In an interview on ABC News which aired yesterday, Imam Feisal Rauf, who leads the Cordoba initiative which plans to open an Islamic center near the site of the World Trade Center, was asked why he does not want to relocate, in spite of strong opposition to the plan.

My major concern with moving it is that the headline in the Muslim world will be Islam is under attack in America, this will strengthen the radicals in the Muslim world, help their recruitment, this will put our people — our soldiers, our troops, our embassies, our citizens — under attack in the Muslim world and we have expanded and given and fueled terrorism.

Even if this genuinely represents the views of the imam, it is also the kind of argument one would expect to be proffered by a political consultant. Shift the debate away from religion towards national security. That’s the most easily defended political ground. Perhaps, but it also sounds lame and can be perceived as disingenuous. Moreover, if national opinion is being offended, potential damage to international opinion is the least persuasive basis on which to appeal to red-blooded Americans.

Whatever the repercussions might be outside the United States in the event that the backers of the Islamic center bow to pressure to relocate, the strongest argument for resisting such pressure should rest on the implications inside America.

Speaking with a surer, more passionate voice, Imam Rauf said:

[T]here’s growing Islamophobia in this country.

How else would you describe the fact that mosques around the country are now being attacked? We are Americans, too. As — we are — we are treated and talked about today as if — as if American Mus — and Muslims are not Americans.

We are Americans. We — we — we are — we are doctors. We are investment bankers. We are taxi drivers. We are store keepers. We are lawyers. We are — we are part of the fabric of America.

This points to the core issue which is not about Islam or Muslims per se — it’s about America’s commitment to advance as a pluralistic society.

In a discussion of the state of Islam in America, Eboo Patel, who serves as an interfaith adviser to President Obama, said: “This is a blip in the broader arc of inclusiveness that is America and the history books will read as they have read before that the forces of inclusiveness will defeat the forces of intolerance.”

Some may share Patel’s faith in America and many more will wish they had his confidence, but his interfaith evangelical fervor contrasts sharply with mounting evidence that America is actually heading in the opposite direction.

In an interview on the John Batchelor Show on Friday, Michael Vlahos, a professor at the US Naval War College, described the parallels between contemporary America and Germany in the 1930s during the period that laid the foundations for the rise of Hitler.

Michael Vlahos interviewed on the John Batchelor Show.

Vlahos says:

Our relationships with the world are taking on a depression era — and by that I mean a 1930s depression era — perspective of nativism… We look at the world as a threatening place and it’s a zero sum game. Everything that they gain, we lose. And therefore we are rejecting the very American universalism that made us great, and part of this is an objectification of threat as the other — as evil people who are trying to hurt and destroy us and hence you have this resonant image of both Muslims and Mexicans as a kind of infection of the American body. So that Americans feeling weak about their identity feel that their body is being infected by this bacterium.

On one hand you have Mexicans, who are penetrating and infecting us, and on the other hand you have Muslims — and the entire crisis over this mosque, the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” is really all about this fear that the world is coming after us. And this is a very powerful point of departure in which you have a sense that American identity, if you have the body being infected — now I’m using these metaphors, because these are the exact metaphors that Hitler used in the 20s: the notion that the German body was being infected, and who was it being infected by?… Communists and Jews. And so you see the same kind of dual infection of Muslims and Mexicans. And the fact is, this speaks to an America that is intensely anxious about its future and that is hunkering down and that has essentially thrown off its relationship to the world and is now looking at the world as a source of threat…

[The Bush administration] in its creation of the Department of Homeland Security, in the elaboration of this whole notion that the homeland was the key and the homeland was what it was all about, and that the world was out there to threaten us — this is very much like the deglobalization of the 1930s where we are pulling back from the rest of the world…

This then points to the ultimate irony: that as opponents of the Cordoba initiative hold up signs warning about an Islamic take over and as a staggering 52% of members of the White party (otherwise known as the GOP) believe that President Obama wants to impose Islamic law in America, these very Americans are unwittingly laying the foundations for the advance of fascism.

A burned Quran along with excrement-smeared pages from the holy book were found outside the Islamic Center of East Lansing, Michigan yesterday. The FBI have been called in to launch an investigation.

The same day, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called for federal hate crime charges to be brought against three men who allegedly painted the racist slur “sand n**gers” on a mosque in New York.

