Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islam. Show all posts
During college, I took a course with a professor who asked us to come to her house, high above Portland, for Passover. While a few of us climbed the Columbia River Valley in a rickety station wagon, one of my classmates warned the rest of us that her husband was something of a “barbarian”: “you half expect him to be ripping into a mutton chop while he’s talking to you,” he explained.
The description turned out to be a bit overdramatic, but the husband was nonetheless a rather intense thickly-bearded figure who suddenly engaged us in a heated debate about the impending peril of Islamic terrorism in the United States. He convinced none of us, of course, but concluded his remarks with the ominous suggestion that once someone blew up Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, we would all change our tune.
We scoffed at the notion, of course. For anyone unfamiliar with Portland, I once ate a sandwich in Pioneer Square with someone behind me playing an acoustic version of “Sexual Healing” while two teenage girls made out in front of a sign-wearing preacher shouting about the evils of homosexuality while being shadowboxed by a homeless person who was standing immediately to the left of a goth kid playing the kazoo and doing a jig. So, really, who would bother scheming to blow up a place normally trafficked by hackysack hippies and pitbull-carrying drifters?
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The description turned out to be a bit overdramatic, but the husband was nonetheless a rather intense thickly-bearded figure who suddenly engaged us in a heated debate about the impending peril of Islamic terrorism in the United States. He convinced none of us, of course, but concluded his remarks with the ominous suggestion that once someone blew up Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, we would all change our tune.
We scoffed at the notion, of course. For anyone unfamiliar with Portland, I once ate a sandwich in Pioneer Square with someone behind me playing an acoustic version of “Sexual Healing” while two teenage girls made out in front of a sign-wearing preacher shouting about the evils of homosexuality while being shadowboxed by a homeless person who was standing immediately to the left of a goth kid playing the kazoo and doing a jig. So, really, who would bother scheming to blow up a place normally trafficked by hackysack hippies and pitbull-carrying drifters?
Well, someone just did. But I’m not sure whether it was Mohamed Mohamud or the FBI.
Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-American and Oregon State student, was arrested by the FBI on Friday for allegedly plotting to set off a car bomb at the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Pioneer Square. (Which brings up the most surprising aspect of this entire story: thousands of people attend a tree lighting ceremony in the heathen Portland?). According to the feds, Mohamud had a stated desire to harm women and children and attempted to remotely detonate a car bomb during the ceremony. He was subsequently taken into custody, kicking and screaming, and shouting “Allahu akbar.” So, violent terrorist thwarted, point to the feds, right?
Well, maybe—but not so fast. Glen Greenwald suggests in Salon, I think rather convincingly, that there is cause for more skepticism regarding the facts of the case and it seems altogether possible that “the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a ‘Terrorist plot’ which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction.”
I certainly have no interest in defending Mohamud who, when given the means, legitimately thought he was detonating a bomb that would obliterate two blocks and potentially kill thousands of Portlanders. He is clearly a warped individual and an attempted terrorist. But it does seem worth asking not only whether Mohamud would have posed any kind of legitimate threat without the help and prodding of the feds, but also the extent to which the FBI simply created a terrorist out of a disaffected teenager filled only with delusional fantasies and bluster until he was given the means to carry them out by the government. The circumstances of the case, I think, bring further into question whether the methods the FBI uses are actually protecting the United States from legitimate terror threats or simply concocting them in a self-perpetuating cycle.
From news reports probing Mohamud’s background, it seems clear that he was an impressionable and disaffected—probably mentally unstable—teenager who had become emotionally troubled after the divorce of his parents. The FBI, in fact, only began to monitor Mohamud after his father, an engineer at Intel, contacted them that he was concerned about his son’s growing extremism. Mohamud was, it seems, in many ways just a troubled teen who involved himself not only in fantasies of violence, but also in sex, alcohol, and partying at Oregon State. But if his father turned to the FBI for some sort of intervention or help, he was obviously mistaken, as it would instead result in a sting operation that further encouraged his son toward terrorism.
According to the FBI affidavit, the sting began in earnest when the feds intercepted a seemingly innocuous email exchange between Mohamud and a man living in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, which was suspicious solely because it is a region where “Islamic militants frequently reside.” The December 3 email read: "salamz bro. it's me, i made it 2 OMRA, [praise be to god] if u wanna come, theres a bro that will contact you about the proper paperwork u need 2 come... i cant go online 4 a while,, i hope 2 see u soon"
Although “OMRA” would typically refer to a pilgrimage in Mecca, the agent concluded that they must be speaking “in code to avoid detection,” and that the above email was therefore an invitation for Mohamud to join in terrorist activities. Mohamud then replied to the email that “yes that would be wonderful, just tell me what I need to do [God willing]. always wanted to see the ka’bah.” But Mohamud hit a dead end when his attempts to contact another party that would help him reach Mecca/Pakistan fell through. So he secured a fishing job in Alaska—but he was prevented from boarding his flight, because he had been placed on the “No Fly List.”
