What a perfect example of selective perception in action, by the way, in Jerome's little cracked history lesson. No matter what happens, it's Islam's fault, never mind that by that same rationale, Stalin's reign of terror was a product of Russian Orthodox Christianity. The Nazis were some kind of Christian phenomenon. The French Revolution and Napoleon were also Catholic I guess. World War I (except for the Turks): Another Christian production. I guess the Khmer Rouge were Buddhism's fault. Rwanda was another Catholic-Protestant production, like the world wars.

A pro-Islamist might claim that the Armenian genocide shows you what happens when Mohammedan rule finally breaks down, but there is no particular religious rationale in any of this at all, of course. It's just human beings doing what they do best.

@ Jerome:
Don't know for sure where you get your ideas, but you might want to keep on looking, since, in your desire to come up with The Dirt on Islam, you've now transformed the actions of the radically secularist Ataturk - so radically anti-Islamist that he installed a constitution allowing the military to step in if things diverged from secular rule - into a long-term conspiracy on behalf of the Superduper Caliphate of your nightmares. His design worked for 90 years, and is now being put to the test. Demographic pressure explains a lot of it, actually. But one way or another it won't represent a major expansion of Islamic influence. It may reflect a change in government or regime.

@ narciso:
Nope: A) There are no final points for Zombie Contentions (prior to heat death of universe or anyway end of humankind) and B) The question isn't "ignore or attend" - the question is what kind of attention, always has been. Every approach carries risks and trade-offs, including familiar bathwater/baby risks.

@ adam:
Now I'm confused about what your concern would be. Are you disassociating yourself from McCarthy/Geller/JEM/Jerome and their fears of a Shariah society, conquest of America, all Muslims presumed to be sleeper agents for worldwide violent Jihadism and burkas for the grandkids until proven otherwise?

As for intensifying animus toward Muslims, I think that's clearly the aim of McCarthy et al. Whether what we've seen so far is escalating animus or revealed animus is hard to say. Either way, the CI has already done a tremendous service to would-be designers of interfaith bridges by revealing just how wide and treacherous the raging river is at important points.

Without that animus, rational or not, there would be absolutely no reason to care about proximity to GZ. The opponents say "We associate Islam with 9/11" and so the Muslim presence is unwelcome in the environs. I don't see any other explanation for their position. Everything else is just a variation on it: "Well we should associate Islam with 9/11" or, at best, "These Muslims, whatever they say, have connections to people who bear arguably important similarities to people arguably like the people who did 9/11."

The last is, in a word, arguable. It still rests on guilt by association applied from a remove by people who wish to replace the judgments of those directly involved with their own judgments, and is far too weak to justify a gesture of total non-differentiated exclusion, which is what McCarthy et al are calling for, the obnoxiousness of their call further escalated by the emotionalism and demagoguery of Barber, Ace o Spades, Podhoretz, and even the superficially polite Dreher.

So you may personally, on the basis of your own examination of the currently available evidence, differ with me as to whether the CH is a good thing in itself, just as you and me or anyone might differ as to whether a new Jehovah's Witness center or Sikh Temple or Scientology Center or Catholic church is a good thing in the neighborhood, and may question whether belief in the imminent end of everything, infallibility of the Pope, etc., are at some level compatible with true adherence to liberal democracy under the Constitution. Under a commitment to tolerance we accept the abstract or arguable contradiction and the theoretical danger. We even accept proven risk - that, i.e., Skinhead rock-n-roll groups are more likely to beat up innocent people, that hard right Christian Identity groups are more likely to produce murderers and twisted kids, that tolerating Mormonism probably means that a fringe of polygamists will continue to operate, etc. Because the cost of blanket judgment and intolerance would be the destruction of the good society that's more important to us.

I also don't think we're in a position to judge how sincere, deep, clear etc. that commitment is until it's put to the test, and I'm fairly certain what grade we should hope to receive.

Jerome wrote:

And by the way, you are not going to get a rise out of an atheist like me by bashing Christianity, but you are welcome to keep trying.

Politicized atheism has rather a lot to account for as well.

@ adam:
Speaking of Spencer, last I heard from narc Spencer had vouched for Rauf. Maybe that's changed. And maybe that's irrelevant.

Again, I'm willing to discuss Cordoba House on its own terms, even though I don't consider the project, as I said, as more than potentially significant. What I object to and consider more significant are the assumptions and the mode of thinking applied by many opponents. Every time we rehearse these arguments, the opposition returns to the same thing: "I don't trust them 1) because they're Muslims and 2) because they appear to be associated (either directly or at various levels of removal) with people with whom I disagree or who frighten me."

The first point is, I believe, fundamentally and absolutely unacceptable in the United States, from the founding to the present day, and indisputably - according to our values and in the present circumstances according to our concrete interests as well.

The second point is debatable, but to whatever extent it relies upon or is tied to the first point - to the extent that acceding to whatever prudential, utilitarian, etc. concerns also comes to constitute a victory for prejudice - then the trade-offs regarding CH itself are skewed heavily in favor of the project, even before we examine the validity of arguments on either side. It becomes more and more essential for those who favor a free society and the American idea to swallow their perhaps legitimate concerns and support the CI's right to make their case - their freedom of speech, religion, assembly, movement, petition, self-determination, etc. - including by building a culture center on Park Place.

