In a New York Times op-ed today, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero, pledged that the project would go forward, that it would include input of leaders from other faiths, and that he would be transparent about its financing. He also praised New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama for their "support" of the center and placed the project's construction within the context of the fight against terrorism:
President Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg both spoke out in support of our project. As I traveled overseas, I saw firsthand how their words and actions made a tremendous impact on the Muslim street and on Muslim leaders. It was striking: a Christian president and a Jewish mayor of New York supporting the rights of Muslims. Their statements sent a powerful message about what America stands for, and will be remembered as a milestone in improving American-Muslim relations.
The wonderful outpouring of support for our right to build this community center from across the social, religious and political spectrum seriously undermines the ability of anti-American radicals to recruit young, impressionable Muslims by falsely claiming that America persecutes Muslims for their faith. These efforts by radicals at distortion endanger our national security and the personal security of Americans worldwide. This is why Americans must not back away from completion of this project. If we do, we cede the discourse and, essentially, our future to radicals on both sides. The paradigm of a clash between the West and the Muslim world will continue, as it has in recent decades at terrible cost. It is a paradigm we must shift.
I suppose the first thing that comes to mind is that the president wasn't quite as supportive as he seemed at first -- although opponents of the project, who threatened to use multiple layers of local and federal government to block the project, also weren't as clear on the "right" of the Cordoba Initiative to proceed as they claim to be now. Rauf also offered an implicit challenge to those planning on protesting the Park51 project on 9/11, saying, "Let us commemorate the anniversary of 9/11 by pausing to reflect and meditate and tone down the vitriol and rhetoric that serves only to strengthen the radicals and weaken our friends’ belief in our values."
Rauf's framing of the conflict as one between tolerance and extremism is likely to irritate his detractors even more, but it's long been clear that Rauf's intellectual project, attempting to reconcile being a Muslim with being an American, has been undertaken with an eye toward reducing violent religious extremism. Rauf told Spencer Ackerman in 2004 that "if I read something like [Harvard Professor Samuel] Huntington, who posits a clash between the West and Islam, it's very easy for a certain number of individuals to start internalizing that identity." Whether or not Rauf has within his ability to meaningfully affect the fight against extremism is beside the point -- it's been obvious for some time that this man, who has spent the last few months being accused of being a terrorist, sees his role as countering religious radicalism.
That said, it's unclear to me, given the obstacles Rauf currently faces, that the project will be built. I could see someone reading the above op-ed as naive given the circumstances, but the tone strikes me as fairly savvy politically -- the last thing you want to do when accused of being a terrorist is get angry about it.
