque

By Krissah Thompson and Felicia Sonmez

This is what the controversial Islamic community center and mosque being planned in Lower Manhattan means to Ehab Zahriyeh: not having to play basketball in church leagues.

For Fatima Monkush, it would be a place to swim -- sans cap and layers of clothing -- with other Muslim women.

While the national debate about the center has elicited passionate statements for and against it from Democrats and Republicans, what Muslims have been left with is a great deal of disappointment. And for the young American-born New Yorkers who hope to use the site as a fitness center, meeting space and prayer hall, among other functions, the sense of rejection is personal.

"The debate is maybe the most unfortunate thing we've seen in a long time, to see Americans behave in such a manner," said Zahriyeh, 24, who was born and raised in Brooklyn. His parents are Palestinian Americans who immigrated to the city more than three decades ago.

He said the center has arisen from nothing more than the needs of his burgeoning community. "It's only natural that something like this should happen," he said. "Our community has grown over the last few decades."

For many Muslims outside New York, the center has become a symbol and the debate about it an affront, reflective of a lack of acceptance that they feel is growing in parts of the United States.

"We are at a cusp," said Haris Tarin, director of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. "The thing that has personally affected me the most is that the individuals who call this an act of insensitivity forget that Muslim Americans were victims on 9/11 also. Our country was attacked. Our neighbors were attacked. . . . Our faith was hijacked on that day."

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, described the debate as a nadir in "Islamophobic rhetoric."

"We're seeing it nationwide," he said. "You literally cannot turn on a radio today without hearing a right-wing radio talk show host slamming Islam in the most corrosive of terms."

The project's organizers have said that the center, called Park51, is modeled on Manhattan's 92nd Street Y, a community center open to all New Yorkers. Park51 is also intended to be open to the entire community, though there will be some restrictions based on Muslim traditions.

It would house meeting rooms, a fitness center, a swimming pool, a basketball court, a restaurant and culinary school, a library, a 500-seat auditorium, a Sept. 11 memorial, a reflection space, and a mosque that could attract as many as 2,000 worshipers on Fridays. There is no place like it in the city, which is home to 600,000 to 700,000 Muslims, according to Columbia University researchers.

There are an estimated 2.5 million Muslims in the United States, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

"Everybody's just excited for the space," said Monkush, 27, who grew up in Hartford and moved to New York recently to pursue a career in fashion. Her American mother and Bengali father worried about her safety when she told them that she planned to go to the Park51 site to pray during Ramadan last week, but she saw no protesters.

"It's very depressing to see your fellow Americans turning on you," she said.

The space has been used for prayer since last year, and Zahriyeh has prayed there half a dozen times. The building used to house a Burlington Coat Factory, but the store closed after Sept. 11, 2001, when it was damaged by the landing gear of one of the planes used in the attacks on the World Trade Center, two blocks away.

The proximity of the proposed community center to the site of the terrorist attacks may be fueling the debate, but Muslims who support Park51 say they are not impinging on Ground Zero. There are at least two other mosques in the neighborhood: Masjid al-Farah, where one of Park51's organizers, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, served as prayer leader until 2009, sits 12 blocks from Ground Zero, and Masjid Manhattan, which was founded in 1970, is four blocks away.

"There's nothing on that block," Monkush said. "The place is so deserted, honestly, you can't even see anything from there -- Ground Zero, you can't see it."

Kareem Elaktaa, 23, a friend of Zahriyeh's who has also prayed at Park51, wondered how far away it would need to be to not hit a nerve. "You know you are in the vicinity of where the World Trade Center formerly was, [but] you can't see the Ground Zero area," he said. "I don't see that as a valid argument."

At this point, they think that even if the center is moved to a different site, the controversy will continue.

Park51's developer, Sharif el-Gamal, was not available for an interview, but a spokesman for the project said it would occupy 97,000 square feet, with an indeterminate number of stories. No architect has been selected, and the planners are intending to hold a "world-class design competition."

Rauf, el-Gamal and Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan, have recently begun to hold meetings at the site with other community groups to try to solidify support. Megan Putney, program director for the Muslim Consultative Network, which advises Muslim groups, has attended some of those meetings and wants to see the project go forward.

"People have been asking, 'Where are the Muslims who are showing the outward detest for 9/11?' " Putney said. "We are here. We abhor what happened on September 11th."

Zahriyeh, a video journalist, said that in his prayers at Park51, he has been "claiming the space" as his own.

"Muslims in New York City really want this now more than before," he said. "It's not a comfortable feeling knowing that a few Americans are rallying thousands, possibly millions, to be fearful of a community center, to be fearful of people who just want to fit into this nation."

Republicans' "Hallowed Ground" Argument Is All About Cheap Political Exploitation of Widespread Mindless Prejudice Against Moslems

The Huffington Post -- August 17, 2010:

Ground Zero Mosque Opponents Have a Lot of Work to Do

By Bob Cesca

If we take Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich at their word, their objection to the proposed community center two blocks north of Ground Zero is that the entire area is hallowed ground, and a Muslim facility so close to the site is an insult to the victims and heroes of September 11.

Of course this is entirely about a swath of 9/11 fetishists, mostly Christians, ginning up anti-Muslim fear and demagoguery to score political points. It's a cheap and obvious exploitation of the widespread American prejudice that anyone who happens to be Muslim is equally as guilty and offensive as the terrorists who hijacked and crashed two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers.

It must be an election year because Republicans are once again rolling out September 11 as a wedge issue. You know, because they care about honoring the fallen. When it helps them politically.

If Beck, Limbaugh, Palin and Gingrich, along with the entire population of far-right AM talk radio, really cared about hallowed ground and historical preservation, they wouldn't be limiting their crusade to Park 51 (formerly Cordoba House).

As many of us have heard, there's a strip club two blocks away. I'm not sure how lap dances are less offensive than a religious community center. In fact, there are quite a few places in lower Manhattan within short walking distance of Ground Zero that would have to be eliminated as part of these stringent guidelines dictating how sacred ground ought to be respected. Via Twitter, Sarah Palin urged President Obama to weigh in on the Park 51 issue. Well, I urge Sarah Palin to weigh in on the strip club "at Ground Zero." We're waiting, Sarah. Will you campaign against the strip club? How about the gun shows that happen at Cox Pavilion, not far from the site of the Oklahoma City bombing? Or the shinto shrines a mile or two from Pearl Harbor?