You are highly unlikely to prove that CH will be a threat to anyone's security - or any greater threat on balance than denying CH. The NYC Chief of Police is in a much better position to assess that issue in all relevant dimensions than you or I can be. The locals are in a much better position to assess the affront to community standards and sensibilities, and they have voted through their lawful representatives overwhelmingly in favor.

Left over are anti-Muslim zealots like Pamela Geller, our new friend Jerome, and our departing friend JEM, who are trying to convince the world that letting Rauf set up shop 10 blocks closer to GZ than in his current location significantly increases the odds that their grandchildren will be threatened with the burka, requiring acts of violence from their grandparents.

I strongly believe the opposite is true. In the meantime, the American tradition and American values strongly favors that ties at First Base, and even situations that fall far short of ties, go to the runner, to more speech and more freedom - even repugnant, if you find this repugnant, speech - not to less.

So proud we are of that insight, we plan to build a Tower in its name, someday to dwarf any 15-story, and even 50- and even 100-story buildings.

@ JEM:
Go in good health. Anyone who has bothered to inform himself with eyes open - who has examined the materials I have painstakingly assembled and analyzed in prior posts - knows exactly where the justification for my last statement comes from. As for anyone else who's ready to leap to conclusions and exclusions based on one-sided and parochial views on the other - there's no hope for discussion anyway.

adam wrote:

If someone tells me that I’d better watch what I say because I’m going to make someone angry (maybe not him, but someone else out there) and then: you’d better look out!–I will not speak further with that person, and I would warn others against it as well.

And that is exactly what you and others are requiring of the Cordoba Initiative. Better not keep that name "Cordoba" - it makes some people angry. Better not build your center in the Muslim exclusion zone we've created around Ground Zero - it makes some people angry. And so on. And then, true to your words I guess, if backwards, you propose a pre-emption of dialogue, the burning of the bridge at the moment you arrive at it, out of fear of the unexplored hinterlands that you know only by rumor and legend.

JEM wrote:

I think the moderate Muslim is under attack from groups like the one proposing to build the mosque near ground zero and when we try and validate them we hurt the moderate muslim who is trying to ignore the call to jihad.

That's really rich. The "moderate Muslim is under attack" from a group that proposes to build a culture center explicitly dedicated to interfaith communication and a rejection of Bin Ladenism. And the brave protectors of "moderate Muslims" are the non-Muslim conservatives who ceaselessly claim that all Muslims are directly and inextricably responsible for Bin Ladenism.

@ Jerome:

The Muslims deserve special treatment because
1 – there’s a lot of them.
2 – They’ve been selling the same schtick for a long time.
3 – They aren’t Catholics.

No. Muslims deserve the same treatment. Period. Regardless of what some Muslims did or how some Muslims interpret the Koran. Just like Catholics, white evangelical conservatives, Wiccans, and everybody else who rightly declines to take responsibility for anything in particular that someone else did "in their name." And until you get that, the only thing American about you is maybe where you or your parents were born.

And your twisted, reductive, and self-interested recitation of Islamic history is getting tiresome. It would be easy to indict Western civilization, Christianity, particular Christian sects, America, conservatives, in just the same way. People in fact do, and, when they do, people like you get self-righteously upset about the unfairness of it all. The only thing that gives any "exceptional" excuse to America/The West/Christianity is, or would be, our commitment to a better idea, the exact same idea that you're ready to junk.

"Skin in the game": 3000 people and two symbolic buildings were a tragedy, and a warning that we were right to heed, and that justified a response that treated it as something other than a one-off. Doesn't even begin to stack up next to what others of a mind to hold on to their hatreds could put on the big poker table.

@ narciso:
I mean - is it really so hard for you to see that you're doing the same thing to these people that, from the other side, turns Sarah Palin into a Young Earth Creationist abortion doctor-shooting racist birther?

adam wrote:

That’s just in the nature of the situation–we need to know whether Islamic representatives believe that suicide bombing is a justified means of war; whether they are ready to speak in defense of the rights of those who publicly renounce or “insult” Islam; whether they think democratic decision making can override Islamic law, etc.

Who's "we" and with a view to "what"? We as in the decision-makers charged with allowing a building to be sited are one thing. We as in private citizens are something else. "Entry fee" is an odd concept. You mean the fee before you let them enter your mind, or the jizya they pay before they're allowed to function as less-equal-than-other free citizens in our not-so-free society?

@ narciso:
It's an issue of you get to say whatever you want, too, indulge in whatever lines-and-dots stuff you want, but that doesn't give you the right to prior restraint, and in the meantime a bunch of Muslims-go-home nutjobs are bad for the conservative movement, bad for American interests, and just plain bad - unless you take the position that destroying the conservative movement and making Americans look like hypocrites is a good thing. In which case I think you may all be on the right track.

narciso wrote:

Lets not be thoeretical, how about the head of Bridges TV, that lopped off the head of his relatives, another Interfaith enterprise,
or the fellow who ran over another in Arizona, why is it almost all affiliated groups are either silent on this, or act like the Menendez
Bros defense team. I don’t know Zuhdi Jasser’s particular stance
on this, but he doesn’t cotton to Salafi intriguesm or Ali Ahmed
or a host of others.

