The Cordoba Initiative

An excerpt from a piece by Joe Conason at Salon.com:

To clear the air clouded by all these noxious effusions, it’s important to understand some basic facts about the project — and about the Constitution that Palin, Williams and the rest of the Tea Party movement claim to defend. 
The victims of 9/11 included numerous Muslims, as anyone browsing the memorial sites can see. Most of them were working New Yorkers who labored as cooks, waiters, cleaners and security guards in the World Trade Center — people whose suffering concerned the perpetrators of the attack no more than those of the thousands of other Muslims they have murdered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere around the world. No religious faith has an exclusive claim on opposition to Islamist terrorism, and no religious group should be excluded or stigmatized in memorializing that opposition. The people who want to build Corboba House have every legal right to do so, and those rights are not subordinate to anyone’s religious prejudice.

The Cordoba Initiative, sponsor of Cordoba House, is an organization that rejects violent extremism and encourages civil dialogue between the Islamic world and the West. So far nobody has found any evidence that Corboba represents a nefarious conspiracy to establish a beach head for Islamism, despite much windy rhetoric devoted to that theme. Moreover, contrary to Lazio’s posturing, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has declared bluntly that he sees no security concerns in the construction of a mosque in that neighborhood. His calm, measured and appropriate response represents the realistic perspective of a law enforcement official who does more to fight terrorism every day than Williams, Lazio or Palin will accomplish in their combined lifetimes.

Finally, the constitutional guarantees of freedom, including freedom of worship, were not suspended by 9/11, despite the efforts of certain politicians and partisans. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out in defending the Cordoba House project, its opponents are undermining the liberties that define us and distinguish us from our enemies:

"I think our young men and women overseas are fighting for exactly this," he said in reaction to Palin. "For the right of people to practice their religion and for government to not pick and choose which religions they support, which religions they don't." Scott Stringer, Manhattan’s brave borough president, who like Bloomberg happens to be Jewish, challenged her directly in his own tweet: "@SarahPalinUSA NYers support the #mosque in the name of tolerance and understanding. You should learn from the example we set here in #NYC."

To read the entire article, go here.