It’s election season, and like clockwork the wedge issue appears. Pick an unpopular group and stir up potential voters with the prospect of their doing something dreadful. Even Republicans are starting to shy away from using marriage between same-sex couples as the bogey–maybe the number of supporters, even within the party, is just rising too fast–so this year’s scapegoat is Muslims.
The New York Times quotes Elliott Maynard (Republican candidate for Congress in West Virginia) as saying, “Ground zero is hallowed ground to Americans” (GOP Seizes Mosque Issue Ahead of Elections). And Newt Gingrich said on Fox, “We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There’s no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.” Do you see the sneaky little move they’ve made there? Muslims are equated with a foreign country at war with the United States.
Which is exactly the bigotry being tapped: the myth that Muslims aren’t Americans. Even the ones who live and worship in New York; even the ones killed at the World Trade Center because they worked there or were trying to rescue others who did.
Maynard again: “Do you think the Muslims would allow a Jewish temple or Christian church to be built in Mecca?” I don’t know whether there are synagogues or churches in Mecca; I doubt it, because the Saudi government, which, unlike Islam as a whole, controls what does and does not happen in Mecca, does not allow religious freedom.
Well, we do, despite our support for our ally Saudi Arabia being so knee-jerk that our response to its apparent sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks was to attack a different country. And to suggest, as Maynard has done, that the mass murder of 2000 Americans makes a spot ground sacred only to Jews and Christians is not only an offense against religious freedom, it’s an offense against Judaism and Christianity.
Some Americans feel that that spot has been hallowed by the tragedy that struck there; some don’t. I’m one of the ones who do; I’m sure some of the New Yorkers who are Muslim do also. What an insult to them to say that my worship is welcome near there but theirs is not. When we play the “real Americans” game, real people get hurt.
Sermons in Stones 
8 comments
Comments feed for this article
August 22, 2010 at 9:57 pm
Dan
You write: “And Newt Gingrich said on Fox, ‘We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.’…”
For what it’s worth, I just went to Google Maps, and found that Pearl Harbor has several Japanese Buddhist Temples around it.
Also for what it’s worth, in my home town of Concord, Massachusetts, there has long been a monument at the Old North Bridge for the British soldiers who lost their lives there on April 19, 1775.
LikeLike
August 23, 2010 at 4:38 am
Bill Baar
How do you feel about a “Trophy Mosque” if that’s in fact what this turns ou to be? Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid wrote in Asharq AlSwat wrote,
“What the US citizens do not understand is that the battle against the 11 September terrorists is a Muslim battle, and not theirs, and this battle still is ablaze in more than 20 Muslim countries. Some Muslims will consider that building a mosque on this site immortalizes and commemorates what was done by the terrorists who committed their crime in the name of Islam. I do not think that the majority of Muslims want to build a symbol or a worship place that tomorrow might become a place about which the terrorists and their Muslim followers boast, and which will become a shrine for Islam haters whose aim is to turn the public opinion against Islam. This is what has started to happen now; they claim that there is a mosque being built over the corpses of 3,000 killed US citizens, who were buried alive by people chanting God is great, which is the same call that will be heard from the mosque.”
“It is the wrong battle, because originally there was no mosque in order to rebuild it, and there are no practicing Muslims who want a place in which to worship.”
A Trophy Mosque and a target for Muslim Haters on top, is probably something the world better off without at the moment. Imam Rauf may have the right, but this Center a really bad idea.
LikeLike
August 23, 2010 at 9:14 am
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
@Dan: And why not? I’m not crazy about Gingrich’s premise, either, but I thought I’d just fight on one front at a time. Accepting the idea that it’s a little soon to have rapprochement between the enemy sides (I bet the plaque for the British didn’t appear as early as 1784), the point is that to complete his analogy, he should have said “…so Al Qaeda shouldn’t be allowed to build a site there.” I would endorse that.
@Bill: What do you suppose they make of the fact that Muslims continue to have a place of prayer in the Pentagon, as they did before 9/11? Do they crow? Let them crow. We have a different worldview than they do (thanks be), and what they may think of as stomping on corpses, some of us see as a declaration that our way of life continues. What’s the alternative? Whether a government official tried to block it or people censored themselves, it would be a case of declaring, like Gingrich and Maynard and Reid and the rest are trying to do, that US Muslims did not suffer the losses of 9/11 along with us non-Muslims–that they’re second-class and even somehow responsible for the tragedy.
By the way, of course it would be inappropriate to put a mosque on the site itself. Or a church, for that matter, given how rapidly our government started throwing around toxic terms like “Crusade.” (An interreligious center, now that would be nice.)
LikeLike
August 23, 2010 at 9:49 am
Susan Zucker
Hooray!
LikeLike
August 23, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Bill Baar
@Amy, I’m afraid I miss your point on what “They” think. I worked in Baghdad’s Green Zone and my office had a Mosque set aside for Muslim coworkers to use. People did their prayers outside when we were getting shelled (March 2008 was a bad month in the IZ for that.) The UU blogosphere in a dither over the Cordoba Center but it’s awfully ambivilent about sharing the risks of getting killed with a Shia or Secular Muslim in a fight against Radicalism. We seem to practice low risk confrontations now against an Islamaphobia in the United States thar doesn’t exist. Purely symbolic protests in Phonix.. Rev Morales complaining about delay’s in getting to the men’s room in Jail. Geez, we’re really becoming a lame sounding faith. Laughing stocks…
LikeLike
August 23, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Bill Baar
PS I mean praying outside when we were NOT getting shelled.
LikeLike
August 23, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
@Bill, I was referring to Al-Rashid’s concern that it will be “a place about which the terrorists and their Muslim followers boast.” No doubt they do, but I don’t think their response is a good basis on which to make our decisions.
I’m afraid I see Islamophobia as a real phenomenon, Exhibit A being the quotes I mentioned in my original post, which do not make any sense if you assume that some Americans are Muslim. I would say it is bigoted to treat several million US citizens as if they are an enemy force by virtue of their religion.
For another example, this video about anti-Muslim bigotry has some heartening news, yet the number of people who cheered the bigot is disturbing and certainly enough to make me feel that Islamophobia is a problem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbQWxHIn4U
And of course, there is the double standard that says Muslims must all answer for the act of any Muslim, while applying no such rule to members of other religions. Sarah Palin asks “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the mosque. Well, peaceful Muslims, devoted to interfaith work and seeking to create something like a YMCA or JCC in their neighborhood, PROPOSED the mosque. It seems that from some people’s point of view, the only acceptable thing for a Muslim to do post-9/11 is sit down and shut up (and stop praying in public, wearing a hijab, or doing anything else that would make others aware that they’re in the presence of a Muslim). Compare the number of people who responded to the conviction of a Baptist minister (finally, in 2005) for the murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner by demanding that other Baptists publicly repudiate him. Were there any?* And no one has suggested that it is insensitive for Baptists to keep building churches in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
*Christopher Hitchens, maybe. He may be the only person consistent enough to hold ALL religious people responsible for any crimes even remotely inspired by religion. And now I’m writing footnotes to my comments, which tells me I’m spending way too much time on this . . .
LikeLike
August 23, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
@Bill, and I agree our action for justice as a movement is way too tame.
LikeLike