Obama endorses Manhattan mosque
We will escape the topic of the ‘mosque row’ eventually, I tell you, but for now must stop in to report that after a period of careful silence on the issue, US President Barack Obama has strongly endorsed the construction of Cordoba House, a community center and mosque planned for Park Place in lower Manhattan, two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The BBC News reports:
Mr Obama acknowledged “sensitivities” surround the 9/11 site, but said Muslims have the same right to practise their religion “as anyone else”.
“Our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable,” Mr Obama said.
Since a New York developer announced plans to build a 13-storey Islamic community centre and mosque about two blocks from the former World Trade Center site, prominent Republican politicians and a host of conservative pundits have attacked the project.
Some relatives of people killed in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 are also opposed to the plan. . .
. . .[Obama] told the group of US Congressmen, government officials and foreign dignitaries that America’s tradition of religious tolerance distinguishes it from “our enemies”.
“Al-Qaeda’s cause is not Islam,” he said, “it is a gross distortion of Islam”.
The President’s defense of the project has been hailed by those who understand the symbolic significance of such an endeavor, which reaches back to the foundations of the United States as a diverse, intercultural nation built upon religious and ideological freedom.
But it will fuel further dissent among those who can only view a mosque in lower Manhattan as an “Islamic triumphalism,” to quote former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, or a “stab in the heart,” as former Republican Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin labeled it—those who do not understand or refuse to acknowledge the clear, gaping difference between extremist acts of terrorism and a largely peaceful global religion.
If the actual ‘Ground Zero’ site were being transformed into a replica of the Qa’aba, we might have a serious issue to discuss. But the construction of an interfaith community center several blocks away—in what is after all one of the most diverse and thriving communities in the United States—is hardly more than cannon fodder for conservative polemics bent on galvanizing the nation’s overwrought Right.
H O M E ▪ A b o u t ▪ W h e r e is A s p h o d e l?
