A clash between two Americas over the Ground Zero Mosque - BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA - THE FREE PRESS JOURNAL

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

THE FREE PRESS JOURNAL

A clash between two Americas over the Ground Zero Mosque



The battle between the lofty embellishments of Republicanism and populist democracy has re- surfaced in the passionate controversy over the proposed construction of an Islamic Centre, better known as Ground- Zero Mosque, on a site a stone’s throw from where the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre stood till that horrible September 11 morning.

BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA

IN an essay published in 1985, Irving Kristol, the ‘godfather of the Neoconservative movement’, quoted a political scientist as saying American democracy is based on one key assumption: “that the people are usually sensible, but rarely wise.” The American system of government, with its elaborate checks and balances and separation of powers, he contended, was geared towards ensuring that the popular will would ultimately prevail.

The operative term was “ultimately”. “ Short of the ultimate”, Kristol wrote, “ the Founders thought it appropriate that popular sentiments should be delayed in their course, refracted in their expression, revised in their enactment, so that a more deliberate public opinion could prevail over a transient public opinion.” Kristol was addressing a debate then raging in the US over school prayer and crime and liberal fears of a rampaging populism that would brush aside the principles on which the Republic had been founded. The debate, in any case, was not new. Throughout its history, the US has led a schizoid existence. Till the defeat of the southern Confederacy in the Civil War, its lofty espousal of freedom jarred against the reality of slavery; and till President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights legislation, some Americans could well have been said to be more equal than others.

Nor was it a case of some white bigots in the southern states violating the enlightened principles that shaped the US Constitution.

Dixieland’s resistance to the complete abolition of slavery was based on the principle that individual states of the Republic had a right to choose their own course of action, unhindered by Federal intrusiveness and Yankee notions of correctness. Both sides in the Civil War could fall back on both public opinion and the Constitution.

The dispute was, quite predictably, settled by force- not merely in the battlefield of Gettysburg but again a hundred years later in Birmingham, Alabama, when federal forces were dispatched to escort a handful of scared Black students to a de- segregated school.

The battle between the lofty embellishments of Republicanism and populist democracy has re- surfaced in the passionate controversy over the proposed construction of an Islamic Centre, better known as Ground- Zero Mosque, on a site a stone’s throw from where the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre stood till that horrible September 11 morning. Coming in the wake of the mid- term elections to the US Congress, the controversy has escalated into a clash between two Americas- one which ostensibly swears by the Constitution and one which waves the Flag.

If the editorial columns of the ‘ respectable’ media are any indication, it is a simple battle between ( pro- mosque) enlightenment and ( anti- mosque) bigotry.

The former has the unequivocal backing of intellectuals, the First Amendment and critical endorsements from President Barak Obama and the Mayor of New York.

The latter may be burdened by the philological clumsiness of Sarah Palin, the Islamophobia of Newt Gingrich and absence from the soirées of Manhattan, but it has the endorsement ( or so the polls say) of nearly two- thirds of America. This has been compelling enough, particularly in an election year, for Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and New York Governor David Paterson to call for a review of the project. The force of public indignation against Cordova House, as the Islamic Centre will be called, was also sufficient to transform Obama’s categorical support at the White House "iftar" into evasive waffle a day later, prompting one writer to dub him a “ stubborn man without conviction”. On the face of it, the pro-mosque lobby is on strong grounds. The US Constitution allows every citizen the unhindered right to both preach and practice faith, without any interference from the state. The rigid separation of state and faith, which was originally intended to forestall any partiality to or discrimination against non- conformist Christian sects, has now come to the aid of a religion that is outside the Judaeo- Christian framework. The universalism of their Constitution has now come to haunt Americans.

The opposition to Cordova House isn’t based on a challenge to the constitutional right of Muslims to build either a mosque or a community centre. The issue is the alleged ‘ insensitivity’ ( some would say provocation) of building it so close to a place where 3,000 people were killed by terrorists claiming to speak for Islam. Would it be proper, ask the sceptics, to build a Japanese war memorial at Pearl Harbour? The promoters of the project have claimed that Cordova House is aimed at promoting inter- faith understanding. However, this has been greeted by scepticism on account of a history of Islamic triumphalism and the tendency of Muslim rulers in distant lands to build a mosque to commemorate a victory. Regardless of the intentions of the Imam in charge of the project, and even his reputation as an authority on Sufism, the fear is that sooner or later the building will come to symbolise a victory monument and become a hub of Islamist extremism. Sinister meaning has even been attached to the use of Cordova, a city that once symbolised Islam’s inroads into the Christian world.

Curiously, one facet of the controversy appears to be troubling both the liberal, non- Muslim supporters of the mosque and their flag- waving opponents. Both fear that whatever the final outcome, the controversy will sharpen the polarisation between Islam and the West and have a negative impact on US foreign policy in the Islamic world. The fear is justified although, ironically, the debate over Cordova House is only peripherally a tussle between Islam and America. The controversy is really another chapter in the battle between the Republic and democracy.

Americans, a historian presciently observed, “ Americans erected their constitutional roof before they put up their national walls... and the Constitution became a substitute for a deeper kind of national identity.” The problem was initially addressed by two filters: the first by an enforced compromise between the brash ‘ frontier spirit’ and lofty ‘ aristocratic’ values, and secondly, by forcing newcomers into a melting pot of Judaeo- Christian values. However, the evolution of the American ‘ nation’ appears to have been derailed by the emergence of a new, disparate America which may in time resemble an ethnic menagerie, bound by a Constitution that was written with a relatively cohesive society in mind.

