‘Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” Those simple, eloquent words made it clear what the United States hoped to avoid in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks: a religious war that would fulfill Osama bin Laden’s dreams. And those sentences came not from some liberal peacenik, but from then-President George W. Bush, in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
Nine years later, Park51, the proposed Islamic cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero, should be a potent symbol of Bush’s sage words. Intended as a 13-story complex with a prayer room, auditorium, restaurant, and gym, it could serve as an example of religious tolerance in the post-9/11 world, a message that Al Qaeda’s attempts to pit the West against Muslims have failed.
Unfortunately, some politicians and activist groups have instead reacted to the proposal in a manner that plays directly into the extremists’ hands.
On her Twitter feed, Sarah Palin encouraged “peaceful Muslims” to “pls refudiate” the planned community center, as though there were something warlike about it. And Newt Gingrich wrote that there “should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia,” apparently implying that the United States should adopt the less-than-pluralistic Saudi take on religious tolerance.
More surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League stood with the Palin-Gingrich contingent. While acknowledging that some of the people opposing Park51 are bigots, the league insisted that “building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some [9/11] victims more pain — unnecessarily — and that is not right.”
Abe Foxman, the ADL director, suggested that 9/11 families were like Holocaust survivors. But the comparison isn’t apt. The German government did indeed exterminate Jews. Islam, as a religion, did not carry out the 9/11 attacks.
The simple fact is there’s nothing threatening about the proposed Islamic center, which is being spearheaded by Feisal Abdul Rauf, one of the most respected moderate Muslim leaders in the country. And given that a strip club, a sex shop, and an off-track betting office all exist near Ground Zero, the “hallowed ground” argument rings hollow.
All New Yorkers — and all Bostonians, who also experienced the pain of the 9/11 attacks — should accept the Islamic center as a way of validating what Bush and most other Americans know in their hearts: 9/11 was a brutal crime by extremists, not the expression of the true beliefs of Islam.