Greg Sargent on the "responsible" argument against the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero:
The only way to see this as a provocative act is to buy into the notion that the building of a center devoted to Islamic heritage is, by accident or by design, tantamount to rubbing the victims' noses into what happened on 9/11 -- that it is inescapably a "victory mosque." To believe this is to legitimize -- wittingly or not -- the world view of the center's bigoted foes.
In fact, it is not legitimate to see the building of a center devoted to the study of Islam near Ground Zero as an inherently provocative act. You can't endorse the idea that it's provocative to study the heritage of Islam in the vicinity of Ground Zero while simultaneously arguing that the bigots are wrong to conflate the 9/11 attacks with Islam as a whole. Period. It's not a coherent or sustainable argument.
Despite the notion that the presence of Muslims near Ground Zero is uniquely offensive, we've seen a broad xenophobic backlash against Muslims nationwide. If opponents of the Park 51 project were truly committed to religious freedom and equality and merely offended by the presence of a Muslim religious building in this particular context, they'd be pairing their criticism of the project with categorical rejections of the attacks on Muslims for building mosques and community centers that are taking place all over the country. But they're not, because they're not opposed to a building; they're opposed to what they see as a "stealth Islamist" subversion of the United States, a framework under which any observant Muslim is a potential fifth columnist. If fewer mosques means fewer Muslims, then they're OK with it, even if the means is deeply illiberal.
As usual, the unrestrained id of the Islamophobic right, Andy McCarthy, explains the thinking:
Most of the American people are in a much different place. They see Islamists advancing, they are beginning to grasp that Islamists (not just terrorists but the whole Islamist movement) mean to change us in very fundamental ways, and therefore they understand that every such advance is a defeat for freedom. Every advance emboldens a determined enemy to press ahead. Over time, we could be conquered in that our way of life would be drastically altered.
Of course terrorism has changed "us" in very fundamental ways. Between the gutting of due process for terrorism suspects, the endorsement of torture and a massive expansion of the surveillance state, we've seen one "defeat for freedom" after another, cheerfully abetted by people like McCarthy who possess a conditional commitment to the rule of law whenever Muslims are involved. Now they want to throw freedom of religion out the window as well, lest our commitment to our own ideals be seen by others as "weakness."