The groundswell from below over the Ground Zero sacrilege constitutes the spirited protest of an older and somewhat endangered ‘ national identity’ which appeared to have been subsumed by the Obama landslide of 2008 but is actually alive and kicking. It is basically a plea to the governing elites - where the liberal self- image counts for too much - to not allow permissiveness to override common decencies.

A mosque overlooking the scene of the 9/ 11 won’t reinforce America’s image as a haven of enlightened tolerance; it may set it apart as a country unable to distinguish between right and wrong.

Build that mosque - Economist

http://www.economist.com/node/16743239



Lexington

Build that mosque

The campaign against the proposed Cordoba centre in New York is unjust and dangerous

Aug 5th 2010


WHAT makes a Muslim in Britain or America wake up and decide that he is no longer a Briton or American but an Islamic “soldier” fighting a holy war against the infidel? Part of it must be pull: the lure of jihadism. Part is presumably push: a feeling that he no longer belongs to the place where he lives. Either way, the results can be lethal. A chilling feature of the suicide video left by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the band that killed more than 50 people in London in July, 2005, was the homely Yorkshire accent in which he told his countrymen that “your” government is at war with “my people”.

For a while America seemed less vulnerable than Europe to home-grown jihadism. The Pew Research Centre reported three years ago that most Muslim Americans were “largely assimilated, happy with their lives… and decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes.” Since then it has become clear that American Muslims can be converted to terrorism too. Nidal Malik Hassan, born in America and an army major, killed 13 of his comrades in a shooting spree at Fort Hood. Faisal Shahzad, a legal immigrant, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square. But something about America—the fact that it is a nation of immigrants, perhaps, or its greater religiosity, or the separation of church and state, or the opportunities to rise—still seems to make it an easier place than Europe for Muslims to feel accepted and at home.

It was in part to preserve this feeling that George Bush repeated like a scratched gramophone record that Americans were at war with the terrorists who had attacked them on 9/11, not at war with Islam. Barack Obama has followed suit: the White House national security strategy published in May says that one way to guard against radicalisation at home is to stress that “diversity is part of our strength—not a source of division or insecurity.” This is hardly rocket science. America is plainly safer if its Muslims feel part of “us” and not, like Mohammad Sidique Khan, part of “them”. And that means reminding Americans of the difference—a real one, by the way, not one fabricated for the purposes of political correctness—between Islam, a religion with a billion adherents, and al-Qaeda, a terrorist outfit that claims to speak in Islam’s name but has absolutely no right or mandate to do so.

Why would any responsible American politician want to erase that vital distinction? Good question. Ask Sarah Palin, or Newt Gingrich, or the many others who have lately clambered aboard the offensive campaign to stop Cordoba House, a proposed community centre and mosque, from being built in New York two blocks from the site of the twin towers. Every single argument put forward for blocking this project leans in some way on the misconceived notion that all Muslims, and Islam itself, share the responsibility for, or are tainted by, the atrocities of 9/11.

In a tweet last month from Alaska, Ms Palin called on “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” the “ground-zero mosque” because it would “stab” American hearts. But why should it? Cordoba House is not being built by al-Qaeda. To the contrary, it is the brainchild of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a well-meaning American cleric who has spent years trying to promote interfaith understanding, not an apostle of religious war like Osama bin Laden. He is modelling his project on New York’s 92nd Street Y, a Jewish community centre that reaches out to other religions. The site was selected in part precisely so that it might heal some of the wounds opened by the felling of the twin towers and all that followed. True, some relatives of 9/11 victims are hurt by the idea of a mosque going up near the site. But that feeling of hurt makes sense only if they too buy the false idea that Muslims in general were perpetrators of the crime. Besides, what about the feelings, and for that matter the rights, of America’s Muslims—some of whom also perished in the atrocity?

Ms Palin’s argument does at least have one mitigating virtue: it concentrates on the impact the centre might have, without impugning the motives of those who want to build it. The same half-defence can be made of the Anti-Defamation League, a venerable Jewish organisation created to fight anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. To the dismay of many liberal Jews, the ADL has also urged the centre’s backers to seek another site in order to spare the feelings of families of the 9/11 victims. But at least it concedes that they have every right to build at this site—and that they might (only might, since the ADL hints at vague concerns about their ideology and finances) genuinely have chosen it in order to send a positive message about Islam.

The Saudi non-sequitur

No such plea of mitigation can be entered on behalf of Mr Gingrich. The former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives may or may not have presidential pretensions, but he certainly has intellectual ones. That makes it impossible to excuse the mean spirit and scrambled logic of his assertion that “there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. Come again? Why hold the rights of Americans who happen to be Muslim hostage to the policy of a foreign country that happens also to be Muslim? To Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second. Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.

Mr Gingrich also objects to the centre’s name. Imam Feisal says he chose “Cordoba” in recollection of a time when the rest of Europe had sunk into the Dark Ages but Muslims, Jews and Christians created an oasis of art, culture and science. Mr Gingrich sees only a “deliberate insult”, a reminder of a period when Muslim conquerors ruled Spain. Like Mr bin Laden, Mr Gingrich is apparently still relitigating the victories and defeats of religious wars fought in Europe and the Middle East centuries ago. He should rejoin the modern world, before he does real harm.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington

[This article attracted 448 comments from readers.]