Instead, an undercover FBI agent contacted Mohamud and arranged a meeting where he was asked what he would be willing to do “for the cause.” Thus, at this point the FBI had been tipped off by a concerned father looking to help his unstable son filled with bluster and impotent rage, saw him discussing a visit to either Mecca or Pakistan, found him too incompetent or disengaged to follow through even with that, but now surrounded him with a “friend” who further pushed him toward jihad.
Given a variety of choices on how to help “the cause,” Mohamud expressed interest in becoming “operational” and, after being instructed to think of a target, suggested Pioneer Square in Portland. The undercover officer offered him praise, saying that “he loved his idea.” The agents then helped him plan the attack (saying that they “were impressed” with his work), gave him money to buy materials for bombs and to pay his rent, and actually built a bomb for him. After a test of an actual functioning bomb on November 4, they filmed a written statement in which explained his reasoning, and eventually helped him to detonate a fake bomb on the 26th. As Greenwald sums: “he had no history of violence, no apparent criminal record, had never been to a training camp in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else, and -- before meeting the FBI -- had never taken a single step toward harming anyone. Does that sound like some menacing sleeper Terrorist to you?”
Yet, the U.S. attorney in Oregon suggested that "this defendant's chilling determination is a stark reminder that there are people -- even here in Oregon -- who are determined to kill Americans,” while the FBI suggested a statement released by the Department of Justice that even though the bomb was fake “the threat was very real.” But was the threat “very real” until the FBI became involved?
The methods used by the FBI in this case closely mirror those used in numerous others, including the arrest of the “Newburgh Four” in 2009, accused of plotting to bomb New York synagogues. In that case, as Ted Conover explains in Slate, the FBI informant offered congregants of the local mosque $25,000 and other gifts if they would help him pursue jihad. The four unemployed and impoverished ex-cons, one of which was described as a paranoid schizophrenic who collected his urine in jars, were seduced in this case entirely by an offer of $250,000 and a BMW—the informant himself wrote that the men were participating “for the money. … They're not even thinking about the cause.”
Beyond legal questions of entrapment, the actual utility of invading often impoverished ethnic communities with promises of money in exchange for committing acts of terrorism seems, at best questionable. One ex-FBI agent and terrorism expert complained to Businessweek: “We’re interested in catching terrorists, not people who have mental problems and wonder what it would be like to blow up the Sears tower but they can’t get out of bed in the morning.”
In fact, the circumstances surrounding the Mohamud case immediately reminded me of the Indian-born British salesman Hemant Lakhani, who was convicted of providing material support to terrorists when he sold a stinger missile to the FBI. As Petra Bartosiewicz explained on This American Life, however, Lakhani was an “amazingly incompetent illegal arms dealer” and a “lair, shameless braggart, and a snob” who not only claimed to the FBI that he could obtain a missile, but equally improbably that he could secure a submarine and plutonium. When Lakhani proved unable to supply the FBI informant with the missile he guaranteed, the government actually provided the missile to him so that he could sell it back to the FBI. Lakhani was not so much a terrorist-in-waiting as he was an immoral liar with a pathological need to be liked who was provided by the FBI with both the means and motive to commit an act he had no philosophical commitment to.
Conover suggests this strategy is like “sending lots of little devils out into Muslim communities and getting them to sit on people's shoulders and whisper in their ears” and points out that there is no shortage of disturbed (or even seemingly normal) Americans who could be convinced to commit violent crimes given enough enticement. The government would certainly have its hands full if it conducted a sting operation of every teenage boy with violent fantasies and a willingness to act upon them if given encouragement, rewards, and means. So it is worth asking whether the government’s tactics actually do anything to prevent actual terrorism or whether it simply allows them first to create, and then to chase, ghosts—thereby inflating the perceived risk of terror.
Meanwhile, the Corvallis mosque attended by Mohamud was firebombed by an arsonist. Greenwald concludes: "So the FBI did not stop any actual Terrorist plots, but they may have helped inspire one."
The answer is shari‘a.