Earlier this week, CAIR called on the FBI to investigate recent vandalism at a mosque in Phoenix.

In recent months, mosques in California, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin, have faced vocal opposition or have been targeted by hate incidents.

In an effort to sound the alarm during “one of those times that test our values,” Nicholas Kristof notes: “In America, bigoted comments about Islam often seem to come from people who have never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims.”

He asks: “Is this America?”

Well, most Americans have never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims.

If liberals such as Kristof and James Fallows are shocked about swelling Islamophobia in America, this may say less about the rise of bigotry than it says about the reluctance of members of America’s liberal elite to acknowledge that they do not represent mainstream America.

Why the reluctance? If one sees oneself as an influential figure — as belonging to that very select class of “opinion makers” (none more prestigious than a New York Times columnist) — yet it turns out that most people do not share your views, it also turns out that you have less influence than your status might suggest.

Kristof lays out some of the numbers that make it clear that Americans, in massive numbers, are delusional. He cites a Newsweek poll that indicates that 52% of Republicans believe President Obama wants to see Sharia law imposed in America and around the world. 24% of those polled believe Obama is a Muslim.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll indicates that 49% of Americans have generally unfavorable opinions about Islam and while these views have no doubt been shaped by the repetitive association made between Islam and terrorism, only 1% of Americans regard terrorism as the most important problem facing this country.

What this suggests is that undiluted Islamphobia has taken hold in the American consciousness over the last nine years. What initially might have simply been a fear of terrorism has gradually shifted into an a more pervasive aversion towards Muslims. Fear has metasticized, becoming a broadly tolerated anti-Muslim bigotry.

One in five Americans believe that most or many Muslims living in America support the goals of al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalists.

Think about what that means if you’re a Muslim American flying inside this country. The chances are that one or two of the passengers in the same row think you’re a terrorist sympathizer (if not a terrorist).

Or think about it this way:

If you’re a non-Muslim American, the chance that you’ll run into a terrorist sympathizer as you go about your day is so small it can be discounted.

If you’re a Muslim American the chance you’ll run into a bigot every single day is so high it’s almost certain.

Firebrand Pastor Jones now says he won’t be burning Qurans on Saturday because he claims he extracted a deal to get the Cordoba House project moved to a different site.

“Americans don’t want the mosque there and of course Muslims don’t want us to burn Qurans,” Jones said.

The problem is, Jones appears to have cut his deal with someone who has no say in the location of the mosque: Florida Imam Muhammad al-Masri.

In an interview on CNN on Wednesday, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf reiterated his commitment to open the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan.

“I am glad that Pastor Jones has decided not to burn any Qurans,” Rauf told ABC News on Thursday. “However, I have not spoken with Pastor Jones or Imam Musri. I am surprised by their announcement.”

The likely political effect of Jones’ Quran burning stunt is that it will strengthen mainstream opposition to Cordoba House. In response to Jones’ antics, many opponents of the Islamic center have taken the opportunity to paint themselves as moderates in tune with popular opinion.

As the Washington Post reports:

Most Americans say the planned Muslim community center and place of worship should not be built in Lower Manhattan, with the sensitive locale being their overwhelming objection, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Two-thirds of those polled object to the prospective Cordoba House complex near the site of the former twin towers, including a slim majority who express strongly negative views. Eighty-two percent of those who oppose the construction say it’s because of the location, although 14 percent (9 percent of all Americans) say they would oppose such building anywhere in the country.

The new results come alongside increasingly critical public views of Islam: 49 percent of all Americans say they have generally unfavorable opinions of Islam, compared with 37 percent who say they have favorable ones. That’s the most negative split on the question in Post-ABC polls dating to October 2001.

Furthermore, the poll makes it clear that while America remains at war, economic recovery is nowhere near in sight, and tackling climate change has yet to be treated as a national and global imperative, the focus of the upcoming midterm elections is likely to be a minor construction project in New York.

Regardless of their rationale, most voters who firmly oppose the center’s construction in Lower Manhattan say they feel strongly enough about the issue that it would influence their congressional vote in November. These voters side by a wide margin with Republican over Democratic candidates.

