Category Archives: Issues

The road to fascism in America

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.

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This is America

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.

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What makes Americans afraid?

9/11 has become the emblem of all our fears not because it represents a national security failure or because it exposed poorly crafted foreign policy.

From our perspective the most terrifying dimension of the threat posed by al Qaeda is not its destructive capacity but its operatives’ casual disregard for life. Like moths drawn towards a flame, death offers for them some irresistible allure.

In contrast, we see our own fear of death as a healthy expression of our love of life. Indeed we see death as signifying more than anything else the termination of life.

There’s a contradiction here which reveals the fundamentally secular nature of contemporary American society — a secularism masked by the ostentatious religious identifications to which so many Americans cling.

Strip away their diverse forms of worship and their often conflicting systems of belief, and each religion has at its core the same function: it provides the individual and society a means to face mortality and render it meaningful.

If you want to determine the degree from which any society has moved away from its historical religious orientation, there is no easier way than to look at how it handles death.

A death-denying society is one that finds little comfort in the promise of an afterlife. It invests most of its faith in this world in the absence of any real confidence about what might follow.

Consider the example of America’s religious fanatic-of-the-week, Pastor Terry Jones. In the face of death threats he professed his willingness to die in defense of his beliefs, yet he did so with a 40-caliber pistol strapped to his waist.

We say “One Nation Under God” as though we are guided by a transcendent perspective, yet more often we seem to worship the nation itself.

The holy book in which so many Americans profess their faith says quite clearly:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal;
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.

This, like so many others, is a throughly un-American Biblical teaching and where American values and Biblical values conflict, the outcome is predictable.

Our fears reign in this land — the place we have stored all our treasures — which is why, however much we spend on defense, we still struggle to feel safe.

We could instead endeavor to become less afraid.

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In the wake of 9/11, Israel put Iran into “Axis of Evil”

Marsha Cohen writes:

When, on September 11, 2001, two terrorist attacks occurred on U.S. soil, Israeli political figures anticipated that the Americans would now be better able to empathize with Israel’s vulnerability to its own random terror attacks. In the hours immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Israeli leaders envisioned a massive U.S. retaliation in which Israel was uniquely equipped to be a partner, even a mentor, of the U.S.

“The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and our way of life,” then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared in a televised statement just after midnight on September 12. “I believe that together we can defeat these forces of evil.”

But immediately, a spate of Israeli pronouncements proclaimed Israel’s own priorities. They drew upon a decade of Israeli assertions of Iranian complicity in terrorist attacks, and warnings of an imminent Iranian nuclear threat. A war of civilizations had begun. 9/11 was just the first strike of Islamic fundamentalists. The next might be a nuclear attack by Iran.

The pronouncements constituted the opening salvo in a months-long back-and-forth about how the U.S. would frame its new “global war on terror.” Would the U.S. choose the allegiance of regimes in Muslim majority countries — even enlisting hostile governments like Iran who might sympathize with the dangers of transnational Islamic fundamentalist terror — over Israel, which proclaimed itself a battle-hardened ally? Today, the outcome of those first months after September 11 speak for itself, but a review of the Israeli side of the wrangling may be instructive to how the U.S. arrived at its present positions.

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The real Ground Zero Mosque was destroyed by al Qaeda

In the midst of the heated debate about the construction of an Islamic center two blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center, Samuel Freedman tells a story that should be heard by everyone who has declared their concern about the sensitivity of this issue.

Sometime in 1999, a construction electrician received a new work assignment from his union. The man, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, was told to report to 2 World Trade Center, the southern of the twin towers.

In the union locker room on the 51st floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam went through a construction worker’s version of due diligence. In the case of an emergency in the building, he asked his foreman and crew, where was he supposed to reassemble? The answer was the corner of Broadway and Vesey.

Over the next few days, noticing some fellow Muslims on the job, Mr. Abdus-Salaam voiced an equally essential question: “So where do you pray at?” And so he learned about the Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower.