Actually, come to think of it, I want all of the usual suspects -- Beck, Palin, Gingrich and the rest -- to weigh in on a variety of actual trespasses upon hallowed ground.

Let's begin with the actual ground. The Ground Zero. Literally, the ground. The One World Trade Center (aka. Freedom Tower) website notes the following feature:

The below-grade concourses will include approximately 55,000 square feet of retail space and connect to an extensive transportation and retail network...
So there's going to be a shopping mall literally in the ground of Ground Zero. "Below-grade" means "in the ground." The Ground. In other words, Sarah Palin and her entire gaggle of various babies and ghost writers can visit Ground Zero and honor the heroes and victims of 9/11 while trying on tankinis at Juicy Couture (or whatever clothing stores end up there) constructed within the actual ground of Ground Zero.

This bears repeating: unlike Park 51, which is blocks away, there's going to be a 55,000 square foot mall under the same ground where people fell to their deaths on that terrible day. Ground that's mixed with the remains of the dead. A mall.

And it wouldn't be the first time we've besmirched and destroyed the hallowed ground where American heroes have died.

I have yet to see Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin contribute their considerable wealth and celebrity to the cause of preserving the Wilderness and Chancellorsville battlefields in Virginia where Washington, D.C.'s suburban sprawl is rapidly consuming the land where thousands of Americans were killed during the American Civil War. When will these self-proclaimed patriots stand against the latest eyesore -- a Walmart Super Store that's likely to be built on the Wilderness battlefield?

Newt Gingrich, for his part, has written several books about the Civil War, one of which fantasizes about a Confederate victory at Gettysburg. Actually, I once stood several feet away from Gingrich as he held a book signing at a Gettysburg gift shop located a block or two from a McDonald's on Steinwehr Avenue -- a McDonald's that sits on the actual battlefield, specifically the location of the infamous Pickett's Charge on the third day of battle. (The gift shop is also technically on the battlefield.)

The McDonald's is next to a Friendly's restaurant and across from a hotel with a swimming pool where tourists can honor the fallen while wearing arm floaties and smacking each other with foam noodles. There's a restaurant called General Pickett's Buffet on the battlefield. There used to be a Stuckey's Restaurant literally in the Peach Orchard. There's a 7-11 convenience store where U.S. cavalry commander General John Buford, arguably the hero of Gettysburg, was headquartered on the first day.

Sarah? Beck?

On the site of some of the most bloody fighting, East Cemetery Hill, there's a towering Holiday Inn, a Rita's Italian Ice, a cigar store, a Hall of Presidents wax museum, another gift shop and another convenience store. Oh and there's a hilarious outhouse attraction complete with an animatronic townie relieving himself and yelling at tourists to stop "letting all the flies in." Hilarious. West of the town, on the site of one of the Civil War's largest field hospitals, known at the time as Camp Letterman, there's a Walmart and a trailer park. South of town, behind Power's Hill where my great-great grandfather's 155th Pennsylvania volunteer regiment bivouacked, you can walk the hallowed ground while playing a round of miniature golf at Mulligan McDuffer's Putt-Putt.

Sure, a soulless free market conservative might shrug off these monuments to corporate consumerism as being the wheels of commerce and capitalism rolling on. Even if that means rolling over the ground where 23,040 United States soldiers were killed or wounded (the Confederates suffered around 20-25,000 casualties at Gettysburg). For the federal Army of the Potomac, that was a 27 percent casualty rate. Unimaginable by today's standards.

And that leads us to an aspect of this particular expanse of hallowed ground that most directly relates to the fracas over Park 51.

To review: Park 51 will be two blocks away from the actual WTC site. It's being installed by American citizens, the chief of whom, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an American citizen who has worked with the Bush administration on Muslim outreach. These are peaceful Muslims who had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorist attacks nearby. The opponents of the inaccurately dubbed "Ground Zero Mosque" suggest it's the work of an enemy religion and offensive to the memory of those who died.

But at Gettysburg, just south of the town and west of the Emmitsburg Road near the tree-line from which 12-15,000 Confederate soldiers emerged on the third day of battle to attack the United States army on Cemetery Ridge, stands a tall marble and bronze statue of General Robert E. Lee, commanding general of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. It's not the only Confederate monument on the actual battlefield, but it's certainly the most striking and the most famous. At the peak of the obelisk is Lee mounted atop his horse, Traveler, staring out at the battlefield. Just below him are heroic bronze representations of random Virginia Confederates.

This general committed treason against the United States. By definition, he was a traitor who commanded a rebel army against the U.S. and inflicted unprecedented casualties. Specifically, General Lee's invasion of the north and advance into Gettysburg was responsible for the aforementioned 23,040 United States military casualties, and, of those 23,040 casualties, 3,155 were killed on that ground.

Yet there's a statue at Gettysburg honoring the fiercest enemy of the United States at that time. Had Lee been victorious, the United States as we know it today would not exist. But he gets a statue on Pennsylvania soil -- a statue which, by the way, stands at the exact same height as the statue to U.S. General George Gordon Meade, the commander of the Army of the Potomac (and a Pennsylvanian).

I can't even imagine the September 11 equivalent of such a memorial to an enemy of the United States. Now, just to be clear, I'm not advocating one way or another about the Confederate battlefield monuments at Gettysburg (the retail shops, on the other hand, are a blight). I'm merely drawing a parallel here. And if Newt, Sarah and Glenn are truly so driven to maintain the sacred purity of American "hallowed ground," they definitely have a lot of work to do. And they can start by campaigning for the removal of the Lee statue of Gettysburg. You know, for the sake of consistency. Let's see how popular that'll be, especially with their southern fanbase.

Naturally they won't bother because the mosque issue isn't really as much about the ground as it is about stoking and capitalizing on religious intolerance. When you eliminate the inconsistencies, contradictions and oversights, all that's left is political fear-mongering, demagoguery and a disturbing disregard for the free exercise clause. If it was truly about hallowed ground, we'd hear about all of those other American sites.

Ultimately, though, I'm expecting too much from the modern conservative movement, considering how it's built entirely upon obvious contradictions, unserious chicanery and an escalating campaign of intolerance.

One More Blast at Republican Low-Blow Prejudice and Hate-Mongering

From The Huffington Post -- July 28, 2010:

By Matt Sledge

Just How Far Is the "Ground Zero Mosque" From Ground Zero?

The "Ground Zero Mosque" that we have been and will be hearing so much about is not exactly a mosque, nor is it at Ground Zero. Here's why: you can't see Ground Zero -- the former site of the World Trade Center -- from the future site of the Cordoba House.