Overall, 83 percent of Republicans oppose the Muslim center, as do 65 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats. Among Republicans, generally negative views have spiked higher: 67 percent of those who identify as Republican say they have unfavorable views of Islam, up from 42 percent in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Big majorities of Protestants and Catholics are against it, with opposition peaking among white evangelical Protestants. By contrast, most people with no professed religion support the construction.

As the issue reveals, rarely is there a discernible difference between piety and pettiness — at least in America.

“Republicans are usually eager to trumpet their support for the troops and the war against terror. So why aren’t they condemning the Florida pastor who plans to lead his congregation in a Quran-burning bonfire on Sept. 11?,” wrote Fred Kaplan on Tuesday.

His call has been answered — by Sarah Palin: “Book burning is antithetical to American ideals. People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation — much like building a mosque at Ground Zero.”

Is Pastor Jones ready to obey Palin’s call to “stand down”? Maybe a generous donation to his church will do the trick.

However Palin and other Cordoba House opponents manage to persuade Jones to back down, this is how they must be hoping they can play his Quran burning stunt: turn an eleventh hour display of “sensitivity” by the Florida pastor into leverage against Feisal Abdul Rauf — as though the imam and the pastor are somehow equivalents. Once “Dr” Jones finds it in his heart to act as the “sensitive” Christian, the chorus will rise even louder demanding a reciprocal display from “sensitive” Muslims.

Before the term got hijacked by Islamophobes, it was widely understood that to be insensitive was to show a lack of awareness about the feelings of others. To call Quran burning “insensitive” is to imply that Jones and his followers don’t grasp the offensiveness of their action. But as ignorant as the members of this church might be, no one can be in any doubt that this action is consciously designed as an act of provocation. Islam is the target of this attack and it is absurd to claim — as Jones does — that Muslims collectively are not also the intended victims.

In tying together Jones’ Quran burning with the proposed Islamic center we witness a false equivalence that has become all too familiar. Islamophobes poke Muslims in the eye and then accuse them of being culturally insensitive because of the manner in which they practice their faith — by building mosques, by women wearing head coverings and so forth.

Sarah Palin and others are riding on the sensitivity bandwagon because they think it’s a safe bet. Who can refute that sensitivity is a good thing. Most importantly though, it appears to let them off a constitutional hook. After all, it’s hard to wrap yourself in the flag and also oppose freedom of religion.

In truth though, the most reliable defenders of freedom of religion are not particularly religious — least of all are they evangelical.

When someone comes to my door and tells me I’d have a better life it I gave it to Christ, they are certainly exercising freedom of religion but they are not defending it. On the contrary, they are engaged in a religiously sanctioned act of arrogance that I regard as an insult to my intelligence. Even as I suggest that in a reversal of the current situation, they might not take kindly to my arrival on their doorstep for the purpose of educating them about Darwinism, they busily search for a line of scripture that might point me in the right direction. Lucky for them, I believe in religious tolerance and have yet to slam the door in anyone’s face.

Living religions (as distinct from their doctrinal underpinnings) are by their very nature intolerant and the purpose of religious freedom is to temper this intolerance by promoting a live-and-let-live spirit. (To his credit, President Obama has acknowledged that the freedom of religion also protects each American’s right to practice no religion at all.)

Tolerance does not mean that I bow to anyone’s prejudice; it means that I recognize and respect the autonomy of each individual in forming and articulating his or her own understanding of life.

The evangelical conceit — and it matters to me not a whit whether the evangelist happens to be a Christian, a Muslim or a Darwinist — is that there is no intrinsic value in the utterly unique vantage point from which we each of us engages the world. On that basis, the evangelist treats the spirit of the unconverted as open territory, ready for colonization.

America is a vessel inside which evangelical colonists roam freely, but however loudly they may insist on making themselves heard we must ensure that no ones freedom confers privilege in ownership.

This can only be the land of the free if it belongs to everyone.

Arguments about the construction of an Islamic center and the destruction of Qurans may have less to do with Islam than they have with who gets to define America and why this nation is grappling with its own identity.

The New York Times reports:

Prominent Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders held an extraordinary “emergency summit” meeting in the capital on Tuesday to denounce what they called “the derision, misinformation and outright bigotry” aimed at American Muslims during the controversy over the proposed Islamic community center near ground zero.

“This is not America,” said Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the emeritus Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, flanked by three dozen clergy members and religious leaders at a packed news conference at the National Press Club. “America was not built on hate.”

