New York City's Landmark Preservation Commission voted unanimously not to landmark the building in the spot where the Cordoba Initiative wants to construct an Islamic community center, often erroneously referred to as the "Ground Zero Mosque." The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the center will contain a memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks, but this is unlikely to quiet opponents of the project, who are either committed to the notion that all Muslims are responsible for the deeds of al-Qaeda or are desperate to use Islamophobic bigotry as a fundraising tool or political football. The vote clears the way for the project to be built, short of some drastic form of state intervention.
When you think about it, it's rather remarkable that this controversy has become a national story. Republicans spend a great deal of time attacking the residents of New York City for not being "real Americans" while waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 whenever it's convenient. Imam Faisal Rauf, the religious leader whose Cordoba Initiative is spearheading the project, has a reputation as a moderate whose work has been focused on reconciling what it means to be an American Muslim. Nevertheless, Republicans smeared him as a terrorist sympathizer and the project as a "beachhead" for "fanatics" to "plan and advance their strategies" for Islamist domination.
In fact, there was little possibility that Republicans would be able to stop the project through legal means, but that didn't stop them from throwing the First Amendment out the window. What made the campaign against the project so alarming was that Republicans were opposing its construction on principle, the principle being that American Muslims are simply not entitled to the same freedoms as Americans of other faiths. It's not just that they're betraying the first principles laid out in the Constitution; they're betraying their own -- the party of "small government" demanding the government intervene and define the limits of where it is appropriate for Americans to worship. And all ostensibly because some people might be offended by the presence of a Muslim religious space near Ground Zero, despite the fact that one already exists. If you scoured every liberal arts college in America, you could not find a group of people more committed to political correctness over individual rights than those opposing the Park 51 project.
What's frightening is how consistently this single, tribalist principle -- constitutional rights only apply to a narrow, arbitrarily defined set of "real Americans" -- has been applied by the Cheneyist right: It's torture when they do it, not when we do it; no one arbitrarily identified as an "enemy" has any right to due process; and anyone who disagrees with the right-wing approach to national security is sympathetic to, if not directly in league with, the enemy.
All these assaults on religious freedom, due process, and common decency are all supposedly deployed in defense of Western civilization. Yet they could hardly show more contempt for the first principles they claim to defend, or more admiration for the despotic practices they claim to oppose, than by calling on Americans to imitate them.