From 45 Park Place, the former Burlington Coat Factory building that will make way for the Cordoba House, it's two blocks, around a corner, to get to the WTC site. Park Place doesn't lie between the construction site and any mass transit stations, so you would need to go out of your way to have it offend you.

If you look up the walking directions you'll notice that it takes a couple of minutes to walk the distance (approximately a tenth of a mile) between the two spots. Pretty much two minutes exactly when I took the trip with a shaky video camera. Here's the clip, first sped up to 4X speed then slowed down to 1X:

When the new World Trade Center rises, you'll be able to see it from 45 Park Place, because it'll be by far the tallest thing around. The planned Cordoba House will be dwarfed. It certainly won't overlook or overshadow Ground Zero.

Why is the distance between the two sites so important? Simple accuracy, for one. It's frustrating to see so many commentators blithely disregard an obvious, physical problem with the "mosque at Ground Zero" formulation: it's not at Ground Zero.

Clyde Haberman of the New York Times further explains the significance:

There's that "at." For a two-letter word, it packs quite a wallop. It has been tossed around in a manner both cavalier and disingenuous, with an intention by some to inflame passions. Nobody, regardless of political leanings, would tolerate a mosque at ground zero. "Near" is not the same, as anyone who paid attention back in the fourth grade should know.

I understand the journalist's impulse to use the "Ground Zero Mosque" shorthand to instantly remind readers why they should care about the story. Headlines leave out qualifiers like "near" all the time for brevity's sake. But in this case the elision is critical; leaving out the "near" clearly takes sides -- against the "mosque" and against accuracy.

In addition, the building planned for 45 Park Place is a cultural center with a prayer room -- not a single-purpose house of worship for Muslims, which is probably what we should reserve the word "mosque" for. As Haberman also explains, "That it may even be called a mosque is debatable. It is designed as a multi-use complex with a space set aside for prayer -- no minarets, no muezzin calls to prayer blaring onto Park Place."

The 92nd Street Y, on which the Cordoba House is explicitly modeled, has a whole host of Jewish events take place inside of it, but no one calls it a synagogue. There's no good reason why Cordoba House should be misleadingly called a "mosque." I've been guilty of using this word too, in conversation and in writing, but it's inaccurate. Muslims already read the Quran and pray at 45 Park Place, but that does not and will not turn it into a "mosque."

There's one more catch for the opponents of the so-called Ground Zero mosque: by the same logical leap you can call the Cordoba Center a "mosque," you can also call Ground Zero as it already exists a giant, open-air mosque. Muslim prayers are already taking place right on the edge of the construction site, and not for world domination. Families are going there to pray -- for the souls of the dozens of innocent Muslim victims who died on September 11.

New York Slams Ignorant, Opportunistic Republican Bigots -- Republicans Stand For The Worst In America, the Rotten Bottom of the Barrel

From The New Yorker -- August 16, 2010:

By Hendrik Hertzberg

A couple of weeks before the last election, the Republican nominees for President and Vice-President granted a joint interview to Brian Williams, of NBC. “Governor,” he asked, turning to the distaff half of the ticket, “what is an élite? Who is a member of the élite?” Sarah Palin replied, “Anyone who thinks that they are, I guess, better than anyone else—that’s my definition of élitism.” “It’s not geography?” Williams pursued. “Of course not,” she said. The ticket’s other half blinked and smiled a tight smile. John McCain had something to say.

MCCAIN: I know where a lot of them live.
WILLIAMS: Where’s that?
MCCAIN: Well, in our nation’s capital and New York City. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived there.

These élitists, he went on to explain, “think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.”

It was nice of Palin not to go all geographical on us back then. She has forgotten her patron’s admonition about Americans letting other Americans decide for themselves, but at least she says please, or its Twitter equivalent. In a follow-up to her quickly famous, quickly removed “pls refudiate” tweet, she tweeted, “Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.” Sic, sic, sic.

Ah, the “Ground Zero mosque.” Well, for a start, it won’t be at Ground Zero. It’ll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it will not be visible), in a neighborhood ajumble with restaurants, shops (electronics, porn, you name it), churches, office cubes, and the rest of the New York mishmash. Park51, as it is to be called, will have a large Islamic “prayer room,” which presumably qualifies as a mosque. But the rest of the building will be devoted to classrooms, an auditorium, galleries, a restaurant, a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001, and a swimming pool and gym. Its sponsors envision something like the 92nd Street Y—a Y.M.I.A., you might say, open to all, including persons of the C. and H. persuasions.

Like many New Yorkers, the people in charge of Park51, a married couple, are from somewhere else—he from Kuwait, she from Kashmir. Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Columbia grad. He has been the imam of a mosque in Tribeca for close to thirty years. He is the author of a book called “What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America.” He is a vice-chair of the Interfaith Center of New York. “My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists,” he wrote recently—in the Daily News, no less. He denounces terrorism in general and the 9/11 attacks in particular, often and at length. The F.B.I. tapped him to conduct “sensitivity training” for agents and cops. His wife, Daisy Khan, runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with him. It promotes “cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange.”

Pretty scary. Leading the pack of scaredy-cats, along with Palin, was her fellow Presidential mentionee Newt Gingrich, a leading intellectual light of the Republican Party. According to Gingrich, Park51 is “an assertion of Islamist triumphalism,” part of “an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.” Those who think it’s O.K. are “apologists for radical Islamist hypocrisy” who “argue that we have to allow the construction of this mosque in order to prove America’s commitment to religious liberty.” Gingrich argues for proving our devotion to religious liberty by taking it hostage: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”

Not all the project’s opponents have embraced the Gingrichian apocalypse. Most, like Palin, have appealed to hurt feelings—“especially the anguish of the families and friends of those who were killed on September 11, 2001,” in the words of a statement issued by the Anti-Defamation League, the venerable Jewish civil-rights organization, which (disgracefully, and in opposition to local Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan and the U.J.A.-Federation of New York) takes the Palin line. There are many 9/11 families who feel differently, and just as strongly. Defending the A.D.L.’s position, its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, reflexively likened the families—the anti-Park51 ones, that is—to Holocaust survivors: “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.” No doubt. But, as a guide to public policy, anguish is hardly better than bigotry. Nor is it an entitlement to abandon rationality itself.