They said they were alarmed that the “anti-Muslim frenzy” and attacks at several mosques had the potential not only to tear apart the country, but also to undermine the reputation of America as a model of religious freedom and diversity.

The imam behind the plan to build an Islamic center near ground zero, Feisal Abdul Rauf, finally spoke out about the controversy, saying in an opinion piece in The New York Times published Tuesday night that he would proceed with plans to build the center. He wrote that by backing down, “we cede the discourse and, essentially, our future to radicals on both sides.”

The meeting in Washington occurred amid growing concern by the White House, the State Department and the top American military commander in Afghanistan over plans by Terry Jones, the pastor of a small church in Florida, to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Gen. David H. Petraeus warned on Tuesday that any video of Americans burning the Koran “would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan — and around the world — to inflame public opinion and incite violence,” endangering the lives of American soldiers.

A State Department spokesman called Mr. Jones’s plan “un-American.” Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said any activity “that puts our troops in harm’s way would be a concern to this administration.”

Several clergy members in Washington and Florida said that there were efforts to dissuade Mr. Jones from proceeding with the event, but that he appeared unlikely to relent.

The religious leaders in Washington said in their statement, “We are appalled by such disrespect for a sacred text that for centuries has shaped many of the great cultures of our world.”

Interfaith events are not unusual, but this one was extraordinary for the urgency and passion expressed by the participants. Some of the same religious leaders later met with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to urge him to prosecute religious hate crimes aggressively.

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said: “We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent. It cannot happen here in America in 2010.”

The problem with any argument that revolves around contesting views about the true identity of this country is that neither side is attempting to differentiate between the America of their convictions and America as actuality.

Cardinal McCarrick can say, “This is not America,” but in fact it is — it just happens to be uglier than he would like it to be.

As an ideological debate, this is ostensibly an argument between on the one hand those who fully include Muslims in the idea of America, and on the other hand those who demand that Muslims must shed or at least modify their identities if they wish to be accepted in this society.

The problem is that a Muslim voice is barely audible on either side of the debate — evidence that the proponents of inclusion are describing an ideal that is far from having been realized.

Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose Cordoba House project has been at the center of the argument and who has just returned from a two-month overseas trip sponsored by the State Department, said in an op-ed in today’s New York Times: “I felt that it would not be right to comment from abroad.”

Not right? Maybe closer the truth was that he knew that if he spoke from the Middle East, his words would more likely be perceived not as those of an American but as a representative of that region and thus they would reinforce the image of Muslims in America as outsiders.

In the context of rising Islamophobia, American Muslims are in retreat, yet the lower the profile they assume, the more empowered the anti-Muslim voice becomes.

The New York Times reported on Sunday:

Muslims sit in their living rooms, aghast as pundits assert over and over that Islam is not a religion at all but a political cult, that Muslims cannot be good Americans and that mosques are fronts for extremist jihadis. To address what it calls a “growing tide of fear and intolerance,” the Islamic Society of North America plans to convene a summit of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders in Washington on Tuesday.

Young American Muslims who are trying to figure out their place and their goals in life are particularly troubled, said Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University.

“People are discussing what is the alternative if we don’t belong here,” he said. “There are jokes: When are we moving to Canada, when are we moving to Sydney? Nobody will go anywhere, but there is hopelessness, there is helplessness, there is real grief.”

Mr. Antepli just returned from a trip last month with a rabbi and other American Muslim leaders to Poland and Germany, where they studied the Holocaust and the events that led up to it (the group issued a denunciation of Holocaust denial on its return).

“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “It’s really scary.”

The Anti-Defamation League has formed an Interfaith Coalition on Mosques (ICOM) which aims to “provide support and stand with Muslims when their rights are being violated,” but the credibility of this initiative is undermined by the ADL’s own opposition to the construction of the Cordoba Islamic center. They might have quickly realized that that was a political blunder but it remains to be seen whether ICOM is more than a PR exercise designed to repair the ADL’s tattered image.

Aside from the question about whether the ADL can be true to its core mission and fight “to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” the proponents of a more libertarian and inclusive vision of American society face a deeper problem. We belong to a minority and there are inherent limits on the extent to which any minority can exert its will. We should thus perhaps more explicitly focus on what we want America to become than profess to represent its current condition.