No, "being theoretical" is necessary in the absence of comprehensive and objective data, and in the presence of heavily ideological and irresponsible attacks based on collective guilt, guilt by association, character assassination, ignorance, xenophobia, and raw emotion - an atmosphere, in short, of self-righteous bigotry, capable of doing lasting damage well beyond the success or failure of someone's project to build a cultural center on Park Place.

(I used to live within walking distance of Scientology's HQ, taller than 15 stories - which made it a "skyscraper" considering that it was in Hollywood, where, unlike Manhattan, there's not much of a skyline. One day my German girlfriend and I decided to check it out. We walked into the lobby, speakers blared an L Ron lecture, and a welcomer made a bee-line to us, immediately starting the big pitch. My German girlfriend handled all of the discussion while I pretended not to understand. Anyway, somehow, we emerged with our freedoms intact, and with an "enhanced understanding," or a somewhat more concrete one, of Scientology. Not a more positive one. Incredibly, large numbers of residents in the area had similar reactions - or maybe they found the Realization Fellowship of Yogananda, just next door, more appealing. Or the Methodist Church. Or the strip club.)

Jerome wrote:

CK, I am still waiting for you to explain to me why you think this thing called Islam is deserving of special consideration, while this thing called the Cosa Nostra is not.

I already answered that. See above. It's a religion of est. 1.5 billion people that's been around for 1300 years, and is exercised by millions of your fellow citizens peacefully. And even if it wasn't, even if it was just an assembly of people with beliefs you fear, why would this thing we can call right wing anti-Muslim conservatism not also be deserving of "special consideration"? Why shouldn't its practitioners be subjected to extra scrutiny? I seem to recall some bombings and shootings and numerous other anti-social and lethal acts, recently and going back decades, well-known to be associated with the outlooks common in those groups. Shouldn't we just assume that conservatives, especially white conservatives, especially white 2nd Amendment obsessive "pro-life" conservatives are a clear and present danger? Shouldn't we look through their literature and require that certain passages and statements that attack other groups in our society and paint them as sub-human or morally deficient, or call for violence and violation of rights, be expunged? Maybe we should start with people who compare a religion, which they understand only through what they've read on hate sites on the internet, to a criminal gang.

The proper comparison isn't the "Cosa Nostra." It's Catholicism.

@ adam:
Ask questions, fine - but your statement went further than "we can and should ask questions," it went to "levy a higher entry fee" to those groups (into civil society) because the trade-offs were better. I am saying absolutely not. That's completely unacceptable. Muslims, like everyone else, are 100% completely free, on a permanently level playing field, to form their own associations and compete in the marketplace of ideas on a 100% equal footing with every other association in our society, and anything else is the end of any possible equal dialogue, the end of the historical American commitment to a free society, a violation of core American values, the destruction of American democracy from within, and a much more serious blow against this country than 9/11 or 100 9/11s, and realization of the most fervent real world wish of Mohammed Atta - not to mention the confirmation of the anti-American propaganda and of widespread suspicions and beliefs about the real meaning of our supposed reverence for liberty.

And not just for Muslims. On a very practical-political level, when Pamela Geller gets on CNN and self-righteously confirms her particular brand of bigotry, she simultaneously reinforces the images of those crazy conservatives who can't stand difference and are utterly clueless about how they come across to all of the members of "victimary" groups you've discussed. You think a Latino, Black, Asian, liberal Jew, homosexual, etc., has any difficulty substituting himself for "Muslim" as the tirade ensues?

Jerome wrote:

Now, can we get back to my question? Do you feel that anything that calls itself a “religion” is deserving of uncritical acceptance, or is there something special about Islam that sends that tingle up your leg?

See above. The existence of governance that includes stoning of adulterers is pretty bad. Good thing there's nothing anyone could point to about our system that's pretty bad. Since you're going to drive the Islamic world further into the arms of the most radical and hateful forces in their societies, you can take responsibility for the future stonings - at least the ones that they manage to get in before you send the bombers.

I imagine many Muslims would respond this way, and that may be because of Islam, or because of the legitimacy granted certain kinds of grievances today.

How about they're having a normal, respectable, and totally justifiable reaction to a statement of hatred from an outsider?

I really can't let this go. You wrote that they're not allowed to have representatives, but must only present themselves individually, because you've seen numerous news items about certain duplicitous figures connected to political issues that you happen to care about. (You are keeping in mind, by the way, that you're talking about 1.5 billion or so people worldwide, several million in the U.S.) So that apparently makes all Muslims unqualified even to have spokespeople!

I'm wondering if "spokespeople" is the right word, however. I mean the "people" part. Once upon a time we considered the right to choose representation - like freedom of religion individually and communally, freedom of assembly and a whole bunch of related things - an inviolable human right. We helped author a universal declaration to that effect, invited others to join us in signing it, and threw a celebration in honor of our high moral character and vision, tempered by years of the worst warfare the world had ever seen, against ideologies that were built around the identification of the dangerous, inferior other who could never be a part of the true community. The main non-signatories at the time include several political entities that no longer exist, ending with the letters SSR (also Saudi Arabia, so there's a point for your side - or maybe not - gets confusing here).

