Posted on 08/06/2010 5:14:07 AM PDT by SJackson
Anti-Defamation League Should Not Oppose Mosques At Ground Zero
By Alan M. Dershowitz
The ADL’s decision to oppose the building of a 13 story Muslim center two blocks from Ground Zero is inconsistent with its mission. The ADL has a long and distinguished history of opposing bigotry, supporting multiculturalism and advocating tolerance. Though it began as an organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism, it has become one of the most potent forces against all forms of religious, ethnic and racial bigotry. Following the mass murders perpetrated on 9/11 by Islamic extremists, the ADL was in the forefront of standing up against those who would use this hateful attack to generalize hatred against all Muslims or all Arabs.
In light of this history, I would have expected the ADL to support the building of this Muslim community center, which would include a mosque, a performing arts center, a pool and a restaurant. At the very least I would have expected it to remain silent and not to lend its powerful and distinguished voice to an opposition that includes many bigots along with many decent people who have expressed legitimate concerns about the structure.
Reasonable people can disagree about the merits of building a Muslim center so close to the sight of a horrendous crime committed in the name of Islam by extremists who do not represent their religion. Many Jews were deeply offended when a Roman Catholic covenant was built adjacent to Auschwitz.
Supporters argue that the proximity of the mosque to the site of this crime sends a powerful message that there are many Muslims in the world who identify with the victims rather than the perpetrators. The most influential opposition comes from families of many of the victims who were killed at Ground Zero, though some families favor the project while others have remained silent.
Let the debate continue, but let the ADL not lend its imprimatur of tolerance to those who stand in opposition. Inevitably, this has become a political debate with rightwing republicans such as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich leading the political campaign against it, while Mayor Michael Bloomberg has strongly supported the project on grounds of religious freedom, arguing that government should have no role in dictating where a mosque can be situated. As Bloomberg put it, “what is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us? Democracy is stronger than this…”
The ADL’s decision to join this debate on the side of those who oppose the mosque was exacerbated by the reason given by Abe Foxman, a friend and a man who I admire, for why the opposition of some families was an important part of why the ADL came down against the project. Mr. Foxman, who himself survived the Holocaust, was quoted in The New York Times saying: ”Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational.” Referring to the loved ones of the 9/11 victims, he added, “Their anguish entitles them to a position that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”
This is a dangerous argument that has implications totally inconsistent with the mission of the ADL. Bigotry is often a result of victimization, perceived or real. Many Germans felt victimized following World War I, and some blamed the Jews. Although their position was “irrational or bigoted,” they were not entitled to act on it. Nor are Palestinians who feel victimized by Israel entitled to be bigoted against Jews. There is simply is no excuse for bigotry, and the ADL ought to know that better than any other organization.
The ADL was founded as the result of irrational bigotry directed against a Jew named Leo Frank by a Ku Klux Klan type organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan. They lynched Leo Frank in the name of an alleged victim of rape and murder. The fact that Frank was totally innocent didn’t matter to them. Their anguish over her victimization did not entitle them to their irrationality and bigotry. The ADL should know better than to provide an “abuse excuse” to bigots based on perceived victimization.
The vast majority of those who oppose the mosque at Ground Zero are neither bigoted nor irrational. Some are. So are some who favor it. That is not the issue. The issue is whether a great human rights organization should oppose the building of a Muslim center near Ground Zero. I have heard no rational reason from the ADL why it should stand in opposition to this project.
I hope that Abe Foxman was misquoted or misspoke and that he will withdraw both his opposition to the mosque and most especially the argument he offered for it. The ADL should continue with its noble mission of siding with the victims of bigotry rather than making excuses for those who engage in bigotry.
Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is the author of more than 20 works of fiction and non-fiction, including Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence (2007) and The Case for Israel (2003).
*
Emboldening the Enemy
By Victor Davis Hanson
I am not well enough acquainted with the history of the Anti-Defamation League to offer a competent analysis about its proper reaction to the Mosque at Ground Zero controversy. But the issue raises larger questions that I think all reasonable people should be concerned with.
