WASHINGTON (ABP) — One thing is settled in the controversy over building an Islamic cultural center near the former World Trade Center site in New York: There is no legal impediment to the facility rising there.
But, say experts in law, religious liberty and Islam, the strong emotions and rhetoric nonetheless surrounding the project suggest Islam’s role in the United States may be the latest battle front in an increasingly diverse society’s culture wars.
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“This discussion masks a kind of ugly and angry reaction or backlash against Muslims in America and Muslim institutions, and I don’t think enough attention is given to that, in my view,” said Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum in Washington. “The real issue is … are we as a country going to ensure that everyone is going to be protected to go out and practice their faith freely not only without governmental interference, but also without fear of intimidation by people who are attacking their faith?”
Makings of a media firestorm
Several political leaders — most notably potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin — have repeatedly attacked attempts to build a 13-story Islamic cultural center called Park51 about two blocks from the edge of the former World Trade Center site near the southern tip of Manhattan.
Gingrich has roundly attacked the center as an affront to American values. In a July 21 statement, he said: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.”
Opposition first surfaced from a group of 9/11 victims' relatives. Other groups for 9/11 victims and survivors have publicly supported the initiative. But Park51’s sponsors — a nonprofit called the Cordoba Initiative, with a stated goal to promote “understanding across minds and borders” — had the unequivocal backing of a broad group of New York political and religious leaders, chief among them Mayor Michael Boomberg (R).
The project gained all the necessary approvals from local authorities and strong support from representative bodies of local residents. Polls show a majority of Manhattan residents approve of the project.
Still, national polls show around two-thirds of Americans are opposed to the idea. Ongoing media attention to the controversy compelled President Obama to defend the center’s constitutional right to exist in remarks at an Aug. 13 White House dinner marking the beginning of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
A question of religious freedom?
Richard Land
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But some religious and political leaders have questioned that right — including Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.,
“I respectfully disagree with the president,” Land said in Aug. 14 remarks on his radio show, “Richard Land Live.”
Land cited a 1997 Supreme Court decision, City of Boerne v. Flores, that upheld the ability of city officials in Boerne, Texas, to block a Catholic church from expanding its building because of historic-preservation laws.
“The people of America have a right to say that this place, Ground Zero, has been made sacred by the enormity of the sacrifice of the 3,000 people who died there, such that we have to treat it differently than we would anyplace else," he said.
But Land’s organization opposed the Boerne ruling at the time as too restrictive of religious freedom. In fact Land, in 1998 congressional testimony for a bill to remedy some of the decision’s effects, called it “one of the worst decisions rendered by the Supreme Court in its long history.”
Chip Lupu, a church-state expert and professor at George Washington University Law School, said Land’s citation of the Boerne decision in the Park51 case is misguided, at best.
Chip Lupu
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“Nobody has the freedom to open a church or a synagogue or a mosque wherever you feel like,” he said. “But you say if this is a place where a religious center, a house of worship can go, then you absolutely cannot discriminate between faiths.”
Several churches already exist even closer to Ground Zero than the Park51 location. And the neighborhood has been home to another mosque, Masjid Manhattan, for 40 years.
Other motivations for opposition
Lupu said Land’s opposition is likely based not on legal principle but political expediency.
“He’s just being phony, and he knows it. He has a political constituency — a religious-political constituency — that’s conservative Christian, that has some anti-Muslim feelings and he’s just playing it,” he said.
The Newseum’s Haynes said he was annoyed by Land’s position.
“It bothers me when religious leaders are splitting hairs about court decisions when they should be simply saying religious freedom is a right for everyone and there’s no question about it,” he said. “For Land to at one time condemn the Supreme Court [on Boerne] … and when it involves Muslims to suddenly say the court got it right, or that Muslims in New York don’t have the full free-exercise right to build where they want, is very disappointing.”
Haynes said the Park51 case is just the most publicized and symbolic example of a growing national debate over Islam.
He noted other recent protests over building mosques and Islamic centers in cities across the country — such as in Temecula, Calif.; and Murfreesboro, Tenn.
“If we listen to what is actually being said at these meetings and read the signs that are being waved, I think that’s the real question here," he said. "The real problem here is that the debate about the mosque near Ground Zero has, to me, uncovered a growing Islamophobia around the country.”
Growing anti-Islam rhetoric
Ibrahim Hooper
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Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he’s seen a definite spike in anti-Islam rhetoric in the United States in recent months.
“You really cannot turn on a radio anywhere in America today to talk radio and not hear within an hour the most vicious kind of anti-Muslim polemic I have ever heard,” he said. “You’d think that Islam made people into just subhuman animals, that we’re engaged in cannibalism. There really is no limit now to the vilification of Islam.”
Hooper noted that there had been recent violent incidents against two mosques — an attempted bombing in Florida and an arson attack in Texas — that weren’t widely reported in the national media.
“The ones who are opposed to this center are the hard-core Islamophobes who are exploiting the legitimate emotions generated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks to promote their own agenda,” he said.
The story of pluralism in America
A sign at a July protest against a mosque expansion project in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
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Lupu contended that, on one level, opposition to mosques being constructed is a story that’s as old — and common — as religious pluralism in the United States.
“From one slant they were [due to] Islamophobia,” He said. “From another slant they’re something that’s very typical about American land-use problems and minority religion — that is to say, you don’t have to look very far to find people who don’t want Mormon temples in their community.”
The difference, according to Haynes, is that the nexus between Americans’ general ignorance about Islam and the feelings of fear inspired by acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam inspires widespread doubts about the goodwill of Muslims and Islamic institutions.
“If we’d only been able to take religion more seriously in our public schools, we could help many Americans at least to have a better understating of Islam and therefore not be so easily swept up in the anti-Islam rhetoric and the distortions that are being spread about Islam itself,” he said.
“Many Americans don’t know much about Islam, and so they are very easily persuaded that Islam is a threat to the United States — just as many Americans were persuaded that Catholicism was a threat to our liberty and freedoms in the 19th century.”
Haynes, Hooper and Lupu all agreed that this being a particularly contentious election year probably throws fuel on the rhetorical fire.
Haynes noted that many of the anti-mosque flare-ups around the country in recent months have been associated with Tea Party movements and leaders. “I think in a political season, there are those who are using this controversy to whip up emotion and to win elections,” he said. “But I think the fallout from this is going to be very serious and I think … for the long term in the United States, we are increasingly challenged by the question of how are we going to live up to our commitment to religious freedom, and do we really mean it? And I think the growth of Islam in America is going to be a true test for whether we meet it or not.
“And right now, I think, in many places in the United States, we’re failing the test. So, we need people with moral courage to stand up when it’s unpopular.”
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.
Previous ABP stories:
Southern Baptist leader says Obama wrong about Ground Zero mosque (8/16/2010)
Ground Zero controversy part of rise in anti-Islamic sentiment, experts say (8/4/2010)
Tenn. city latest flashpoint in culture wars (7/15/2010)