Do you think maybe we should set aside some segregated communities for Muslims, their leadership subjected to the veto of people that all good, ideologically sound Americans can trust? I'm sure you could do a much better job of picking the "right" people to oversee their interests, and enforce ours, than they can.

And then you blame them for grabbing whatever representation insists on standing up for them whether you happen to like it or not.

@ Jerome:
If someone rips out someone's heart, he can be arrested. If someone thinks or believes that ripping people's hearts out is terrific, he can get a production deal with HBO.

People are free in this country to believe anything they want to believe, and to form groups that peacefully and lawfully advance their beliefs. It doesn't matter what people like them back where they came from do. It doesn't matter what people who have similar beliefs, or claim to, but have no material connection to them, may do here. Of course, we're capable of establishing limits according to community standards of decency, and general prudence. If we're at war with a country, or with a transnational movement, we can certainly submit citizens or people who fit the "profile" to intensified scrutiny. But we have traditionally, and with very good reason, required the very highest level of justification prior to any religious test.

Islam isn't just some made-up excuse for privileges. It's been around for 1300 years. It's practiced across this country, and internationally we have good, close, and critically important relations with a number of Islamic states and of course countless individual Muslims. Anything we do that embraces collective punishment, rejection, humiliation, exclusion, etc., of Muslims will involve serious trade-offs, and create opportunities for third parties as well as for the very forces within Islam that we need to suppress for our own good and for the good of Muslims, too.

@ adam:
When did you study Islam? How many different Muslims have you known? When did you learn enough about Islam and about Muslims to say something like the following?

I am completely willing to do so for individual Muslims, who make claims only as citizens; but not for Muslim groups or representatives, because the costs of allowing such groups to game the system outweigh the costs of levying too high an entry fee.

What is an average Muslim supposed to glean from a statement like that? If I were a Muslim and became convinced that Americans thought they way, the Muslim Brotherhood would start looking a lot more welcoming, and a lot of other things - like blowing up buildings and getting rid of outsiders - might start looking a lot more appealing. I'd have a lot less interest in anything other than solidarity, and would forgive an awful lot on the part of my brothers, because the citizens of the richest, most powerful, most well-armed, and most self-ignorant and hypocritical nation in the history of the world hated people like me and would never accept us until we had submitted, as hopeless reviled atoms, to their mastery.

@ Jerome:

There may be lessons to be learned from the Cold War, but I don't draw the same ones you do. Oddly enough, we saw religious Muslims as our allies back then. That's when we pretended that we respected religious differences, and also welcomed belief in God-Jehovah-Allah as a bulwark against communism.

I haven't been to Europe in a very long time. I'm certainly not about to take responsibility for the mistakes that Europeans have made. But the ghettos of the Paris suburbs, etc., aren't Islam, they're the ghettos of the Paris suburbs, etc. - hardly the only places in the world, or in history, where an alienated, unassimilated, minority makes life miserable for outsiders. There are lots of places in American cities where it's also unsafe to be an outsider. I can see you already working to increase their number and extent.

Have you ever visited a Muslim land, Jerome? Have you ever had a Muslim friend? Have you ever been penniless, homeless, a strange foreigner wandering, hungry, treated with heartbreaking kindness and selfless charity by Muslims for whom there was nothing in it and never would or could be? If that had ever happened to you, how would you feel about people speaking blithely about a campaign of remorseless vilification and regrettably or maybe not so regrettably harsh measures against them?

You know very little about that which you are interested in vilifying and destroying, and you're very upset about one small effort to enable people like yourself to learn more. You appear to think you know enough. You appear to have consumed a multi-course feast of propaganda. It's sitting in your stomach as congealed hatred, and I doubt I'm qualified to make you expel it.

The "insect" reference was yours, Jerome. You're the one who spoke of fire ants.

It's hard for me to imagine a worse outcome than your way of thinking triumphing in this country.

adam wrote:

@ CK MacLeod:
a politicization of religious belief is completely contraindicated in a liberal democracy. It is, immediately and inherently, in itself, the termination of liberal democracy.

In that case the fate of liberal democracy is in the hands of Islamists, whom we must count upon not to politicize their religious beliefs.

No, liberal democracy is in each of our hands at the moment we enter the political sphere and choose to do so either as free and equal citizens or as something else.

The Cordoba House, and Rauf in particular, have asserted their de-politicizing intent. It goes without saying that a de-politicizing gesture will have to enter a politicized setting. Otherwise, you'd be de-politicizing the already apolitical, which would be an absurdity.

They wish to assert a non-extremist, anti-terrorist, ecumenical Islam. Such gestures should be encouraged. Whatever attachment to suspect actors should be openly examined, but not with the presumption that, e.g., a connection to the Muslim Brotherhood or even to the Free Gaza Movement is a grounds for expulsion - unless you're ready to move to have all Americans with such sympathies or connections expelled, imprisoned, denied, etc.

