WSJ Editorial: The Mosque of Misunderstanding
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...
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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...