Measure 755 “forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law” when issuing rulings, which has been a notorious problem in a state where Muslims make up—at most—.04% of the population. The authors of the measure argued that it was direly needed in order to confront the impending “onslaught” on Oklahoman values by, presumably, invading hordes of Islam-o-bots riding camels down the Oklahoma freeway, lopping off the heads of unbelievers.
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Of particular concern to supporters was the, admittedly appalling, ruling by a New Jersey judge that a Moroccan immigrant had not committed marital rape because he believed that, within his religion, marriage implied consent. While outrage is justified, the assumption that the judge was therefore “applying shari‘a” is a rather wishful, and probably willful, misreading by the Islamophobes.
The judge did not exculpate the husband because shari‘a “allows for” marital rape; instead, he simply ruled that the husband “did not act with criminal intent” because the man believed his actions were within his religious rights. So the judge was acting solely within the confines of American law—though his decision was egregious and later overturned by the New Jersey appellate court. Ironically, enough, the judge was guilty of excepting a man from the application of state laws because his religious views conflicted with that law—a kind of decision many conservative Christians may themselves appreciate.
Nonetheless, the media campaign in support of the measure, which was funded most prominently by the anti-Muslim organization Act! For America, seized upon this decision as proof that evil, evil “Shari’a law” was almost certainly coming to Oklahoma unless it was stopped:
Act! For America was founded in order to “provide American citizens a means to be a collective voice for the democratic values of Western Civilization, such as the celebration of life and liberty, as opposed to the authoritarian values of radical Islam, such as the celebration of death, terror, and tyranny.” But, interestingly, it’s not just death, terror, and tyranny that concerns them. No, no. Among the various other grievances cited by Act! For America in their dis-informational PowerPoint on Islam is that, ostensibly because of Muslim dietary restrictions, “Bacon and eggs are becoming harder and harder to get at British university cafeterias.” Those. Bastards.
As noted lovers of bacon and eggs, and apparently feeling asphyxiated by the icy death grip of the 15,000 or so Muslims in their state, Oklahomans passed Measure 755 by an enormous margin of 70-30%.
By no means do I purport to be an expert on Islamic law, but Measure 755 reveals the unsurprising fact that Islamophobes know virtually nothing about shari‘a beyond the Disney movie Aladdin:
Poor Ali Ababwa. First he almost loses his hand, then he’s condemned by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee for insisting that “they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric but, hey, it’s home.” Damn PC Police, man, and their making sure children aren't indoctrinated with vicious portrayals of an entire region.
In reality, shari‘a is not the application by the state of ancient and barbaric laws to modern situations, but is instead a process whereby jurists issue rulings based on their own reasoning, precedent, and holy texts. As Sherman Jackson explains, it is a set of competing discourses and approaches to the law that are constantly re-interpreted in light of new socio-cultural circumstances and is necessarily decentralized. Marital rape is not a concept familiar to Islamic jurisprudence (and was not in the West until the 1970s), but it could become one if Muslim jurists begin to deliberate on it.
As a result, shari‘a exists in an uneasy, if not untenable, relationship with the state. Wael Hallaq, the most important scholar of Islamic Law in the English-speaking world, argues that even in states like Iran, which presume to apply shari‘a, the vast majority of their laws are necessarily “Western in inspiration and content,” because the strict codification and enforcement of law is fundamentally at odds with the actual function of shari‘a.
So the notion of America (or any country) “under the rule of shari‘a” is the unrealizable dream of Islamists, and the unnecessary nightmare of Islamophobes. Haroon Moghul expresses amusement “that Oklahomans would consider this threat enough to pass a law, to head off (and I can’t believe this is the case) the looming Islamization of the West” and it is, on the one hand, riotously humorous. But it is also obviously a disturbing addition to what is beginning to feel like an unstoppable wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States.
For those who know me, it may seem rather odd to read me continually defending religious believers since I am myself openly irreligious. Like most people who define themselves as atheists, I have never found any convincing evidence for any sort of “god” at all, and I am all but certain that there is no anthropomorphized god-figure acting in the world. But I also recognize the possibility that my own way of understanding the world around me is so strongly conditioned by the modern, secular, rational world that I simply cannot perceive the divine acting upon us.
This, I believe, is what true skepticism looks like. Skepticism cannot be simply holding militantly to your own beliefs and forcing others to provide a burden of proof. It is also constantly questioning your own beliefs and worldview as well. And this holds equally to religious and non-religious people.