Where the “Ground Zero mosque” is concerned, opposition is roughly proportional to distance, even in New York. According to a recent poll, Manhattanites are mostly for it, Staten Islanders mostly against. Community Board No. 1 endorsed it, twenty-nine to one. That’s the council that represents a corner of Manhattan that includes both Park51 and the 9/11 site—and us, too, in the not too distant future. The New Yorker is set to move from 4 Times Square to 1 World Trade Center, once it gets built. Opinion here is divided, depending on whether one’s subway ride will be longer or shorter. No one has a problem with Park51.

Last Tuesday, after the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, in a unanimous vote, gave Park51 a green light, Mayor Michael Bloomberg celebrated the occasion with a speech that, in its gruff eloquence, will be remembered as a high point in his distinguished tenure. “We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors,” he said:

"That’s life. And it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11."

That should have been the end of it, but it isn’t. The midterm elections loom. Locally, partisanship—Republican partisanship, to be specific—trumps propinquity. The two leading Republican candidates for governor of New York have made the “Ground Zero mosque” an issue, urged on by Rudy Giuliani, the ex-mayor, and by George Pataki, the ex-governor. Nationally, opposition to Park51 is rapidly becoming a matter of Republican discipline and conservative orthodoxy. By the end of last week, John McCain had joined his former running mate’s chorus. (“Obviously my opinion is that I’m opposed to it.”)

In a famous letter—the one that holds that the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens”—George Washington offered a benediction:

May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

Lower Manhattan is a little short on vines and fig trees nowadays, though there are some excellent wine bars. Washington’s point remains. His letter was addressed to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. But, as he knew, Muslims are Abraham’s children, too. By the McCain standard, George Washington was a three-time loser: as President, he lived in New York City; the nation’s capital bears his name; and, even by the standards of his time, he was an élitist. Nevertheless: he was right.

The New York Times Tells Republican Prejudice Spewers to Go Shove It

New York Times Editorial -- August 16, 2010:

The Constitution and the Mosque

President Obama showed his understanding of the Constitution, and his respect for the American people, last week when he defended the right of a Muslim community group to build a mosque and Islamic center two blocks north of ground zero in
Mr. Obama’s words at a White House dinner celebrating the Muslim holy month of Ramadan were simple and forceful. “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country,” he said.

Republican ideologues, predictably, used his statement as one more excuse not only to attack the president but to spew more of their intolerant rhetoric.

Newt Gingrich, who has been beating this drum for weeks, accused the president of “pandering to radical Islam” and said the mosque would be a symbol of Muslim “triumphalism.” We were hesitant about repeating those comments here. But the country ignores such cynicism and ugliness at its own peril. Make no mistake, the rest of the world is listening.

Like President George W. Bush before him, President Obama warned against linking all followers of Islam to terrorists. “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam — it is a gross distortion of Islam,” he rightly said. It is our tolerance of others, he said, “that quintessentially American creed,” that stands in contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001.

We wish he hadn’t diluted the message the next day, telling reporters that he wasn’t commenting on “the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.”

He would have done better if he had explained the wisdom of going ahead with the project, which developers said is intended to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together. In addition to a place of worship, it would have a pool and performing arts center. They also have said they want the board to include members from other faiths — a promise they should take care to keep.

Too many Republican leaders are determined to whip up as much false controversy and anguish as they can, right through November. Some Democrats will cave. We were disturbed on Monday when a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said that Mr. Reid “thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.”

Mr. Obama and all people of conscience need to push back hard. Defending all Americans’ right to worship — and their right to build places to worship — is fundamental to who we are.

Republican Pandering to Ignorance and Prejudice About Muslims Cripples Our National Security

The New York Times -- August 16, 2010:

The Muslims in the Middle

By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.

Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors.

Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion.

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.

While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.

This was only the latest in a series of assaults against Pakistan’s Sufis. In May, Peeru’s Cafe in Lahore, a cultural center where I had recently performed with a troupe of Sufi musicians, was bombed in the middle of its annual festival. An important site in a tribal area of the northwest — the tomb of Haji Sahib of Turangzai, a Sufi persecuted under British colonial rule for his social work — has been forcibly turned into a Taliban headquarters. Two shrines near Peshawar, the mausoleum of Bahadar Baba and the shrine of Abu Saeed Baba, have been destroyed by rocket fire.

Symbolically, however, the most devastating Taliban attack occurred last spring at the shrine of the 17th-century poet-saint Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass in northwest Pakistan. For centuries, the complex has been a place for musicians and poets to gather, and Rahman Baba’s Sufi verses had long made him the national poet of the Pashtuns living on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “I am a lover, and I deal in love,” wrote the saint. “Sow flowers,/ so your surroundings become a garden./ Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet./ We are all one body./ Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.”

THEN, about a decade ago, a Saudi-financed religious school, or madrasa, was built at the end of the path leading to the shrine. Soon its students took it upon themselves to halt what they see as the un-Islamic practices of Rahman Baba’s admirers. When I last visited it in 2003, the shrine-keeper, Tila Mohammed, described how young students were coming regularly to complain that his shrine was a center of idolatry and immorality.

“My family have been singing here for generations,” he told me. “But now these madrasa students come and tell us that what we do is wrong. They tell women to stay at home. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they just encounter more problems.”

Then, one morning in early March 2009, a group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn and placed dynamite packages around the squinches supporting the shrine’s dome. In the ensuing explosion, the mausoleum was destroyed, but at least nobody was killed. The Pakistani Taliban quickly took credit, blaming the shrine’s administrators for allowing women to pray and seek healing there.

The good news is that Sufis, though mild, are also resilient. While the Wahhabis have become dominant in northern Pakistan ever since we chose to finance their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, things are different in Sindh Province in southern Pakistan. Sufis are putting up a strong resistance on behalf of the pluralist, composite culture that emerged in the course of a thousand years of cohabitation between Hinduism and Islam.

Last year, when I visited a shrine of the saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in the town of Sehwan, I was astonished by the strength and the openness of the feelings against those puritan mullahs who criticize as heresy all homage to Sufi saints.

“I feel that it is my duty to protect both the Sufi saints, just as they have protected me,” one woman told me. “Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is heresy. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the prophet.”

There are many like her; indeed, until recently Sufism was the dominant form of Islam in South Asia. And her point of view shows why the West would do well to view Sufis as natural allies against the extremists. A 2007 study by the RAND Corporation found that Sufis’ open, intellectual interpretation of Islam makes them ideal “partners in the effort to combat Islamist extremism.”

