Opinion: The ground zero mosque is good for the Jews

By Richard L. Stein

Issue of August 20, 2010/ 10 Elul 5770

I live in Riverdale, a community that was traumatized fifteen months ago when a consortium of police agencies foiled an alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb two of its largest synagogues. It wasn't the first time that attackers - acting in the name of Islam - had targeted institutions in our midst.

Yet, a local newspaper editorial, written in May of 2009 - just a week after the abortive synagogue attack - was able to draw a positive lesson from the incident.

"There are times when good flowers from the soil of evil. So Riverdale reaped a harvest of goodness from the horrific plan of the four men who schemed to set off truck bombs aimed at Riverdale Temple and the Riverdale Jewish Center," it noted.

The good the editorial referred to was an outpouring of support from members of the clergy of every faith and denomination - especially Muslims. One after another of the city's imams rose to the podium at a rally in the community room of the Riverdale Jewish Center to condemn the plot and avow that terrorism has no place in Islam.

Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, an African-American from Harlem, reminded his listeners that too often Muslims are singled out as though every worshiper in every mosque harbored hatred.

Ten years after Al Qaeda's heinous destruction of the World Trade Center that misconception is as strong as ever. Recent attempts to build mosques and Muslim community centers, not just near Ground Zero, but from coast to coast, have met with vehement opposition. Protestors have rallied in Staten Island, Falls Church, Va., Sheboygan, Wis., and even tiny Temecula, Ca.

Of course, religious misunderstanding and persecution are not unique to America. What is unique is our precious Bill of Rights.

Europe's colonies in the new world were peopled with adherents of unpopular religious sects, and though they fled mistreatment in their home countries they were not above meting it out to "heretics" in their midst.

In 1654, Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of what was then New Netherland, sat down at his desk - not far from today's Ground Zero - to write to the directors of the Dutch West India Company:

"The Jews who have arrived would nearly all like to remain here, but learning that they (with their customary usury and deceitful trading with the Christians) were very repugnant... we have... deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart, praying... that the deceitful race - such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ - be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony..."

In a later missive, Stuyvesant explained that he feared tolerance for Jews might attract other persecuted minorities, like Catholics, to settle in the city.

Beholden to wealthy Jewish investors, the directors refused to expel the Jews from Manhattan but they wrote to Stuyvesant, "The consent given to the Jews to go to New Netherland was extended with respect to civil and political liberties, without the said Jews becoming thereby entitled to a license to exercise and carry on their religion in synagogues or gatherings."

It was, thus, to protect us from ourselves - Quakers from Puritans, Catholics from Protestants, Jews from Christians and even Moslems from the rest - that the First Amendment was inserted in the Constitution. Its words are clear:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

Free exercise of religion means being able to put a church, synagogue or mosque where adherents want one, even if it's a place where no one else does.

Richard L. Stein is the former editor and publisher of The Riverdale Press, a weekly newspaper that was firebombed by followers of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for supporting the right of Americans to read Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.