Christopher Hitchens has long been one of my favorite journalists. Not only is he an engrossing writer willing to criticize sacred cows, but he is a drunken curmudgeon from a bygone era of drunken public intellectuals—he is a gin-soaked, high-brow Andy Rooney with actual wit but without the unseemly dementia and eyebrows. And like any good public intellectual, his best quality is the ability to piss everyone off, myself included. His support for the Iraq War has been problematic at best, his tendency toward misogyny is distasteful and, most importantly for this discussion, his association with the so-called “New Atheists” is unfortunate.
To be fair, it should be noted that Hitchens has been far less shrill in his criticism of religion than the insufferably smug certitude of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—elite snobs so obnoxious they thought to label themselves “Brights” (a label even Hitchens finds distasteful). While Dawkins spends the majority of The God Delusion essentially arguing that religious people are inherently dumb people, Hitchens’ book god is not Great (while not entirely eschewing this tendency) tends to focus more on certain religious practices that are clearly abhorrent to modern liberal sensibilities. So I was disappointed to see him pen a recent article on Slate arguing that “the taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.” I have two brief points to make.
First, what does it mean to “tame and domesticate” religion?
Talal Asad has suggested that defining anything as “religious” is really a way of marking it distinct, and therefore necessarily separate, from other forms of public life. Many Americans, even religious Americans, easily keep their private religious lives largely separate from their public life. But others may not so easily draw a clear distinction between private religious beliefs and the rest of their everyday lives. Many religious people both in the United States and outside it inhabit a world in which the sacred is omnipresent and omniscient; they interpret the events of their lives through the lens of religious texts; and they may hold values and desires that differ dramatically from secularists.
So, from a rational viewpoint it might be easy to mock someone who sees the Virgin Mary in a sunspot on the window of a tacqueria. But for someone with a particular way of understanding the world around them, this is perfectly reasonable and expected. And while American culture is obsessed with the prevention of suffering, many religious people believe that enduring pain is a necessary element of redemption (Catholics, for instance). And as Saba Mahmood explains, Western critics may understand veiled Muslim women as victims of patriarchal religious authority, but many of these women actually choose to veil themselves—not because they “don’t know any better,” but because they live in a world in which piety is more important than liberal notions of “freedom” or “choice.”
My point is that religious people often inhabit dramatically different worlds than Hitchens or I do. What he is really promoting, I think, is the elimination of religious ways of living in the world that don’t conform easily to secular, liberal values. “Taming and domesticating” religion really means privatizing religion and making certain practices and beliefs more palatable to secular observers. Hitchens and his ilk are essentially arguing to forcefully integrate religious people into a secular, rational, scientific, nationalistic, democratic, capitalist world. And this is, in reality, a form of colonialism.
Such an argument is premised on the uncritical belief in the superiority of what Hitchens terms “civilization.” While he is absolutely correct that many religious practices and beliefs are utterly abhorrent to any reasonable liberal observer, can we honestly say that science, nationalism, or capitalism have proven themselves any less prone to violence or any more democratic than religions have?
Mainstream science has long been central to racism and colonialism; homosexuality used to be defined as a mental illness “cured” with electroshock; transorbital lobotomies were once considered a solution to even minor problems. What contemporary scientific practices will seem utterly barbaric in fifty years? Capitalism is responsible for millions of deaths through conquest and war, it has created unbelievable social inequality and suffering, and has increasingly deracinated the world of any meaning beyond the accumulation of consumer goods and personal wealth. And the modern-nation state has proven itself time and time again to be the most efficient vehicle for the wholesale slaughter of humanity ever conceived.
As Asad questions in On Suicide Bombing, why are we so repulsed by individual acts of religious terrorism, but completely accepting of even more destructive forms of state terrorism? Americans continue to believe the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were somehow justifiable, but would be utterly horrified if the same action was perpetrated by a non-state actor. Why? This is not to defend religious terrorism by any means, but simply to ask why we are increasingly so quick to criticize abhorrent religious practices but so accepting of the equally (if not more) destructive practices of “civilization”?
There is growing outrage (OUTRAGE!) over the memorial to United 93 victims, which critics suggest hides a wicked red crescent and is wickedly oriented toward wicked Mecca. Now, for a moment, let's actually just overlook the preposterous levels of insane, jingoistic paranoia required to say "a more obvious tribute to the terrorists is hard to imagine" toward the image below. Even seeing a distinct "red crescent" at all requires approaching the picture like one of those optical illusion books for kids. So even if it were a hidden tribute to the "tur-ists" (which of course, it isn't, but again let's pretend it is), I can think of a few ways to make it "more obvious."
