The furore surrounding the so-called Ground Zero mosque has intensified once more, as the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, again voices his support for the community centre project to go ahead at its proposed location, two blocks away from the Ground Zero site.
Last night, the mayor hosted a Ramadan dinner at his official residence celebrating the breaking of the fast. Addressing the guests, he went even further in his defence of the project, linking it in unequivocally moral terms to fundamental American freedoms. This particular section is worth quoting in full:
But if we say that a mosque and community centre should not be built near the perimeter of the World Trade Center site, we would compromise our commitment to fighting terror with freedom.
We would undercut the values and principles that so many heroes died protecting. We would feed the false impressions that some Americans have about Muslims. We would send a signal around the world that Muslim Americans may be equal in the eyes of the law, but separate in the eyes of their countrymen. And we would hand a valuable propaganda tool to terrorist recruiters, who spread the fallacy that America is at war with Islam.
Islam did not attack the World Trade Center — al-Qaeda did. To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American. Today we are not at war with Islam — we are at war with al-Qaeda and other extremists who hate freedom.
The members of our military are men and women at arms — battling for hearts and minds. And their greatest weapon in that fight is the strength of our American values, which have always inspired people around the world. But if we do not practice here at home what we preach abroad — if we do not lead by example — we undermine our soldiers. We undermine our foreign policy objectives. And we undermine our national security.
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Crucially, later on in the speech, Bloomberg compared the anti-Muslim sentiment the debate has prompted to the discrimination previously experienced by other religious groups, saying:
It was not so long ago that Jews and Catholics had to overcome stereotypes and build bridges to those who viewed them with suspicion and less than fully American.
By asserting once again that opposition to this plan goes right to the heart of America’s constitutional principles of religious freedom, Bloomberg has injected some much-needed context into the debate. The comparison between the American Muslim community and other religious minorities is key, reminding people in the midst of the outrage that this kind of extreme religious discrimination is, unfortunately, nothing new, but Americans have overcome it before, and can and should again.
Unfortunately, the controversy has now been further incorporated into New York’s political wrangling, as the state assembly leader Sheldon Silver asserted his opposition to the plan, even though the building already has city approval. Silver, a powerful figure in New York’s Democratic elite, said that while he recognised that the constitutional right to religious freedom applied here, he felt at the developers should seek a compromise site to show that they are “sensitive to the issues”.
Silver’s comments about sensitivity come as the US state department has issued a warning to journalists to be “cautious” about how they report the controversy. At a press conference, a spokesman for the department, P J Crowley, warned of the dangers of taking statements out of context, referring no doubt to the hysteria raging in the US conservative blogosphere over a supposed comment made in 2005 by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the project’s instigator, suggesting that the US was responsible for more Muslim deaths than al-Qaeda is for murders of non-Muslims.
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