Sufism is an entirely indigenous, deeply rooted resistance movement against violent Islamic radicalism. Whether it can be harnessed to a political end is not clear. But the least we can do is to encourage the Sufis in our own societies. Men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should be embraced as vital allies, and we should have only contempt for those who, through ignorance or political calculation, attempt to conflate them with the extremists.

Republican Ignorance Explosion

From The Washington Post -- August 17, 2010:

Republicans pander over 'Ground Zero mosque'

By Eugene Robinson

Lies, distortions, jingoism, xenophobia -- another day, another campaign issue that Republicans can use to bash President Obama and the Democrats. First it was illegal immigration. Now it's the so-called Ground Zero mosque, which is not at all what its opponents claim.

First, it's not at Ground Zero. The site in question is two blocks north of the former World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan; an existing mosque is just a few hundred feet more distant from the site of the collapsed towers. Second, while the planned building would indeed house a place of worship, it is designed to be more of a community center along the lines of a YMCA. Plans include a fitness center, swimming pool, basketball court, bookstore, performing arts center and food court. Kebabs do not threaten our way of life.

Most important, organizers have made clear that the whole point of the project is to provide a high-profile platform for mainstream, moderate Islam -- and to stridently reject the warped, radical, jihadist worldview that produced the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.

"It will have a real community feel, to celebrate the pluralism in the United States, as well as in the Islamic religion," Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said in May as she argued for permission to build the center. "It will also serve as a major platform for amplifying the silent voice of the majority of Muslims who have nothing to do with extremist ideologies. It will counter the extremist momentum."

Actually, it will take much more than one community center to stop radical jihad in its tracks. But it's hard to think of a better way to give extremist ideology a major boost than to demonstrate what far too many of the world's 1 billion Muslims already believe is true: that the West rejects not just extremism but Islam itself.

"Three hundred of the victims [of the Sept. 11 attacks] were Muslim," Khan told CNN. "We are Americans, too. The 9/11 tragedy hurt everybody, including the Muslim community. We are all in this together, and together we have to fight against extremism and terrorism."

President Obama was correct to say Friday that Muslims "have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in the country," and that this "includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances." Obama's remarks came at a White House dinner marking Ramadan, the Islamic holy month.

The first White House observance of Ramadan was hosted in 1805 by Thomas Jefferson. He invited the Tunisian ambassador to the President's House for dinner and changed the time of the meal from the usual "half after three" to "precisely at sunset" so the envoy could comply with the Ramadan obligation to fast during daylight hours.

Jefferson's well-thumbed copy of the Koran is now in the Library of Congress. If the author of the Declaration of Independence were alive today, he would surely face censure from the big-mouthed, small-minded coterie of Republican presidential hopefuls.

Sarah Palin wrote on Twitter that the "Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts." Newt Gingrich wrote that "there should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia." Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said that the mosque would "degrade or disrespect" the site. Mike Huckabee asked whether supporters of the project believe "we can offend Americans and Christians, but not foreigners and Muslims." Mitt Romney is against it, too, citing "the wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda."

This is pandering -- and that goes for Harry Reid too. A CNN poll showed that 68 percent of Americans opposed a plan by "a group of Muslims in the U.S." to build "a mosque" two blocks from the World Trade Center site. I wonder what the results might look like if pollsters had phrased the question differently -- if they had asked, say, whether "a group of Americans" should be allowed to build "a center promoting moderate, peaceful Islam." It might be, though, that most people would oppose the project however the issue was framed.

And that's why we have a Bill of Rights that protects our freedoms against the whims of public opinion. Jefferson understood this. A bunch of opportunistic politicians -- who love to quote him -- obviously do not.

The GOP: Grand Old Panderers to Prejudice

From The Washington Post -- August 17, 2010:

Obama muddles his mosque message

By Richard Cohen

Last Friday, at the start of Ramadan, President Obama presided over the White House's annual iftar dinner and made some rather bland remarks about religious freedom. The context, of course, was the controversy over the proposed mosque in Lower Manhattan, which is not, as Obama insisted, about freedom of religion but about religious tolerance. And then, having once again gotten high praise for so very little, he went to bed a panicked man and reached, trembling, some hours later, for a political morning-after pill to take back some of what he had said. Whew, for a moment there he was pregnant with principle.

Grand Old Panderers and Moral Midgetry

No more. "I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there," Obama said in revising and extending and eviscerating his remarks of the previous night. He had merely been commenting on freedom of religion. Turns out he's for it.

The president muddled his message. Does he not grasp that questioning the "wisdom" of the mosque's placement is predicated on thinking that 9/11 was a Muslim crime? Does he not understand that the issue here is religious prejudice, not zoning? The answer, of course, is that he does. But unlike Henry Clay, he would rather be president than right.

The very ugly controversy over the planned Islamic center -- not at Ground Zero, mind you, and not even within eyeshot -- has managed to make fools or knaves out of some pretty smart people. Some of them have embarked on a fruitless hunt for the perfect analogy. The winner, as you might have imagined, goes to that evil cherub Newt Gingrich, formerly of Georgia but now of any meeting hall with a spotlight. He said approving the mosque "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust museum."

Gingrich keeps trying. Earlier he had argued that since there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia, "there should be no mosque near Ground Zero." But the mosque is not Saudi Arabian; it is Islamic, a distinction not all that hard to keep in mind. The comparison to a Nazi sign at the Holocaust museum is equally specious. Every Nazi was dedicated to the persecution and/or murder of all Jews. This is not the case with Islam and the attack on the World Trade Center. That attack was conducted by a handful of fanatics, not an entire religion.

Others have joined in the false analogy contests. The most surprising is Charles Krauthammer, my longtime colleague on The Post's op-ed page. In a belabored analogy, he said that while "no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up at Pearl Harbor would be offensive." Yes, indeed. But all of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States. It was not a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai, but an attack by a nation. You can look that up.

Krauthammer, though, could not be stopped. He likened the mosque to a "commercial tower over Gettysburg," then to the attempt to establish a convent outside of Auschwitz and, inevitably, to "a German cultural center at, say, Treblinka." Enough said. We all have bad days.

If it is not false analogies that pollute this debate, it is false populism. The people are opposed. John Boehner, the House minority leader, says so, and so does Rep. Peter King, the Long Island Loud Mouth who is clearly running for something. They are right -- but so what? Would they have liked Lincoln to have deferred to popular sentiment in the South regarding slavery? Would they have liked Truman to have polled the Army about desegregation? Minority rights are embedded in our Constitution. It was the perceived lack of them that caused the states to seek some immediate amendments, what we now call the Bill of Rights. King, Boehner and the rest of the GOP mob are showing a fearless willingness to pander to majority prejudice. Newt has mounted a crusade against radical Islam. No Saracen will be safe.

