As the debate over the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero wears on, those who supported government intervention to prevent the building from being built have started to employ this rhetorical device that the Weekly Standard's William Kristol used two days ago on Fox News (via Nexis):
[Obama] should say the truth, which is decent Muslims are appalled by this. This isn't helping Muslim relations in the United States. It's terribly damaging to them. He should say to his imam if you care all about comedy[sic] and decency in the U.S., build this mosque elsewhere.
Kristol isn't the first person to invoke "decent Muslims" whose decency is predicated on their opposition to religious freedom for other Muslims. Sarah Palin memorably asked "peaceful Muslims" to "refudiate" the project, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said that opposition to the community center "will not and should not insult any decent Muslim because decent Muslims should be as opposed to Islamic extremism as you and I are.” By this definition, "Islamic extremist" is a label that applies to the kind of Imam who helps the FBI reach out to the American Muslim community after 9/11 and says "[f]anaticism and terrorism have no place in Islam."
This is, of course, a rhetorical strategy for legitimizing opposition to religious freedom for a particular group by implying consent from the "reputable" members of said group. If "decent Muslims" would agree to have their right to worship curtailed by the government, then it stands to reason that those who would claim the same rights as Americans of any other faith are "indecent" and potentially extremists. Kristol gives Faisal Rauf an out -- stop the project and you're not an extremist -- which should be cold comfort for Rauf given that Kristol spent last weekend saying that the funding for the project had "terror related connections." If it were true, that would actually be a crime, which should give you an indication of how capricious and arbitrary the accusations coming from conservative pundits really are.
This isn't, as Scott Lemieux implied, the same thing as Dixiecrats convincing themselves they had obtained the consent of black people in imposing Jim Crow segregation. That was a product of centuries of myth-making, a desperate attempt to preserve one's sense of being human while exhibiting inhuman brutality against others. By contrast, the "decent Muslims" talk is just spin, as poorly veiled but not as sincerely held.
But look, here's the point: If Kristol's "decent Muslims" exist, there aren't many of them. And they couldn't possibly have any influence on Muslims who have read the Constitution, and therefore got the idea that they have the same rights as everyone else. Pretending to have the consent of "decent Muslims" doesn't change the fundamental principles at stake here, nor does it hide the fact that conservatives are demanding government intervene in the project not because of terrorism, not because of extremism, but because the builders happen to be Muslims. Even if opponents of the project produced a Muslim who met their decency standards, it's not as though American Muslims could collectively abdicate their rights to self-determination through a set of conservative-friendly spokespeople.