1) What little we know about Khan/Rauf family connection to the Mosque is not encouraging; at the least, it seems that a key proponent of the mosque cannot fully explain exactly from where all the funding arises, or whether in the past Mr. Rauf has shown sympathy for radical terrorists. So there is a legitimate concern that those in the past who offered apologies for the tactics of Islamic terrorism are now to be financially connected to those building a mosque near a site where 3,000 American perished due to Islamic terrorism. Why not a simple, transparent and full accounting?
2) Municipalities, through zoning pressures and laws, make all sorts of decisions about the sorts of construction allowed. Surely, this falls into the category of taste. Professor Dershowitz cites the Roman Catholic convent near Auschwitz as a parallel. Aside from the fact that the construction of such a building likewise showed poor taste and so, as I recall, was closed by Pope Paul II in 1993, it is an inexact parallel, in that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were agnostic or atheist Nazi pagans, who saw the church as valuable only as a social institution to preserve order and tradition.
Indeed, the Nazis targeted many Christians for their pacifism, anti-Nazi activity and sympathy for the Jews. But at Ground Zero, the religious symbolism of a huge mosque, fairly or not, resonates with the purported beliefs of the mass murderers. Hawaiians would not allow a Bushido shrine (unlike the Nazis, the Japanese fascists absorbed religion into their ideology) near the USS Arizona, not because they are bigots, but because they are sensitive to the dead and the symbolism that might thus arise. They know it would insult the memory of those who were entombed below, and at the same time give encouragement to right-wing fanatical Japanese extremists.
Aside from the fact that Hiroshima was a military target, and its bombing helped to end the war and save thousands of lives in the Pacific who would otherwise have been doomed by the ongoing Japanese butchery in Asia and a planned invasion of the Japanese mainland, no one has urged that there be a Southern Baptist Church or an American Methodist Church near the Ground Zero shrine as a sign of postwar harmony; such a proposal might be well intended, but it would be also grotesque.
3) Much has been made that America shows her strength and tolerant values by allowing such a symbolic structure near Ground Zero, but one wonders in a huge city like New York, why Ground Zero at all? While we believe it may reveal our liberality, our enemies, again fairly or not, will see the mosque as a sort of strong horse symbolism, in which those who evoked Islam to murder thousands of Americans found closure by tearing down godless towers and hence paving the way for Islam’s shrine to rise nearby, as in their frequent crackpot al Qaeda triumphalist historicizing about the minarets on Santa Sophia or the Al-Aqsa Mosque atop the site of the first and second Jewish temples.
Surely would not the well-intentioned Muslim community of New York wish to move their proposed site just a bit further from the site of 9/11, in order not to enhance the propaganda of a crazed minority that so unfairly tarnishes their efforts at ecumenicalism?
Instead, one can already see that supporters of the mosque advertising the Ground Zero connection, but, again, for what purpose? Again, they must know that a small fanatical minority of a billion Muslims—that is, many millions—will gain confidence and encouragement from such a gratuitous act. As Lawrence Wright showed in the Looming Tower, Atta, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and others were iconic killers who, like the Taliban who in 2001 blew up the Buddhist monuments at Bamyan, chose their targets largely for their symbolic capital.
I predict that within a year of the mosque’s construction, there will be videos, posters, and pamphlets all over the Middle East, juxtaposing the minarets of the mosque with the Ground Zero memorial wreckage—shown as purported proof how such mass murder can demoralize a beaten people into bowing to the Islam of the killers. Few have commented on the security aspects of such an act, but surely it will give added confidence to those who wish to tear down and incinerate more American towers and landmarks.
4) The war against radical Islam is ongoing, as we see in a resurgent Taliban, and the recent Hasan murdering, the Abdul Mutallab attempt, and the Times Square bombing. Such a controversial decision surely can be postponed until the Islamists cease their attempts at attacking the West in general and New York in particular, given that the war so often hinges on symbolism, propaganda, and the perceived strength or weakness of the West in standing up to radical Islamists.