The inclination to go from the particular to the general -- to blame a people for the acts of a few -- is what has always fueled pogroms and race riots. History shows that it is a natural tendency and it will literally run riot if not controlled. It is the solemn obligation of elected leaders to restrain such an urge -- to be moral as well as political leaders. Obama almost pulled that off, but he flinched.

Yes, he couldn't.

Youth Is Wasted On the Young --and Common Sense Is Wasted on Conservatives

From The Washington Post -- August 16, 2010:

Obama's Mosque Duty

By Michael Gerson

President Obama has a peculiar talent for enraging his critics while deflating the enthusiasm of his friends, on full display in the Manhattan mosque controversy.

His first intervention, at a White House dinner for Ramadan on Friday, was an unqualified defense of both religious liberty and religious tolerance, implying that opposition to a mosque near Ground Zero violated both. In his second intervention, in an unplanned exchange with a reporter on Saturday, he insisted that he was not commenting "on the wisdom" of building the mosque, merely affirming the right to a construction permit. It was not a contradiction, but it was a marked change in tone. Obama managed to collect all the political damage for taking an unpopular stand without gaining credit for political courage.

But being hapless does not make the president wrong.

Though columnists are loath to admit it, there is a difference between being a commentator and being president. Pundits have every right to raise questions about the construction of an Islamic center near Ground Zero. Where is the funding coming from? What are the motives of its supporters? Is the symbolism insensitive?

But the view from the Oval Office differs from the view from a keyboard. A president does not merely have opinions; he has duties to the Constitution and to the citizens he serves -- including millions of Muslim citizens. His primary concern is not the sifting of sensitivities but the protection of the American people and the vindication of their rights.

By this standard, Obama had no choice but the general path he took. No president, of any party or ideology, could tell millions of Americans that their sacred building desecrates American holy ground. This would understandably be taken as a presidential assault on the deepest beliefs of his fellow citizens. It would be an unprecedented act of sectarianism, alienating an entire faith tradition from the American experiment. If a church or synagogue can be built on a commercial street in Lower Manhattan, declaring a mosque off-limits would officially equate Islam with violence and terrorism. No president would consider making such a statement. And those commentators who urge the president to do so fundamentally misunderstand the presidency itself.

An inclusive rhetoric toward Islam is sometimes dismissed as mere political correctness. Having spent some time crafting such rhetoric for a president, I can attest that it is actually a matter of national interest. It is appropriate -- in my view, required -- for a president to draw a clear line between "us" and "them" in the global conflict with Muslim militants. I wish Obama would do it with more vigor. But it matters greatly where that line is drawn. The militants hope, above all else, to provoke conflict between the West and Islam -- to graft their totalitarian political manias onto a broader movement of Muslim solidarity. America hopes to draw a line that isolates the politically violent and those who tolerate political violence -- creating solidarity with Muslim opponents and victims of radicalism.

How precisely is our cause served by treating the construction of a non-radical mosque in Lower Manhattan as the functional equivalent of defiling a grave? It assumes a civilizational conflict instead of defusing it. Symbolism is indeed important in the war against terrorism. But a mosque that rejects radicalism is not a symbol of the enemy's victory; it is a prerequisite for our own.

The federal government has a response to American mosques taken over by advocates of violence. It investigates them, freezes their assets and charges their leaders. It does not urge zoning decisions that express a general discomfort with Islam itself.

Here again, this debate illustrates a gap in perspective. A commentator can speak with obvious sincerity of preventing American hallowed ground from being overshadowed by a mosque. A president not only serves Muslim citizens, not only commands Muslims in the American military, but also leads a coalition that includes Iraqi and Afghan Muslims who risk death each day fighting Islamic radicalism at our side. How could he possibly tell them that their place of worship inherently symbolizes the triumph of terror?

There are many reasons to criticize Obama's late, vacillating response to the Manhattan mosque, and perhaps even to criticize this particular mosque. But those who want a president to assert that any mosque would defile the neighborhood near Ground Zero are asking him to undermine the war on terrorism. A war on Islam would make a war on terrorism impossible.

President Obama Believes in the United States Constitution -- Republicans Don't!

From Politico -- August 15, 2010:

GOP keeps mosque flap alive

Polling indicates that the mosque proposal is unpopular among voters, with a recent CNN survey showing that 68 percent of voters disapproving of the plan. But a top White House official told POLITICO Obama was determined to raise the issue, even though he knew polls were decisively against the mosque.

“We had no illusions about this. He didn't take this on as a political strategy. He took it on because it was a matter of fundamental principle. One of the reasons we work for him is that he doesn’t sit there with a political calculator on these big, tough issues that come along. There was never any hesitation about the decision, and he has absolutely no regrets about it,” the official said.

“He understands the emotions swirling around it and the horrific events that occurred there. But he doesn’t believe shifting from our moorings as a country on questions like religious freedom -- treating one faith differently than another -- is the right answer. It would be a betrayal of who we are.”

Other Democrats making the talk show rounds on Sunday defended the president’s comments on the principle of First Amendment rights, and criticized Republicans for double-talk on constitutional issues.

DNC Chairman Tim Kaine on CBS’s “Face the Nation” criticized Republicans for not doing enough to defend the Constitution — on the mosque issue as well as with the recently popularized movement to repeal or re-write the 14th Amendment.

“We see an awful lot of Republicans going out and saying we gotta respect the Constitution — and that means we gotta respect it. We can’t tarnish people’s First Amendment rights,” Kaine said.

A Perfect Storm for the GOP ("The Us Vs. Them" Party") -- Ignorance, ScapeGoating, RaceBaiting, Fear-Mongering -- Who Could Ask For Anything More?

From Politico -- August 15, 2010:

GOP takes harsher stance toward Islam

The Republican response to Obama's speech marks a shift in the party's posture toward Islam.

By BEN SMITH & MAGGIE HABERMAN |

The harsh Republican response to President Barack Obama's defense of a mosque near ground zero marks a dramatic shift in the party's posture toward Islam — from a once active courtship of Muslim voters to a very public tolerance after Sept. 11 to an openly aired sense of mistrust.