To declare such projects impossible, and to seek out reasons to reject them, and in the crudest possible, most maximally dismissive way - "Muslims go home! Islam not welcome 2 blocks from Ground Zero! Odious religion that killed desecrating our memories!" - is incredibly self-destructive, unless you are taking the position of Pamela Geller and the other radicals. And, yes, her statement about the Islamic threat and the mosques that are a threat to our way of life do remind me of Nazi propaganda. The similarities are inescapable: A religion defined as unacceptable, inherently counter to "true" national values, its doctrines re-assembled and re-ordered in the most hostile manner possible, and all of the visitors to this blog and other sites showing off their blood-curdling machismo without consideration of consequences and implications.

Why not back off and engage their audience if they genuinely want to de-politicize? The whole formulation doesn’t make sense–if you want to de-politicize religion, why make it the basis of a dialogue? Are you imagining a de-politicized dialogue? What are we talking about, in that case?

Why don't the opponents "back off and engage"? Are you assuming that all exposure to other religions must be immediately political - in the sense of actionable? A dialogue that would be de-politicized in this context would be an exploration of points of contact and a nurturance of Islamic traditions of reason and acceptance of the will of God, beginning with joint recognition of the 10 commandments, and the defense of philosophy common to Maimonides, the Islamic philosopher Farabi ("the Second Aristotle"), Plato - and Pope Benedict and John Locke and Cicero. It would be turning CH, and CH-like efforts, not into the beachhead in some paranoid-fantastical assault on North America by the Muslim fire-ant hordes of antiquity, but into a portal to the Islamic world whose best traditions are fully susceptible and accessible to Judeo-Christian ethics - and incidentally as beautiful, complex, and refined as the calligraphy that testifies to the Islamic love of the Word.

It would be political chiefly, and perhaps only, in the sense that it would require detachment from treasured enemy images and pet-hatreds.

I don’t understand much of this. Someone says he wants to speak with me, presumably as a representative of the West, or liberalism, in the name of Islam–he has a right, if I take him up on it [...] But if he ends up speaking only for himself, again, what can we do about that?

I was referring to the gesture of opposing on principle the participation of Muslims - in effect opposing the existence of Islam, declaring Islam taboo - within a 3-block exclusion zone around Ground Zero... the declaration of a culture center as a "looming horror" and an offense to sacred memory...and about what that says about the nation of the "Freedom Tower."

That someone is treated as a free and equal fellow citizen doesn't mean that he or she becomes an empty atom or cipher. Your interlocutor can represent many things to you without being a "representative" in some political sense. You don't have to assume that talking to Imam Rauf is talking to "the Islamic world" in order to learn something about the Islamic world different from what you knew before.

Of course, the discussion that you describe is what your side has declared a scandal, so long as it takes place too close to the future Freedom Tower.

@ Jerome:
So let's see. If not being gung-ho for a worldwide genocidal religious war makes me a "liberal," gosh darnit... have to think real hard about it here... I'll put on that uniform!

Or were we talking about a 15-story cultural center with worship area on Park Place (presuming financing)?

Jerome wrote:

Islam is an agressive ideology, which grants its’ adherents an absolute right to prey upon everyone else. In terms that can not be misunderstood, it requires them to attack us, enslave us, take our property, force their laws and practices upon us, and if we resist in any way, to kill us.

Which is exactly how most religions and other totalizing ideologies have proceeded, even the ones whose sacred books consist more of stories, than instruction, and even the ones whose instructions include apparent incontrovertible instructions against, e.g., mass murderous warfare, assumption of state power, forced conversion, violent suppression of dissent, unequal treatment, etc.

So we are free to ask whether it makes any difference what a sacred book, or a part of a sacred book, happens to say, or seems to the uninitiated to say.

Looking at history, we can even ask whether the adherence to the words of a "prince of peace" and a merciful savior doesn't seem to have a peculiar, paradoxical effect on believers, turning them into even more merciless mass killers and oppressors, rendering them incapable of admitting to themselves what they are, and in the experience of that contradiction driving them to ever more escalated cruelties. It may even make some of them incapable of recognizing when they're violating one or more of the most sacred commandments (which, incidentally, are also the basis of Islamic law, but I digress).

Read a fair and accurate history of the late Western Roman Empire, of the Byzantine Empire, of the Knights Templar, of the Teutonic Knights, of the Conquests of Peru and Mexico, of the settling of North America, of the 30 Years War, of the Taiping Rebellion, of the suppression of the Huguenots, just to bring a few famous and central dramas of politicized Christianity to mind, and then tell me how important the central Christian instructions turned out to be. We can leave an honest discussion of the spread of democratic liberalism for some other time.

In this, it resembles the creeds of the mafia, the Crips, the Bloods, and lots of other gangsters. And a glance at the map will tell you that it has been, and continues to be, very
successful.

Eh - it's been somewhat successful. The cross overall has blown the crescent away, firepower, body count, and spread-wise.

Like fire ants, the Muslims have spread, driving all others before them.

See above - but also note how ludicrous it is. Islam hasn't spread, significantly, except by demographic pressure, in centuries. Of course, there's only one sure and final solution to demographic pressure from such insect people. Is that what you propose?

adam wrote:

Islam is not sacred–it can be questioned and criticized in whatever terms those critics like. If there are then compelling examples of Islams that counter the representations of those critics, by all means let them be put forward.

