WSJ EDITORIAL: THE MOSQUE OF MISUNDERSTANDING…..SEE NOTE PLEASE
NO…THE WSJ EDITORIAL IS DEAD WRONG……FEISAL SHOULD NOT BUILD A MOSQUE, ESPECIALLY A MOSQUE WITH THE SYMBOLIC NAME OF MOSLEM CONQUEST ANYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES…..IT’S THE IMAM AS WELL AS THE LOCATION…..RSK
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423243201956002.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
How fraught is the debate over the proposed Ground Zero mosque? Even President Obama can’t seem to decide, or at least to say clearly, what he thinks about it.
First, at a White House dinner in honor of Ramadan on Friday, the President gave an unqualified defense of building the mosque on religious freedom grounds. Then a day later he said he was only backing the “right” to build the mosque, not the wisdom of doing so near such a politically sensitive site. On the latter, he is apparently taking no view.
So in the name of reducing religious tensions and reaching out to the Muslim world, Mr. Obama has managed to elevate the debate into a global spectacle and rile up everyone further. He has also tossed the issue into the center of an already hot election season. In this he is only following the entire arc of this needless and destructive controversy, in which a mosque supposedly being built to promote interfaith understanding has instead fostered ill feelings as raw as at any time since 9/11.
Like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Mr. Obama is of course correct about the right to build a mosque. There’s nothing relative about the Constitutional protections afforded to expressions of religious freedom on private property. The government has no right to stop imam Feisal Abdul Rauf from developing the abandoned Burlington Coat Factory at 51 Park Place into a 13-story complex of classrooms, auditoriums and a mosque under the name of Cordoba House. Even opponents of the mosque concede this point.
But the objection here is not about the right to religious free expression. It is about the prudence—and some would say effrontery—of seeking to build a symbol of Islamic faith at the doorstep of a site where terrorists invoking the name of Islam killed 3,000 Americans.
These wounds are still raw, and Mr. Rauf has done a poor job in addressing them. On paper, Mr. Rauf, a Kuwaiti-born cleric who came to the U.S. in his teens, is an unlikely rabble-rouser. Over three decades, he has denounced terrorism and anti-Semitism, attended “peace seders,” and preached democracy and human rights for the Muslim world. His congregation is diverse, bringing together black, Asian and Arab Muslims in lower Manhattan. The FBI once hired him to teach agents about Islam.
Mr. Rauf also seems to have given some thought to the place of Muslims in a free society. His 2004 book “What’s Right With Islam”—the paperback version adds the clause, “is What’s Right with America,” to the title—argues that Islam’s core teachings are compatible with American democracy. “We have the chance to create here a new Muslim identity, to modernize the theology,” he told the French weekly L’Express in 2003. “America is an opportunity for Islam.”
But these sentiments have been drowned out by other comments by Mr. Rauf that have been amplified in the tumult of recent weeks. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Rauf told CBS that “the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”
Earlier this summer, asked whether he agreed with the State Department’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization, Mr. Rauf demurred. “I’m not a politician,” he said. “The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” We don’t know the content of Mr. Rauf’s heart, but he would have done better to disarm the opposition if he were clearer in saying that terrorism is never justified.
Mr. Rauf also hasn’t been clear about the sources of the $100 million or so needed to build the Cordoba House project. If it truly wishes to become an Islamic cultural institution akin to the 92nd Street Y, Cordoba House needs to build the confidence of the public. Reports of money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas around the world don’t inspire confidence in the mosque’s peaceful bona fides.
This debate is especially unfortunate because it is feeding into the view among some Americans that Islam as a whole is irredeemable. Opposition in some American cities is growing to the construction of any new mosques, which really would be a violation of what the U.S. Constitution was written to protect.
Going down this road also makes the war on Islamic radicals that much harder to win. That war is taking place within Islam as much as it is between the West and the radicals. President George W. Bush was right, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to make this crucial distinction between Islam and those who would pervert its teachings.
The West can’t triumph unless the silent majority of Muslims, too often prone to passivity and prevarication, stands up to the violent fundamentalists in their midst. As important, Islam can undermine al Qaeda and its offshoots if its believers see that they can thrive in open and pluralistic democracies, being tolerated as well as being tolerant.
But such tolerance and sensitivity go both ways. Mr. Rauf’s insistence in building his mosque at Ground Zero reveals an obstinacy that suggests a desire to make a political, as much as a religious, statement. Other Manhattan sites were and are available for such a project.
As our colleague William McGurn has noted, Pope John Paul II once asked the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He did so out of respect for what that site represented to Jews around the world. It was an act of ecumenical good faith.
If Mr. Rauf truly wants to assist the cause of interfaith understanding, he’ll build Cordoba House somewhere else.
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