Republican leaders have largely abandoned former President George W. Bush's post-Sept. 11 rhetorical embrace of American Muslims and his insistence — always controversial inside the party — that Islam is a religion of peace. This weekend, former Bush aides were among the very few Republicans siding with Obama, as many of the party's leaders have moved toward more vocal denunciations of Islam's role in violence abroad and suspicion of its place at home.

The shift plays to a hostility toward Islam among many Republican voters, and it fits with traditional Republican attacks on Democratic weakness on security policy.

"Bush went against the grain of his own constituency," said Allen Roth, a political aide to conservative billionaire Ron Lauder and, independently, a key organizer of the fight against the mosque. "This is part of an underlying set of security issues that could play a significant role in the elections this November."

Obama's remarks provide a clear, national focus for the simmering question of Islam in American life, and Republicans showed every sign Saturday of beginning to capitalize on it, with Republican candidates in New York and Florida seeking to inject the issue into local races as Democrats largely held their silence.

That stance in the GOP — both in terms of political strategy and policy views — appears to be carrying the day. Most of the potential Republican presidential hopefuls, led by Sarah Palin, came out sharply against the mosque.

And while most of its opponents note that they aren't opposing Islam, just this project, Republican attempts to build bridges with Muslims are few and far between — although some say that's because early post-Sept. 11 efforts were met with deep resistance. Republicans have stopped winning the Muslim votes they once split with Democrats, and largely stopped seeking them.

The spectrum ranges from silence on the issue to politicians and groups, like Keep America Safe, led by Liz Cheney and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, gearing up to engage the battle over the mosque and the basket of other issues involving the Obama administration's relationship with Muslims at home and abroad.

"The president supports a mosque at ground zero led by a man who blamed America for 9/11, his top intelligence official preaches the true meaning of jihad, and his attorney general can't even say the words 'radical Islam,'" said Michael Goldfarb, an adviser to Keep America Safe. "You start to worry they don't understand who the enemy is, and so Republicans might understandably feel like they have to spell it out for them."

Obama, meanwhile, only fed Republicans' eagerness to engage the issue with remarks Saturday morning that appeared to narrow his broader embrace of Islam in America to a defense of the legal right to build a mosque, though his office later issued a third statement saying he hadn't backed off his original remarks.

Muslim leaders say, regretfully, that they also see a dramatic change.

Republicans have "shifted completely away from the Bush administration line on relations with Islam and they've obviously made the political calculation that bashing Islam and Muslims is a winning issue for them," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who blamed the "tea party movement [for] liberating the inner bigot in people."

The shift has various causes. One is simply the freedom of opposition. "The stronger imperative for Bush's stance was geopolitical," said former Bush speechwriter David Frum, referring to the Bush administration's reliance on Islamic allies for the prosecution of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now Republicans are liberated to say what many think, and what many of their supporters want to hear.

But the attacks on what is now nationally known as the "Ground Zero mosque" — it is a few blocks north of the site — also stand in for a broader turn in the cultural politics of the right, in which some of the social issues that served as the emotional core of candidates' appeals have lost their power. A recent CNN poll showing that 68 percent of Americans oppose the construction of the mosque also found that about half think there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. No political genius is required to decide which issue to run on.

The debate over the mosque's locale had been brewing in the crucible of the New York tabloids for parts of the spring, then died down. Then came an attempted car bombing in New York's Times Square, by a confessed suspect who'd said he planned mass deaths as vengeance for Muslims in the two wars being waged by the United States in the Mideast, which recalled for many residents the constant sense of edginess and fear the Sept. 11 attacks inspired.

New York's beleaguered Republicans, seeing an opening, have seized and driven the mosque issue, and Roth and other mainstream figures have worked to insulate it from more radical anti-Islamic voices, like blogger Pamela Geller, who might marginalize the cause.

Leading New York Republicans acknowledge a shift from the Bush years, but say Muslim leaders, not Republicans, are to blame.

"George Bush made every attempt to reach out," said Rep. Pete King, a leading critic of the mosque project. "The Muslim community did not reciprocate, did not respond. After Sept. 11, some of them became entrenched and really didn't know how to cope.

"Somehow the leadership in the community does not impel them forward to be more part of the community. That's my reading of it," said King, who also noted that sensitivities involving the site are far deeper, and more real, than many are willing to recognize beyond the boundaries of New York.

Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles Burlingame was the pilot of the jetliner that crashed into the Pentagon and who serves on the board of Keep America Safe, agreed that there is an emotional component but rejected the notion that the mosque issue is a "feelings" concept instead of part of a larger debate about different cultures and how the U.S. should engage with Muslim culture within the country.

"I do ascribe to the 'clash of civilizations' theory now," said Burlingame, who has been among the main voices questioning the funding behind the proposed mosque, and the intents of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind it. She said, as she did after Obama's speech, that many Muslims have practiced peacefully in the U.S. before and after the attacks, but that Rauf has made statements supporting radical elements of Islam, and that the location was chosen to be provocative.

She criticized those, mostly led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who are defending the project under freedom of religion, saying, "That's a Western concept."

"This is a different model," she said, arguing that in the United States people "for generations had been raised on this concept of separation of church and state, and that you don't trash someone because of their religion ... but that's not what we're dealing with here."

"I think the challenge for us is enlisting the Muslims who have already bought into the American program and not adjusting" to Muslim culture, she added. For Burlingame, the issue is not political — she said she objects to the content as well as the form of efforts by Bloomberg and others to push back because the goal is "to shut you up."

"We're talking to the wrong people," said New York City firefighter Tim Brown, a survivor of the attacks who has worked with Burlingame. He suggested that "radical" Muslims are being recognized in the United States as part of the religious dialogue, as in the case of the mosque. "Whoever made this decision and whoever set us on this path, and I don't care if it's the Bush administration or whoever, it's the wrong path."

Whatever the cause of the shift, the end of the Bush-era outreach aligns with the views of much of the Republican base. A Pew poll found last year that 55 percent of conservative Republicans believe Islam encourages violence.

The pre-Sept. 11 Republican Party actively courted Muslim voters in key states like Michigan. An energetic effort to lead the socially conservative, relatively affluent community into the GOP was led by power broker Grover Norquist — who didn't respond to a request to talk about Republicans and Muslims. But it failed, and the present-day Republican Party has more or less given them up for those lost and alienated by American policies in the Middle East and — as Republicans see it — misled by their own leaders into ambiguous public positions.

"The leading members of that community have not settled inside the Republican Party, and so their voice is lesser," said Frum.