To the contrary, Islam is "sacred" to believers. Just as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc., are sacred to adherents, and different elements to different sub-groups within each religion.

In our public discourse, we can criticize religions, but in any political context - any discussion carried forward with a view to political action - that criticism inevitably, inherently will be conducted according to partial (in both senses of the term) and provisional representations that will be alien and taken rightly as implicitly hostile to some or all of those most directly concerned. A philosophical consideration of the meaning of Islam might be undertaken in "academic time" or "scholarly time," though even in that context it would be subject to distortion and misunderstanding, but is virtually impossible in "political time," even in those instances where the setting for such a discussion isn't super-charged by events and clashing interests. For that reason, as proven through long and inexpressibly ugly history - much of if the Western history that the anti-Islamists wish to privilege as intrinsically superior to, say, Ummayad Cordoba - a politicization of religious belief is completely contraindicated in a liberal democracy. It is, immediately and inherently, in itself, the termination of liberal democracy.

The Cordoba House presents itself as a gesture of de-politicization - equal and non-pre-judged entry into the social-political sphere - not Ground Zero, but, through disavowal and negation of the terrorists' intentions and actions, a return to square zero.

Doubting (or claiming to doubt) the honest intentions and good faith of the Cordoba Initiative, the opponents claim justification for negating that gesture and putting in its place an escalated, intensified, and broadly expanded (Geller et al) politicization. If religion can and should be politicized, then in a free society the Cordobans would have every right to pursue a religious-political agenda. And we can all look forward to a post-modern resumption of the great religious wars, perhaps with new model armies for secularists, non-Abrahamic, and who knows how many other sects and coalitions.

If religion shouldn't be politicized, then the opponents should respond with de-politicizing gestures of their own. Because, however, that would apparently require them to accept the heinous Muslim presence in sight of the sacred site, at time of the ritual marking of the site - preferably as a declared Muslim-free or Muslim-subordinating sacred ground - they refuse, and proceed to sketch out in word and deed their favored setting, one in which all claims against Islam go un-answered by those who authentically sympathize with Islam, because anyone speaking on behalf of Islam has already been marked by the prior exclusion as defective and deficient, and therefore disqualified.

The more knowledgeable and authentically representative of Islam, the more clearly disqualified, under this formula. Every proof that the speaker is qualified will be written into the great book of anti-Islamic judgment as a suspect and disqualifying connection. Only people who know nothing or know only the wrong things about Islam, who have been cast out or have cast themselves out of the community, or who have shown sufficient "dhimmitude" within the counter-Sharia of anti-Islam, will be allowed to speak.

You can't converse with someone who is required to remain absent. You can't have an equal conversation when you have defined yourself as superior and the other as inferior, yourself as beyond suspicion, the other as suspect.

adam wrote:

And my judgment isn’t based on an “item” on their website, but on a reading of the website as a whole. This group has very deliberately thrust itself into our collective consciousness, and yet they have nothing to say–they want to build bridges, but don’t say why we are at odds in the first place; they claim to want dialogue but don’t say what they want to talk about–they have no diagnosis, no prescription. And yet they want to place themselves at the center–why?

Maybe to advance, providing one of many settings for, the dialogue that you accuse them of not seeking to advance.

It seems obvious to me that the notion of an equal voice for an Islamic-friendly point of view is threatening to those who find such a point of view impermissible. The mere claim that the "other side" might have a point of any kind is treated as a danger and a symbol of "conquest."

Because I don't, in fact, think the CH on its own terms should be judged a threat or even as more than potentially significant - and more likely a positive than a negative if so - I focus on the things that I feel more certain are significant, especially the embrace of a xenophobic, ignorant, un-American, counterproductive, and inestimably dangerous politicization of religion across the conservative right, including from people I would have expected to be immune or at least healthily resistant to such pathologies.

We may indeed need a public discussion of comparative religion, especially when a popular rightwing blogger and self-appointed leader of the "anti-mosque" forces (the appropriateness of that appellation should already tell you, though apparently it doesn't, how odious this whole line of discussion is) calls for to her-offensive passages in the Koran to be "expunged" for implicitly all use in the United States. (That's whose side you're on.) Unfortunately, and this is why the deep American preference is to declare such discussion with any view to policy off-limits, we always and inevitably enter into such discussion deeply self-interested and generally incapable of being fair to the "other." For that reason, politicized religious disputes have been the source for history's most destructive wars and revolutions, and the basis of the most tyrannical and inhuman governments. We once understood this very well.

More on this later, time permitting.

@ narciso:
never used the word "coincidences," so I don't know who the "you" is that's supposed to be "saying" anything. And all of that has what specifically to do with Rauf, or is it just more Neo-McCarthyism?

@ narciso:
It's not hard to understand, it's just very, very far from proved. A list of names and associations is nothing. And "we" aren't doing anything - we're at worst letting the marketplace absorb this particular. If the nameless moderates are so weak that someone putting up a cultural center in Manhattan is going to destroy them, then we should stop worrying about them altogether, but I don't accept that theory either.

@ narciso:
I get the gist - more guilt by association based on suppositional and even more indirect guilt by association.

