This past Friday, the Ground Zero mosque picked up its highest-level endorsement yet. During a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan, President Obama, echoing NYC Mayor Blooomberg, gave his endorsement of the $100 million, 13-story mosque and Islamic center to be located just two blocks from the site where 3,000 innocent Americans were murdered by Islamic fundamentalists.
Location of mosque in relation to Ground Zero
The project, spearheaded by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has launched a heated national debate about whether or not a mosque should be located so close to where the twin towers once stood.
Americans are touchy on matters that invoke Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ between church and state or the First Amendment’s prohibition of any law ‘respecting an establishment of religion’.
Appropriately, the debate over the mosque hasn’t taken place on Constitutional grounds. The debate isn’t about rights; it’s about taste and sensitivity. The Imam Rauf and his followers have the right to build a mosque on this particular plot of ground if they so wish. But should they? What is their purpose?
The imam claims he wants to improve the relations between the Muslim World and the West. Relations are in need of improvement but is Rauf the moderate Muslim that can build such bridges?
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Just 19 days after the attacks on 9/11, Rauf told CBS’s 60 Minutes that “the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.” In the same interview, Rauf stated that Osama bin Laden is “made in the USA.” In other words, Americans brought the attacks on themselves.
More recently, in a June 2010 interview on New York’s WABC radio, Rauf waffled and would not classify Hamas as a terrorist organization. In contrast, the US State Department states: “Hamas terrorists…have conducted many attacks, including large-scale suicide bombings, against Israeli civlilian and military targets.”
Given these concerns, it’s clearly understandable why so many would object to and be offended by a mega-mosque existing just steps away from Ground Zero. Yet this is not the first time that religious facilities have encroached on deep sensitivities.
In the 1980s, Carmelite nuns planned to form a convent next to Auschwitz to pray for those that died in the Nazi concentration camp. As honest as the nuns’ intentions were, it deeply upset Jews that viewed it as an attempt to ‘Christianize’ a site of Jewish suffering.
William McGurn wrote an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining that Pope John Paul II counseled the nuns to relocate their convent to another location after realizing that their mission was causing more harm than good.
For a moment, consider a hypothetical situation. What if the Westboro Baptist Church announced plans to build a mega-church a couple blocks from Arlington National Cemetary?
Members of Westboro Baptist Church protest a military funeral
In case you aren’t familiar with Westboro, it is a Kansas-based church that is known for picketing military funerals with despicable banners reading ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘Thank God for Dead Soldiers’. The church claims to have been involved in over 41,000 protests in 650 cities since 1991.
Would President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg and the wider group supporting the Ground Zero mosque have the same tolerance for Westboro?
It’s shameful that there aren’t enough leaders to recognize that it’s about sensitivities, not rights. And if Imam Rauf were really interested in improving relations, he would take up the offers to relocate his mosque a little further from Ground Zero.
I think we know how Pope John Paul II would have felt.
Neil Rosekrans is a founder and partner of StateBrief.com. He has been a guest political commentator for the Arizona Law Channel, NBC's Sunday Square Off and The Terry Gilberg Show on KFYI. Neil earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University and earned his MBA and Masters in Public Policy, with an emphasis in International Relations, from Pepperdine University.
Neil and his wife, Beth, live in Scottsdale, Arizona. 
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. The response, or lack of response, by “moderate muslims” is telling. Obviously their rights supercede anyone else’s…oh, yes…This is a victory mosque after all.
I’m a little perplexed by the difficulties that the Greek Orthodox church that stood near Ground Zero originally, and was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks has encountered nothing but bureaucratic problems; and has been told it cannot rebuild at the site; while the mosque appears to have been fast tracked through all of the NY real estate hurdles. It strikes me as profoundly ironic that this mosque will probably be built before the new world trade center. Cordoba indeed.