Bush is hardly remembered fondly by Muslim Americans, many of whom blame him for a wave of detentions and deportations immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks and for conflict with Muslims abroad. But a less-remembered element of his legacy is the battle he fought within the Republican Party on Islam's behalf.

By the day after the attacks, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer recalled, Bush had expressed his intense concern at the possibility of a backlash against American Muslims, and his aides had begun discussing "the need to balance getting America ready for war against the people who carried out the attacks without infringing on Muslims' right to practice their religion."

On September 17, 2001, Bush visited Washington's Islamic Center with a simple message: "Islam is peace."

Those words didn't sit well with key segments of the Republican base, including some Christian leaders. In June 2002, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention suggested that the God of Muslims would "turn you into a terrorist that'll try to bomb people and take the lives of thousands and thousands of people."

Fleischer took public exception to the statement on Bush's behalf.

"It's something that the president definitely disagrees with. Islam is a religion of peace, that's what the president believes," he said.

Today, Fleischer says he thinks the mosque's organizers would be more sensible to go elsewhere, but that the GOP risks taking too hard a line on Islam as the 2012 elections approach.

"The real issue is going to be the rhetoric of presidential candidates in '11 and '12, and whether they try to strike a balance or whether is it much more vitriolic," he said. "We are at war with radical Islam; we are not at war with Muslims writ large, and we have to find that right balance."

Other former Bush aides backed President Obama's defense of the mosque. Former Bush consultant Mark McKinnon called Obama's Friday remarks an example of "bold and decisive leadership."

"An enormously complex and emotional issue — but ultimately the right thing to do. A president is president for every citizen, including every Muslim citizen," said former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. "Obama is correct that the way to marginalize radicalism is to respect the best traditions of Islam and protect the religious liberty of Muslim Americans. It is radicals who imagine an American war on Islam. But our conflict is with the radicals alone."

Among the first conservative groups gunning for the ground zero mosque was the National Republican Trust PAC, whose television ad two broadcast networks refused to air on the grounds that it seemed to tie the organizers of the community center, without evidence, to the planners of the terror attacks.

But it became a hit on YouTube, and combined with the complaints of New York politicians and some conservative bloggers, the project became a national issue.

"Once we brought this issue to the American people, the politicians were falling all over each other to get out in front of it," said Scott Wheeler, the group's executive director.

The GOP's likely presidential candidates drew a spectrum of shades of opposition but not a single one sided with Bloomberg in backing the mosque on the grounds of private property and religious freedom.

"Ground zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts," wrote Palin on July 18, calling on "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" it.

"There should be no mosque near ground zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia," wrote former House Speaker Newt Gingrich a day later.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, though he represents a relatively heavily Muslim state, rebuffed pleas from local Muslim leaders to back off his suggestion that the mosque would "degrade and disrespect" the Trade Center site. A spokesman for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney cited both "the wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda" in opposing it.

But it was former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee who seemed to fit the issue most clearly into a recognizable political category of culture war.

"Is it just that we can offend Americans and Christians, but not foreigners and Muslims?" he asked.

Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Osama Bin Laden Stand United as Allies on this Mosque

From The New York Daily News -- August 15, 2010:

It's an emotional issue, but blocking the Ground Zero mosque is just what the terrorists want

By MICHAEL DALY

As I stood at the planned site of the mosque near Ground Zero Saturday morning, I remembered nights laughing at a big round table in Zinno's restaurant, a newspaper guy with five friends from the Fire Department, the finest, bravest and most fun people I ever knew.

I could see them all, intensely alive in the way of the FDNY's very best, Mychal Judge, Pat Brown, Terry Hatton, Dennis Mojica and Tim Brown.

All save Tim were killed on 9/11. Tim was a brother to Pat not by blood, but spirit, as he was to the four others.

Tim and Terry embraced just before Terry headed up into the north tower. Tim went to the south tower, where he saved lives and somehow escaped with his own.

Since then, Tim has retired from the FDNY, but continued to be a brother to his comrades, honoring their memory and doing whatever he possibly could for their families.

With the truest of hearts and the protectiveness of a brother, he has remained suspicious of those planning to build the mosque near Ground Zero. He has asked why they want to put it there and where the money is coming from. He has not been satisfied with the answers.

After the city Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the project, Tim filed a lawsuit to stop it. He remains one of the leading voices in opposition.

How I wish I did not so strongly disagree with him and agree with our mayor and now our President.

Nobody could sway me more than Tim when it comes to Ground Zero. But I cannot help feeling that if we block this mosque we will not only be doing what Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh want, we will also be doing exactly what Osama Bin Laden wants.

On the day it murdered Mychal and Pat and Terry and Dennis and so many others, Al Qaeda was looking to hijack more than jetliners. The killers' ultimate goal was and is hijacking Islam itself. And to do that they need us to make them into more than what they are.

Without us elevating them into enemy combatants in a war on terror, they would be just a couple of hundred murderous losers.

Even now, after all our mistakes, after we let Bin Laden slip away in Afghanistan and lost our focus going into Iraq, Al Qaeda is still more a gang than an army.

It is still so small that its new operations chief, Adnan Shukrijumah, met personally with the knuckleheads who planned to bomb the subway last September.

When the previous operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was captured, he was not surrounded by a host of terrorists. He had nary a bodyguard when he was rousted from bed in his underwear at the house where he was hiding out like what he was, a murderer on the run.

We have since built him into a figure of such awesome evil that we are afraid to try him in downtown Manhattan like what he is, a murderer who has been caught.

We have glorified Al Qaeda in the same way, but to reach its ultimate goal, it still needs us to convince the majority of Muslims that the war on terror is really a war on Islam.

We are only helping the bad guys if we declare that the religious freedom at the core of our democracy does not apply to a mosque too close to Ground Zero.

Maybe it is my own anger at the murder of my friends that gives me such a visceral reaction against doing what it seems clear the killers want us to do.

The feeling is so strong that it now puts me on opposite sides with the only other survivor of the grand round table that had no sides at all.

Saturday, on the morning after Obama chose Ramadan to voice support for the mosque's right to be there, I stood at the site and noted a Y-shaped standpipe extending from a closed coat emporium that is slated for demolition.

"SIAMESE CONNECTION FOR FIRE DEPARTMENT," a small sign read.

The new mosque will also have such a standpipe and should a fire ever break out there, the FDNY will no doubt be just as quick to charge inside to save lives of whatever faith as it was on that fateful day two blocks south.

I thought of calling Tim to talk about the mosque, but all I ever want to tell him is that I love him.