Bret Stephens: The Mosque at Ground Zero
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
The conservative blogosphere is buzzing with outrage over plans to build a 13-story mosque and Muslim cultural center just a few hundred feet from Ground Zero. As a resident of lower Manhattan, I see it differently: The center—to be known as Cordoba House and built (if it is ever built) at a cost of $100 million—might yet serve as an excellent test case for tolerance.
Muslim tolerance, that is.
That, at least, is how the concept is being advertised by Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Kuwaiti-born imam whose brainchild this is. "We see it as a major step toward the Americanization of the Muslim community," Mr. Rauf told members of the financial district's community board, which approved the project unanimously less than a week after the attempted Times Square bombing. His wife, Daisy Khan, who runs an outfit called the American Society for Muslim Advancement, adds that "it's going to be a place not only for Muslim activity, but interfaith activity of the highest order."
Opponents of the center insist that Mr. Rauf's image as a moderate is a sham. In the American Thinker, an online magazine, Madeleine Brooks reports that in a recent sermon she personally heard Mr. Rauf "deny that Muslims perpetrated 9/11," though she doesn't quote him directly. Alyssa Lappen of Pajamas Media website notes that the imam has urged the U.S. to allow "religious communities more leeway to judge among themselves according to their own laws," which in his case means Shariah law. There's also a question of how Mr. Rauf's Cordoba Initiative, which in 2008 had assets of $18,255 according to its IRS tax filing, plans to raise $100 million.
Opponents also argue that building the center so close to Ground Zero is an insult to the memory of the victims of 9/11. Germany has spent six decades in conspicuous and mainly sincere atonement for Nazi crimes. But it surely has no plans to showcase the tolerant society it has become by building a cultural center down the road from Auschwitz. Japan is no doubt equally disinclined to finance a Shinto shrine in the vicinity of the Pearl Harbor memorial.
But discretion does not seem to be part of Mr. Rauf's playbook: He is nothing if not American in his penchant for publicity-seeking. He also seems to know exactly how to play to the great conceit of modern American liberalism, which constantly seeks opportunities to congratulate itself for its superior capacity for tolerance. Apparently it did not occur to the members of the community board who so eagerly green-lighted Cordoba House to suggest to Mr. Rauf that the $100 million might be better spent building centers of "interfaith activity" in Riyadh, Islamabad and Kuwait City...
Read entire article at WSJ
The conservative blogosphere is buzzing with outrage over plans to build a 13-story mosque and Muslim cultural center just a few hundred feet from Ground Zero. As a resident of lower Manhattan, I see it differently: The center—to be known as Cordoba House and built (if it is ever built) at a cost of $100 million—might yet serve as an excellent test case for tolerance.
Muslim tolerance, that is.
That, at least, is how the concept is being advertised by Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Kuwaiti-born imam whose brainchild this is. "We see it as a major step toward the Americanization of the Muslim community," Mr. Rauf told members of the financial district's community board, which approved the project unanimously less than a week after the attempted Times Square bombing. His wife, Daisy Khan, who runs an outfit called the American Society for Muslim Advancement, adds that "it's going to be a place not only for Muslim activity, but interfaith activity of the highest order."
Opponents of the center insist that Mr. Rauf's image as a moderate is a sham. In the American Thinker, an online magazine, Madeleine Brooks reports that in a recent sermon she personally heard Mr. Rauf "deny that Muslims perpetrated 9/11," though she doesn't quote him directly. Alyssa Lappen of Pajamas Media website notes that the imam has urged the U.S. to allow "religious communities more leeway to judge among themselves according to their own laws," which in his case means Shariah law. There's also a question of how Mr. Rauf's Cordoba Initiative, which in 2008 had assets of $18,255 according to its IRS tax filing, plans to raise $100 million.
Opponents also argue that building the center so close to Ground Zero is an insult to the memory of the victims of 9/11. Germany has spent six decades in conspicuous and mainly sincere atonement for Nazi crimes. But it surely has no plans to showcase the tolerant society it has become by building a cultural center down the road from Auschwitz. Japan is no doubt equally disinclined to finance a Shinto shrine in the vicinity of the Pearl Harbor memorial.
But discretion does not seem to be part of Mr. Rauf's playbook: He is nothing if not American in his penchant for publicity-seeking. He also seems to know exactly how to play to the great conceit of modern American liberalism, which constantly seeks opportunities to congratulate itself for its superior capacity for tolerance. Apparently it did not occur to the members of the community board who so eagerly green-lighted Cordoba House to suggest to Mr. Rauf that the $100 million might be better spent building centers of "interfaith activity" in Riyadh, Islamabad and Kuwait City...