Opinions & Editorials
'Mosque' opponents no champions of Democracy
“The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer,” Paul wrote.
The would-be Paul Reveres galloping through lower Manhattan, bellowing “the Muslims are coming,” are playing into the hands of religious extremists by cementing the image of the United States as a nation waging war on Islam.The result is division and fear, and there is no collective emotion more useful to the enemies of freedom than fear. There is nothing new about the presence of Muslims in New York or the united States and those trying to conjure up the illusion of a “Muslim invasion” are using fear as a weapon against freedom. Fear of terrorism is being used to dupe the general public into abandoning the democratic values of our constitution and replacing them with a generalized Islamophobia.While the fear of being viewed as subversive or un-American is being used to coerce American Muslims into forfeiting their constitutionally-guaranteed right to religious freedom.The spectre of “radical Islamists” pushing for a Muslim theocracy in the United States is not the creation of those with an anti-theocracy agenda, just a different one. The most vocal opponents of the proposed Park 51 community center have no problem with the idea of theocratic government that uses religious text to create laws and restrict the freedom of non-believers and people from other faiths, so long as it’s the “right” faith doing the restricting.“By no means are all or most Muslims fanatics of the Osama bin Laden variety,” conservative commentator Pat Buchanan writes in a recent article widely distributed online. “But many are uncompromising in their belief that, once their faith becomes the majority faith in a community or society, Muslims should write the rules and Muslims should make the law.”But it is Buchanan who does not believe in a separation between church and state and has encouraged Christian Americans to, “capture their occupied public schools and re-establish their beliefs as the legitimate moral foundation of American society.” His rationale? “Three-in-four Americans profess a Christian faith.”Thanks to a largely lazy and reactionary news media, the center - basically a Muslim YMCA that would be open to all the public - has been successfully labeled “the mosque at ground zero” by those who want to use it as a social wedge. The real tragedy, however, is not the unremarkable fact that the mainstream media once again failed to see through the sloppy, boilerplate propaganda spoon-fed them by the Republican PR machine. What’s truly disturbing about the public response to our nation’s latest media circus is the growing knee-jerk, xenophobia it represents. According to a CNN poll, 68 percent of U.S. citizens are opposed to the construction of Park 51. Most of them acknowledge that there is no legal basis for restricting its construction. Even the most strident critics of the proposed center admit that its construction would be perfectly legal and is protected by the constitution. They claim that it’s “insensitive” for a community bonded by an adherence to Islam to create a space to share its culture with the larger community, because that larger community was scarred by the actions of extremists who also professed faith in Islam.What is truly insensitive is the “Burn A Qu’Ran Day” planned by the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville Florida on the ninth anniversary of September 11. A twisted display that commemorates a tragedy, brought about by hate and religious fanaticism, with a stunning display of religious fanaticism and hate. The message this sends to Muslims everywhere is that our country views their religion as violent and evil, or at the very least, too scary and flawed to be allowed in certain public spaces.Incidentally, groups who burn books are rarely, if ever, big on freedom.We’re all so absorbed in the fighting over the difference between a mosque and a center; and the precise number of blocks between Park 51 and “Ground Zero” (an imprecise label for a space that nobody can agree on the boundaries of) that we’ve let the civil rights of American citizens become a secondary issue.It is fundamentally wrong to deny the freedom of an unpopular group, but it is even more despicable to ask that they willingly forfeit their freedom and vilify those among them who refuse to submit to second-class citizenship. It’s outrageous to ask American Muslims who had no involvement - directly or otherwise - with the attacks of 9-11 to live with ‘separate but equal’ status and not assert their constitutional rights for the sake of a “sensitive” majority.In fairness, not all Conservatives or Republicans are buying into the latest political hate parade. In a statement released on his Website, Rep. Ron Paul, of Texas, decried what he called a “sideshow” motivated by “hate and demagoguery.” “The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer,” Paul wrote.The Guardsman is not a paper that traditionally makes endorsements of any kind, so we are not explicitly endorsing the construction of the Park 51 community center. Like most of the center’s opposition, we don’t live in Manhattan and our lives will not be affected in any way by its construction. However, we are condemning the slippery slope of religious intolerance that is represented by the public “outrage” over a perfectly legal structure being built a few blocks away from a national tragedy that Muslims shared in the pain of.The truth is that no matter how many names of World Trade Center employees, first responders and other Muslim Americans killed in the attacks on our country are read aloud, the religious right will not be moved. They see 9-11 as their tragedy and America as their country. For them, no distance between the center and ground zero will ever be far enough.In their minds, the proper response to Americans exercising their civil rights is fear, but there is no room for fear in a free society. Free people have the freedom to be anything but afraid—we give up the right to be afraid when we have the audacity to call ourselves free people.
