Editorial: Location, location, location

Issue of August 6, 2010/ 26 Av, 5770

Efforts to block construction of a mosque and Muslim community center in the emotional shadow of the destroyed World Trade Center don’t have a constitutional leg to stand on. This is America and the law is clear — as anyone who has ever fought for the right to put up a new shul could probably explain at length. The Cordoba Project, as it is known, is to go up on private property and now that the Landmark Preservation Commission has decided that the 150 year-old building currently on the site is not of any particular historical significance, the City of New York is essentially required to bend over backward to not get in the way.

However, opposition to the plan does not require legal standing; there is plenty of moral standing to go around.

Just because it is legally permissible to build a mosque and Islamic center at the planned site two blocks from Ground Zero does not mean that it should be built there.

It should not.

In exactly the same way that it was once simply wrong to construct a monastery at Auschwitz, so it is simply wrong to construct a mosque a few steps away from the site of the mass murder by Islamic fundamentalists of nearly 3,000 people. The families of the victims are entitled to feel upset about the plan and New Yorkers in general are entitled to their still exceedingly raw feelings as well.

We — all Americans — were attacked there and absorbed a tremendous blow. Thousands of families still deal every day with empty beds and empty seats at the dinner table because of it. If the imam who runs the Cordoba Project was as sincere as he says he is about healing and reconciliation, then he ought to have the sensitivity to know this and get his real estate agent searching for a site elsewhere in Manhattan, and considerably further away.

As an aside, we can think of more than a few countries, mostly in the Middle East, that would greatly benefit from a well-funded, moderate Muslim voice, and could use one much more than the United States, but that’s just our opinion. In any event, this is probably the only country whose laws absolutely protect the right to build a moderate Muslim anything.

By contrast, European democracies of late have been busy passing anti-Islamic laws that would never pass muster here.

The Anti-Defamation League caught many people by surprise late last week when its leader, Abraham Foxman, wrote on the ADL website, “The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.”

Just hours earlier an ADL executive told The Jewish Star on our What’s Next internet radio program that the organization, “is not taking a position on that,” and “the hateful rhetoric that has been out there in relation to the proposed mosque is troubling.”

We didn’t object to the seeming about-face. Rather we were gratified than an organization with the moral stature of the ADL would say out loud what most right-minded people of our acquaintance also happen to believe.

That’s why we were perplexed by Foxman’s comments to the Jerusalem Post this week about criticism of his principled position.

“We didn’t say it should be found, and we didn’t say we were opposed to it, okay?” Foxman said. “We brought up a sensitivity, which was then pushed by somebody for their own interest, whatever that may be.”

What’s wrong with being opposed to building a mosque at that specific location?

He certainly did sound opposed and that was just fine. We are too.