There was a clip from the Daily Show in early July that I remember finding to be a particularly depressing testament to our current political climate. It ended with Diane Sawyer asking the audience whether Muslims should “be allowed to build their mosques in the neighborhoods of their choosing.” I remember asking how that could even be a question. The issue seemed to fade for a moment and then, suddenly, Obama has the temerity to defend Muslims by referencing (of all things!) the Bill of Rights and now it’s all the mass media can talk about (by the way a chunk of Pakistan the size of Italy is currently under water. Anyone? Bono? No?).
So why is this controversial at all? It’s worth noting, as Michael Calderone does, that the very phrase “Ground Zero Mosque” is a complete misnomer, and that its continued use by the mass media is a coup for the ideologues that turned a non-issue into a fabricated controversy. First, it is an Islamic community center that will house a mosque among many other services and functions. Second, it is two blocks away from Ground Zero, located on a neighborhood that already has mosques. So while the phrase “Ground Zero Mosque” evokes for some, I assume, a shrine to Osama bin Laden on the very ashes of the World Trade Center, reality hews closer to building a Muslim 92nd St Y in an old Burlington Coat Factory.
Still, arguments from prominent conservative politicians are as irate as they are completely non-sensical. Rudy Giuliani argued that “nobody would allow something like that at Pearl Harbor. Let’s have some respect for who died here and why they died here. Let’s not put this off on some kind of politically correct theory.” Now, one can only assume that the “politically correct theory” he is referencing here is liberalism, the proto-Marxist doctrine of bleeding-heart sissies like Jefferson, Madison, and Locke. But maybe he has a point: even though Pearl Harbor is conspicuously close to a sushi restaurant, a Buddhist temple, and a Toyota dealership, it’s not as though Americans could ever be so insensitive, right?
Newt Gingrich, that paragon of rational political discourse, argued against the Islamic center on Fox News by suggesting that “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.” There are obvious problems with this statement, and it is particularly horrifying for a former Speaker of the House to, in all seriousness, compare the world’s second largest religion to nazism. But even if both statements are completely absurd on their face, they both get at what appears to be the central idea in the controversy.
The most common argument appears to be that the Islamic Center is somehow “insensitive” to the families of the victims. But why would building a Muslim community center near Ground Zero be insensitive? No one ever seems to elaborate on this, and the claim doesn’t really make much sense unless you believe that Islam, writ large, caused 9/11 and that Muslims, by extension, are responsible and have no business congregating near Ground Zero. And that is precisely why the debate is at once so bizarre and so frightening--because it seems so rooted in this longstanding Western idea of an Islamic Manchurian Candidate wherein contact with a Qur'an will turn you into a mindless Islam-o-bot, roving the countryside lopping off the heads of the "infidels."
But I think the controversy has even larger implications on how Americans have begun to re-imagine their nation. Back during the heady days of the Cold War, Americans liked to advertise themselves to the rest of the world as a nation of good-natured, tolerant people with an aw-shucks, can-do attitude who extended freedom and liberty to everyone. Numerous people, of course, pointed out some small inconsistencies with this rhetoric. But, as recent historians have shown, this Cold War ideology helped force white Americans to confront their more overt legalized forms of racism; exchange them for a subtler more nuanced mélange of suppressed bigotry; and largely pretend that none of it had ever happened in the first place. Ever since, including even the Reagan years, that has been the image of America that we have conveyed both to ourselves and abroad: a place of liberty, diversity, and (begrudging) tolerance. It is an appealing image, even if the reality is often more complex and troubled. So this controversy is indicative, I think, of much larger changes occurring in the way America is currently imagined by a large segment of the population.
Even if they were literally building a mosque on Ground Zero, what could possibly be a better symbol of what America is supposed to represent—what we have been arguing for sixty years? Wouldn't that be a beautiful testament to what is good about liberal democracy? So perhaps the complete unpopularity of that vision suggests that this old vision of what America means is rapidly fading in favor of another, less pleasant, one.
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