It’s really remarkable how, after trying to get the landmark commission to order the former Burlington Coat Factory building preserved so the Cordoba Initiative wouldn’t be able to build their community center there, opponents of the project have begun pretending they never had any intention of using government to stop the project from being built. Here’s Joe Conason buying this nonsense from Pam Geller, who recently took the position that “”It’s up to the imam to withdraw the mosque. I don’t think the government should stop it.” Right. And she’s going to keep accusing Rauf of being a terrorist until that happens.
So Geller doesn’t think that government should stop the project, and her nemesis Obama doesn’t think that government should stop the project. As an activist and blogger, Geller is exercising her First Amendment right to make noise, hoping that the sponsors will change the location. Her attempt to intimidate them and to stigmatize all Muslims is highly obnoxious but protected speech.
Yes, now that it’s become clear that 60% of Americans think that the Cordoba Initiative has the right to build whatever it wants but an equal or large number still think it’s a bad idea, opponents are saying they don’t want the government to step in. But Geller spent the past few weeks arguing that the former Burlington Coat Factory was a historical landmark because it was an “Italian Renaissance, palazzo-style,” building that had been hit by debris during the 9/11 attacks, and therefore should be preserved by the city’s landmark commission, which would prevent the community center from being built.
Yet the historical significance of the property is clear: the famous architect Daniel D. Badger designed the building. A number of his buildings have already been given landmark status. The New York Times obituary of Badger from Nov. 19, 1884 called him “the pioneer of this country in the use of iron for building purposes.”
More importantly, this building has special historical significance because of 9/11. It was part of the attack. The landing gear from one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center towers fell onto the Burlington Coat Factory building, through the roof to the basement. The fact that the commission ignores that fact is outrageous, and disrespects the victims of 9/11.
Geller could be seen in some of the b-roll footage taken by the networks screaming “shame on you” at the commission after they voted unanimously not to landmark the building just to prevent Muslims from building something there. Jay Sekulow‘s religious right group, the American Center for Law and Justice, sued to try to overturn the landmark commission’s decision, frankly admitting they wouldn’t be doing so if the proposed project was a Church.
Both Republican gubernatorial candidates, Rick Lazio and Carl Paladino, supported the effort to landmark the building so that the Cordoba Initiative couldn’t use it. Such efforts are in fact, completely contrary to federal law, which places strict restrictions on the ability of the government to block the construction of religious sites through zoning laws. Lazio has promised to appoint people to the Public Service Commission that would block the project. Newt Gingrich explicitly said the Cordoba Initative didn’t have “the right” to proceed with the project, anymore than Nazis had a right to set up shop near the Holocaust Museum. Calls for “investigations” of the project’s funding by Congressional Republicans like Peter King were mere thinly veiled threats to intimidate the builders out of continuing with the project, especially since the backers have been public about the fact that the fundraising campaign hasn’t even begun yet.
What’s happened is that opponents of the community center were willing to use any means to stop it from being built, even if that meant using the government. But now that they’ve managed to gin up the kind of outrage that might be enough to stop the project, they’ve begun arguing that they’re not actually arguing against the legal right to build the project.
Meanwhile, as Wendy Kaminer notes, “A right denied formally by the government or informally by a virtual mob is still a right denied. ” We would hardly be as comfortable with the distinction between government and private coercion if this were an anti-Semitic mob protesting a synagogue rather than an Islamophobic one protesting an Islamic community center. This excuse is mostly an effort to rationalize a national freakout over a local zoning dispute because Muslims are involved.
Conason was snookered. But no one else should be.