You think the people we cut deals with in Iraq and Afghanistan had better resumes? Not talking about Rauf, who, unsurprisingly to me, has apparently had contact of some type with such people - I'm talking about the Brotherhood and all of the rest. We're never going to kill all of them or isolate and imprison everyone who ever was a member of or sympathized with the Muslim Brotherhood. Unless you're planning a genocidal war to the death and the forced conversion of survivors, there are an awful lot of people who currently feel a lot more kinship with the Muslim Brotherhood than with the Republican Party whom we're going to have get along with.

There's an argument - I don't know enough about Rauf to offer it as more than speculation - that the mediation of Sufis and others in relatively or completely non-bellicose schools of Islam is exactly what we need. People like Sistani - who, when he's all by himself, may not like us any more than he likes his own "fundamentalists." Just a few months ago, we were staking hopes in an Iranian revolution led by former leading members of the Iranian government and upper religious circles under Khomeini.

We tend to see things strictly through our own eyes, hardly pausing to consider how we're seen by and what we're asking of people who come from very different places. To give another example, we have a tendency to view Shariah as though it's a single uniform tradition that equates with hanging homosexuals from construction cranes and chopping people's hands off. Shariah is a much broader phenomenon than that, with a range of discrete schools of interpretation. We focus on the luridly fundamentalist interpretations practiced by people with the express intent of returning to the 7th Century. We hardly ever recognize that for a resident of a 3rd or 4th world country who's never known anything but the arbitrary rule of tyrants and imperialists, and who associates modernity with the massive disruption of settled village lifestyles and destruction of kinship and tribal relations, even the 7th Century is a vast improvement.

It's not perversity that leads people to the Taliban or to Khomeinism or the MB. That doesn't obligate us to tolerate any particular action of Taliban or Khomeinist or MB-influenced governments or non-state actors, but it may obligate us - unless our only answer is death and destruction virtually without end - to do exactly what rightwing political correctness prevents us from doing: understand and divide the opposition. It's how we originally "won" in Afghanistan. It's how we eventually "won" in Iraq. And it's how we'll have to conduct ourselves, and better, going forward if we hope to keep all of our victories from turning into ever worse defeats.

narciso wrote:

We have pointed out, how the Muslim Brotherhood, the Perdana movement (an umbrella of far left, Islamist, nationalists) are fronting
al Rauf and the Cordoba Mosque, which would seem to be a reasonable
affront to those victims of 9/11, even more than the Crescent shaped
monument to Flight 93, We have seen conversely a full court press to demonize Israel’s very existence, not unlikely what they would probably
inflict on the US, if we pushed for a more assertive foreign policy

I think you're suggesting that Rauf is fronting the Muslim Brotherhood, which is not Al Qaeda, nor was it involved in 9/11. Ditto for the Perdana Movement. Ditto for the vast majority even of "Islamists" in the world, among whose number by at least one reasonable application of the term we might have to include the governments of the Islamic republics of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as numerous other U.S. allies. Even a creature like Mahathir bin Mohamad is not a declared enemy of the United States or a threat to us - though he's certainly a critic.

Your rather encyclopedic knowledge sometimes leads you to think and express yourself associatively, sometimes with impressive results. In this particular discussion, it's a problem - because it leads you over and over to do exactly what it is I'm criticizing the anti-Rauf people of doing. The above-quoted paragraph is an almost pure example of guilt by association, to an absurd extent. Now the "crescent-shaped" memorial relates to this? Please.

@ OhioCoastie:
I've said my piece, and said it again, and said it again again. My current intention is to review the thread some time, and see if there's anything worth responding to in it. That could change, but an invitation from you I don't find very interesting as compared to taking care of some business and conversing with the regulars here as time allows.

Fine, but in the end, the suspicions about the Cordoba project are completely justified, even if they could have been expressed more “liberally” (in the broader, non-partisan sense of “liberal”).

Assumes facts way not in evidence, and depends on the general term "suspicions": I've seen everything from suspicions that they really don't like non-Muslims very much to suspicions that they're planning on indoctrinating and sending out suicide bombers. So, what suspicions are you talking about?

I'm not responsible or, for purposes of this discussion, greatly interested in the "Cordobans"' "good faith interest in dialogue," though it might give the opponents something to talk about that wasn't based on prejudice and collective guilt, or built on character assassination and guilt by association (the prosecutorial version of collective guilt, of course). As a matter of fact, I don't think an abstract judgment like the one you've offered - based on an item on their web site that quotes someone else's statement! - should bear at all on their right to build a building in NYC, so long as it doesn't violate community standards, which we have two decisions by the community board, as well as OKs from higher officials, expressing.

Again, if the CI screws up, they should and will pay a price. It doesn't have anything to do with "religion that killed 2,996 people" and "conquer America" and "looming horror" and "Islime" and "I hate Muslims" and "in the name of" logic, all fully in evidence long before some dude may have called the Islimers Nazi-like, and all obviously unrelated to anything else the Cordobans have said or done lately. It's beneath the dignity of a free man or woman to call anyone, Osama Bin Laden included, "Islime," regardless of who Rauf "really" is, and the right should acknowledge it.