I see a circle in a field ringed with some sort of red plant. Why is red so upsetting? What did red do to these people? Green is traditionally the color of Islam. So unless the "secret Muslim" planners found it difficult to find a green plant to use as fringe for their evil crescent and just went with the next evilest color, I think I'm missing the symbolism...But, wait, maybe it's because it's a red crescent. And that would make sense, since the International Red Cross and Red Crescent is a notorious terrorist organization with close ties to other evil-doers like UNICEF and Doctors without Borders.
And look! If you draw perpendicular lines and align it on a map just right, it looks like the bow of the crescent sort of points toward the Kabaa! Stone cold evidence of... ugh, I'm bored with this already... Let's just hope this doesn't lead to more Qu'ran burning.
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| Cross your eyes and you will see the face of Satan! Or possibly Elmo. (Source: NPS.gov) |
And look! If you draw perpendicular lines and align it on a map just right, it looks like the bow of the crescent sort of points toward the Kabaa! Stone cold evidence of... ugh, I'm bored with this already... Let's just hope this doesn't lead to more Qu'ran burning.
I’ve heard that the best way to make a successful blog is to repeatedly post on the same topic over and over until the four (maybe) people who read it get bored. And then also intersperse it with smug, pedantic commentary on trivial issues. So, anyway, about this thing in New York…
At this point, there is probably little left to be said--when Ron Paul is the voice of reason, you know things have lost any semblance of sanity--but it might be interesting nonetheless to think about one controversy with an eye toward another. No doubt you will remember the outrage expressed by many Muslims across the world when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons in 2005 that depicted Muhammad (thus violating Islamic law), including one in which he wore a turban made of a lit bomb emblazoned with the shahada.
The reaction in Europe and America ranged from a didactic South Park episode (redundant, I know) that taught us all a valuable lesson about the evils of censorship to alarmist outrage about the threat of “Islamofacism”: “Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now.” Fuck, I wish. The general gist these reactions shared was reaffirmation of the secular liberal values of freedom of speech and press. As conservative commentator Daniel Pipes wrote at the time:
“The key issue in the battle over twelve Danish cartoons…is this: Will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West? Ultimately, there is no compromise: Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.”
Pipes, like many other Americans, argued that the defining characteristic of “Western civilization” was its reverence for free speech, including the right to insult and blaspheme, and therefore, censoring any speech that was intentionally insensitive, offensive, and blasphemous to a group of people would be a violation of basic liberal principles.
Yet on August 16, Pipes wrote that the Islamic Center in Manhattan should “be barred from opening” because it “carries the unmistakable odor of Islamic triumphalism” and might “give reason to worry that this center will spread Islamist ideology.” But even if concerns about the Imam at the center were not preposterously overblown, and even if it were a meeting place for ultra-conservative Muslims, would it not still fall under the very principles Pipes believes are the crux of Western civilization itself?
What is particularly fascinating is how many activists and commentators have consistently used words like blasphemous, sacred, and insensitive to describe their objections to the Islamic center. Journalist Charles Krauthammer, in a widely-published editorial entitled “Sacrilege at Ground Zero,” rather frighteningly criticizes Mayor Bloomberg for his “expansive view of religious freedom” before going on to argue that “although America is a free country” it is acceptable to prevent buildings that “offend local sensibilities”—particularly for reasons of “common decency and respect for the sacred.” Thus, one would assume here that Krauthammer believes that when a speech act or a public assembly offends sensibilities toward the sacred, it can and should be restricted.
So what did Krauthammer have to say about the Danish cartoon controversy? He criticized any Muslim felt outrage at the blasphemy, of course. Moderate Muslims who condemned violence while expressing disapproval with the cartoons were, for Krauthammer, endorsing “the goals of the mob without endorsing the means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.” Indeed.
In the book Is Critique Secular? anthropologist Saba Mahmood argues that, for many Muslims, the Danish cartoons were offensive less because they were blasphemous than because they insulted a person who was, for them, very tangibly real, with whom they had established a personal and loving relationship. (It is, one would suspect, the same reason that Christians tend to be upset when you drop a crucifix into a steaming bucket of piss). Even as they condemned the violence, she suggested, such Muslims nonetheless felt the sense of grief, sorrow, and anger that comes after a personal affront on a close friend or family member.
Now, to think that allowing Muslims to congregate in the general vicinity of where 9/11 victims died is an insult "to the victims and their families" is, of course, the result of incredibly ignorant Islamophobia. But perhaps this whole controversy suggests a much greater similarity between the sensibilities of “the West” and the Islamic world than the former wants to admit.
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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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