As we have seen from the recent rude reception in India of President Obama’s representative to the Muslim world, the response to the Obama Cairo speech, the various anti-American and anti-Semitic rantings out of Turkey and Pakistan, both the recipients of recent lavish American attention and cash, and the continual al Qaeda threatening—what we consider to be outreach and tolerance are often seen as both weakness and an invitation to even greater demands for apologies and concessions.
As it is, the current asymmetry is absurd: a Christian would incur a death sentence for building a church in much of the Middle East, Arabs vote and express themselves more freely in the Zionist Entity than almost elsewhere in the Middle East, and current U.S. outreach to Muslims and liberal immigration policies are unrivaled in the Western world, and certainly unheard of in places like Russia, China, and much of Latin America or Africa. The rest of the world, not the U.S, has a long way to go in matters of religious tolerance.
The location of the mosque is a legal, though deliberately tasteless, act that will have the effect of encouraging radical extremists in their ongoing efforts to attack icons of modern Western liberal society. Cui bono?
Muslims that visit NY will head for that mosque and have a hearty laugh at our expense
It’ll be Mecca, NYC.
A pilgrimage.
This is really strange....because Dershowitz is usually one of the few liberal Jews who defends Israel...while the ADL usually leans pro-terrorist.
The ADL actually gets something right....and Dershowitz doesn’t like it. Funny that Dershowitz is the anti-Semite here.
Supporting a shrine to Islamic Terrorism near the 9/11 tragedy is wrong, and outright evil. Islam is a religion that bans the expression of other faiths in Islamic nations...this shrine does not promote religious freedom...it promotes Islamic Terrorism
Since the effect 9/11 seemed to have on him and his book, “Why Terrorism Works”, and other writings in the past 9yrs, Dershowitz seems to be walking a fine line here.
There is simply no excuse for defining it as "bigotry."
In fact, I’d like to hear him defend the stance he takes on coddling terrorists or helping to even promote their cause (which he states in his book Why Terrorism Works) and this defence of the mosque.
How is using money from people who support terrorist acts in order to build this mosque, not also doing exactly what he argues against in his book?
It feels like this irritating tse-tse fly has been infesting the fetid academic, legal and media swamps FOREVER.
He's 73. Do Hahvahd perfessers EVER retire, EVER?
Good thing I inoculated myself against him decades ago.
Leni
Are the local firefighters going to attend to it if ever there is a fire?
Are there going to be loud calls to prayer 5 times a day wafting over Manhattan and ground zero?
It’ll be Mecca, NYC.>>>>>>>
Muslims follow the mosques wherever they are built. Muslims will feel a lot more home in Manhattan
Mosques are how Muslims mark off territory.... canine style
So POS Alan attempts to make Catholics equivalent to Islamic murderers and NAZI's.
Foxman has been a very difficult person and I see him as generally hewing to the leftist line. He seems determined to alienate Christians and attacks us heavily for any perceived slight (even though none was meant or actually even existed).
But perhaps this has thrown him into the lion’s mouth, and maybe the teeth are making him hit one of those wake-up moments.
Hugh Hewit made an interesting analogy on his program yesterday.
He compared the battle to retain the “Sacred Space” and hallowed ground at Ground Zero to the fight to prevent the incursion of commercial areas within the space of the battlegrounds of the Civil War.
Even a Museum was successfully thwarted from being built at Gettysburg as it impinged on the sacred and haloowed space of that area.
His argument is that there is no place for a building with a “message” which is what a mosque is, at this hallowed site.
Exactomundo!
How stupid are some people?
Pretty frickin stupid!
Dershowitz is the prototypical "useful idiot."
It's truly amazing how someone like Dershowitz can have a "high" IQ and be a complete moron, at the same time.
STE=Q
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