@ adam:
As for agreement, I'm referring to the "rights from God" discussion and the presumptions of a civil discourse. For some reason it sticks in your craw that someone somehow associated with the CI said something about someone's Nazi-like tactics. Since I don't know who, what, where, when, or why, it makes little impression on me. I know that I myself have been subjected to every form of personal and political and personal-political attack for doubting the anti-"mosque" arguments. I have seen - and could catalog if I must - the most crass imaginable statements about Islam and Muslims as a class made on a regular basis on threads relating to this and other issues at HotAir, Pajamas, Daily Caller, etc., and the whole point of the first "Fight them all together" piece was to demonstrate how people from Barber to the Conservative blogger of the year 2007 to a leading "polite" conservative were basing their rhetoric on emotionalist and otherwise forced and one-sided indictments of Islam as a whole.

And the problem is that I'm "setting" the rules? I'm calling 'em as I see 'em.

adam wrote:

If the opposition forces them to either offer a credible account of what they mean by “dialogue” or demonstrate that they have no idea, and that something else is involved here altogether, I would consider that a significant victory, one that goes some way to restoring what is best in us.

If you think the important thing is to "win the dialogue," then having the leading voices on your side resorting to bigotry, demagogy, and the basic presumptions of American constitutionalism to make their point is a very poor way to proceed - except in a nation committed to bigotry.

I thought we were just having this discussion and reaching agreement. If Muslims (communists, atheists, Episcopalians, conservatives, et al) aren't free to be wrong, if they are wrong, then no one can reach right. Every participant in the conversation is entitled to a presumption of good faith, which continues even through the recitation of points you disagree with - e.g., that their critics are behaving like Nazis. Let the marketplace of ideas set the value for society. In the meantime shrieking, as some opponents have, about the "mosque" and the Muslims devalues whatever else they might want to sell.

adam wrote:

Politically, I think those who see this as a hostile act have very good grounds for doing so.

You think maybe we should look for some of those ABMs we junked? Maybe they could be converted into Anti-Building Missiles to defend us from the barrage of bricks and windows coming our way.

adam wrote:

What they think about the Muslim world, in the name of which they proffer themselves as dialogue partners, is extremely relevant in this connection.

I don't buy that for a second. No one asking for a building permit gets his mind read by someone x-hundred or -thousand miles away for correct thinking. Whether you want to have dialogue with the owners or occupants of that building is 100% up to you. In the meantime, they're not obligated to give a flying fig what you or anyone else thinks of their thoughts or of what you think their thoughts are or might be or might have been. The locals made their decision. It's a heavy burden on opponents to explain why that decision is wrong.

Now, Rauf et al may decide that the opposition is too strong. They may have trouble getting funding. They may have to put off their opening for a month, a year, or a decade.

None of that makes it good for opponents of the CH to turn whatever "victory" they achieve over the CH into a victory for the worst in us.

@ forecastle casady:
Excellent idea! Oh, wait, that's already in the works.

I'm trying to avoid (further) sarcasm here, so I'll just say the boring thing: Since when do we treat people here according to our assessment of the injustice of whatever regimes they left behind?

adam wrote:

the only player to evade withering critical scrutiny are the Cordobans themselves,

Who propose to put up a building, if they can put together financing. Merely. In the US of A. Possibly with a view of the Statue of Liberty, someday in the shadow of the Freedom Tower. Or should we write "Freedom" Tower?

The critical scrutiny of them has been handled by others, before I got interested - otherwise I would have lacked anyone to wither.

@ adam:
Adam, if you click on the GR post of mine (a composite of ZC posts) linked in the initial Allahpundit excerpt, you will quickly find the Barber video, along with discussion on point. I have to run an errand now anyway. So perhaps we can continue this discussion after you've had a chance to review the relevant materials.

I can’t think of a single politician, not from the reddest region of the reddest state, that has campaigned, much less won, on an anti-Muslim platform. Can you?

We now have Rick Barber (see earlier post). We also have elements of rightwing political correctness that were arguably justifiable in their day - don't dare mention what role U.S. policy had on the way to 9/11! - but that have become obstacles to a clear-eyed assessment, and the bases for self-destructive attacks on people like Rauf.

I lost interest in Ground Zero a while ago, once it became clear we weren’t going to do anything with it.

The main elements of the Liebeskind project are, last I checked, under construction. The smallest planned building project was canceled when JP Morgan pulled out and developers decided that Manhattan didn't need that much more office space. Apparently being re-designed for alternative uses.

We don’t even have a map of all this.

I believe that Petraeus and others have numerous highly detailed maps and relatively highly nuanced strategies, rough drafted under Bush, for dividing and conquering - not, as our anti-jihadist jihadists have it, unifying against us. We're all on those maps somewhere.

@ adam:
A disappointing response, I must say.

@ bob:
We've inched around that one - that 9/11 is being treated as the sacred re-founding of the national community, and that CH opponents are eager to exclude Muslims in declaring it. I'd like to hear Adam's analysis on this.

I realize that ecumenical observances of some sort will be included at the eventual memorial, but the exclusion zone re-voids the gesture. So, a further complication for the exclusionists would be the ghosts of Muslims who died on 9/11, other than the hijackers, condemned to haunt the environs eternally.