OUR VIEW: 'Ground zero mosque' an unfair target

Editorials

August 18, 2010

Staff Reports The Tonawanda News The Tonawanda News Wed Aug 18, 2010, 10:51 PM EDT

— — New Yorkers and all Americans — not the least of them Carl Paladino — need to take a deep breath and get some of their facts straight before spouting off on the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.”

First, the facts: The mosque isn’t being built on the place where the World Trade Center once stood. It’s being built two blocks from there. The proposed site for the mosque isn’t even visible from the former Twin Towers location. It is, simply, in the same neighborhood.

A second fact: Leaders of the group seeking to build the mosque and accompanying Islamic cultural center have spent their careers trying to foster better relations and a more mature understanding of their faith in America. These aren’t fundamentalists, and any insinuation that they are is simply incorrect. Their brand of Islam — the one practiced by a vast majority of Muslim-Americans — is the kind that we should be trying to support, not shun.

A political firestorm has erupted thanks to some hard-line conservative Republicans who are seeking to create an even larger divide between Muslim-Americans and their Judeo-Christian counterparts. It is a campaign based on ugly implied stereotypes and xenophobia, nothing more.

There exists for good reason a division between church and state in our Constitution. Many of these same Republicans have talked endlessly about policies like universal health care as being unconstitutional. Where is that conviction now, when a plain text reading of the First Amendment clearly states that the government has no business meddling in religious affairs?

Some have suggested that the group seeking to open the mosque should just go somewhere else, somewhere more convenient and less controversial. That is an unfair request. Muslims have just as much right to open a mosque as a Christian congregation would to open a church or a Jewish one to open a synagogue.

Gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino has harped endlessly on the subject. If this is an indication of his temperament should his longshot campaign somehow succeed, New Yorkers would do well to dismiss him now for this hysterical exercise in fear-mongering.

Most Americans understand the difference between the fundamentalist sect of Islam that is our enemy and the silent majority of Muslims the world over who practice and preach tolerance and civility.

Unfortunately, some of our politicians don’t see that distinction. And others do, but would rather turn back to the Bush-era tactics of exploiting ignorance and hate for electoral gain.

We applaud President Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for speaking out in favor of religious freedom when it would certainly have been easier to say nothing. Perhaps Bloomberg put it best: “If we shut down — shout down — a mosque and community center because it is two blocks away from the site where freedom was attacked, I think it would be a sad day for America.”

We all are granted the unfettered right to practice whatever religion we choose, wherever we wish. That fundamental right must continue to exist without qualification, whether it’s convenient or not.

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