On the Mosque, Good Citizenship, Not Moral One-Upmanship
President Obama's conflicting comments on the mosque are illuminative, because many people are deliberately distorting the arguments of those, such as myself, who oppose using legal or regulatory gimmicks to stop the construction but suggest instead that an appeal to good citizenship might persuade the imam to find a better location on his own. It seems to me that this approach -- which does not presume that the imam is a radical Muslim (though he has said at least one troubling thing suggesting U.S. policy invited 9/11) -- is an approach that treats the imam and his congregation as fellow Americans.
Over at Commonweal, this line of argument is dismissed, along with the analogy of Pope John Paul II moving the convent at Auschwitz when Jews protested. The author points out how the pope accommodated fully expressions of Islam, even when it was inconvenient -- and cites an example involving the pope at Manger Square in Bethlehem. Of course he doesn't realize that entirely makes the point: Can we not ask an imam who says his desire is to build bridges to show a similar accommodation and sensitivity? Or is this just a one-way street, where we cannot address Muslims as fellow Americans and equals and neighbors? Do people not realize how condescending it is to start out with the premise that a Muslim-American could not possibly show the kind of accommodation and good sense that, say, John Paul did? That the grace of John Paul's actions were that they were voluntary?
Certainly there are people who want the law to stop this mosque, and others who want it linked to, say, a church going up in Saudi Arabia. But to pretend that this is the only argument -- that people want to take away the right to build a mosque -- is really less about trying to find a civil way out of a contentious issue than about parading one's own moral superiority.
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Jun '10
Re: On the Mosque, Good Citizenship, Not Moral One-Upmanship
I don't know if there's any straightforward legal method that can stop the mosque now, probably not, but I bristle when apologists for the mosque, like Mike Bloomberg, say that allowing a mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero will teach the World about the power of our Constitution. I don't buy that for a minute. People (around the World) judge things like this according to their own social and political norms, the rules they live under, and what they'll take away is, America got rolled, again. United Chumps of America.
Jun '10
Re: On the Mosque, Good Citizenship, Not Moral One-Upmanship
CNN International is running Muslim Week. The cake today went to their report on Codoba Spain. Just a whitewash in the worst way, Good Islam, bad Spanish.
I don't know what gene or implant the left has in finding good in any attack on the West, but I would love to find it...
Jul '10
Re: On the Mosque, Good Citizenship, Not Moral One-Upmanship
I have enormous respect for Bill McGurn, but I think his own great decency blinds him to the fact that most Muslims - or at least most leaders in the Muslim community - are not interested in being "good citizens" of the United States. They are citizens of the world-wide Islamic community, which takes precedence over the fact that they are domiciled in the U.S.
In 2002, my wife was enrolled in a post-doctoral medical specialty program at Penn. No Middle-eastern students had been admitted to this wildly-expensive program in living memory, but that year, making a stand for "tolerance", Penn admitted 4 students from Jordan and Saudi Arabia with generous scholarships. I happened to chat with them at a gathering. To a man, they frankly expressed hatred for the U.S.
When I asked what they planned to do upon graduating, they all answered that they planned to marry an American Muslim woman and settle here.