Here’s how Allahpundit sums up recent opinion polling among New York City residents on the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” project showing among other things that respondents claim a more positive opinion of Muslims than they do of the project:
It’s not that the City is suspicious of mosques generally… it’s that it’s suspicious of a mosque there, which has been the objection all along. And with good reason. So much for healing.
Yes, we know that “the objection” was prompted by the proposed siting “there,” but a significant and loud group of hardcore opponents make it clear in post after post, comment after comment, protest after op-ed after TV interview, that “suspicious of a mosque there” is inextricably linked to “suspicious of mosques generally”- and, furthermore, that “suspicious” is self-serving blogger’s eyewash for what those opponents believe and proclaim.
Unless there were some strange reason to expect an Islamic cultural center to oppose Islam, why wouldn’t you expect self-identifying Islamophobes among respondents to be smaller in number than (a subset of) the group of all those who oppose the project? Such a result says nothing about “the objection.” It merely tells us, predictably, how some of those who object, including some bloggers if less so their friends, allies, and community, prefer to see themselves.
The “good reason” link goes to Allahpundit’s own post about Cordoba Initiative founder’s Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s tenuous connections to the Gaza Flotilla (reply here). Why such connections would provide “good reason” for any particular attitude toward building an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero is something that Allahpundit doesn’t bother to explain: We’re left to assume that people who contribute to groups that contribute to groups that sponsor actions of which someone strongly disapproves should be barred from the national community… which last, by my calculations, would be reduced to those people who were never involved in politics. Ever.
Also absent is any connection between the preceding discussion and Allahpundit’s closing dismissal of “healing.” The word-link goes to an op-ed by Bret Stephens from the end of May proposing questions to Rauf. Are we simply to presume that there are no answers? Possibly in Creatorpundit’s grim universe, where freedom of worship and expression apparently hangs on opinion polls, where the existence of a wound is obviously an argument against healing efforts, and where a therapy that does not heal before it has been applied is deemed ineffective.
Maybe a blogger who didn’t just make his name as a blaspheming atheist, but literally made his name for the specific purpose of comical anti-Islamic blasphemy, is in a poor position to judge the significance of Islamophobia – ahem, of “being suspicious of mosques generally” – in the apparent majority opposition of New York City (but not Manhattan borough) residents to the Cordoba House project. Maybe if Allahpundit carefully reviewed the comments under his own post, under all of his posts on this and any related subject, he’d reflect on what the politics of the obvious gets you: comment threads that read more like selected excerpts from far right chain e-mails than like discussions, in which the closest thing to a dissenting view has to come from someone who also seems to believe that one third of New Yorkers are “hardcore leftists who celebrated the [9/11] attacks.”
Maybe the commenter is joking about that, but, if it’s not obvious, then isn’t that obviously bad enough? And maybe Allahpundit is happy with the reaction he gets at his site. I don’t find it obvious that he isn’t.
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Unless we amend the Constitution,I cannot envision a prohibition on building a Mosque anywhere that any other religious organization would be allowed to build anything (based on local Zoning/Building codes) that would not be judged unconstitutional by SCOTUS.