He went there regularly in the months to come, first doing the ablution known as wudu in a washroom fitted for cleansing hands, face and feet, and then facing toward Mecca to intone the salat prayer.

On any given day, Mr. Abdus-Salaam’s companions in the prayer room might include financial analysts, carpenters, receptionists, secretaries and ironworkers. There were American natives, immigrants who had earned citizenship, visitors conducting international business — the whole Muslim spectrum of nationality and race.

Leaping down the stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he had been installing ceiling speakers for a reinsurance company on the 49th floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam had a brief, panicked thought. He didn’t see any of the Muslims he recognized from the prayer room. Where were they? Had they managed to evacuate?

He staggered out to the gathering place at Broadway and Vesey. From that corner, he watched the south tower collapse, to be followed soon by the north one. Somewhere in the smoking, burning mountain of rubble lay whatever remained of the prayer room, and also of some of the Muslims who had used it.

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

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Pastor Jones’ daughter says he’s a megalomaniac

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Pastor Terry Jones’ daughter Emma Jones describes her father as a megalomaniac who she characterizes as a delusional cult leader.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How did you grow up?

Emma Jones: We were raised in a very Christian household, and it was very strict. But also very social. We received visits from people from all over the world and were open to everything.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Former members of his church have spoken of psychological cruelty, forced work, financial irregularities and calls to beat ones own children.

Jones: My mother, Lisa Jones, died in 1996 of a heart attack. Shortly thereafter, my father remarried and I left the church at age 17. In 2005, he offered me a job as a bookkeeper in a company belonging to the church, which sold donated furniture on eBay. I gained a new insight, and realized that my father preached things and did things that I didn’t find to be in accordance with the Bible at all. He demanded that people completely obey him and his second wife, Sylvia. Both are extremely obsessed with power. I saw genuine religious delusion. A typical indication of a sect. Both of them wanted to control everything.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Did you confront your father at the time?

Jones: Yes. I didn’t agree with those things which I saw as exploitation and psychological abuse. I repeatedly brought those things up. In the end, he called me into his office and said he received a message from God for me: God would take my children and then kill me. I stood up and left. Then I contacted members of the church and tried to open their eyes. And I was successful.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It is true, then, that the church in Cologne ousted your father itself?

Jones: Yes.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Did he leave Cologne willingly?

Jones: It was a mixture. We confronted him and demanded that he correct his errors. But he didn’t give in. When we brought up the church finances, he disappeared the next day.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Are you still involved with the church that he left behind?

Jones: No.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you believe your father is serious about burning the Korans?

Jones: I do. My father is not one to give up. As his daughter, I can see the good-natured core deep inside him. But I think he needs help.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is your father a megalomaniac?

Jones: I’m afraid he is. As his daughter, it is difficult for me to say that.

ABC News adds:

Shane Butcher, who was expelled from the church for disobeying Jones, told the paper [the Gainesville Sun] that he worked for the pastor’s company for up 72 hours a week without pay and meals were provided from a “food bank.”

Butcher said punishments for disobedience ranged from cleaning the barnacles off Jones’s boat in Tampa, to carrying a life-size wooden cross or writing out all of Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible.

“We carried a card that said ‘obedience is always blessed,’ ” he was quoted as saying.

Indeed, the church has a laundry list of dicta, called the “Academy Rulebook.” Created by his Sylvia Jones in 2007, the rulebook directs students to sever most contact with family members. “Family occasions like wedding, funerals or Birthdays are no exception to this rule,” the rulebook says.

“No phone calls. Exceptions can be made under certain circumstances but only after receiving permission.”

The syntactically-challenged rulebook also barred “Singles” from having “romantic relationships to the opposite sex…Except work things, there is no need to talk at all, or even flirt!”

Sarah Posner sees beyond the drama surrounding Pastor Jones a crisis of much greater proportions — one that has come to permeate American society: the utter ordinariness of demeaning Islam.

That ordinariness, and the ordinariness of accepting it, is why an evangelical like Joel Rosenberg can on the one hand denounce the Qur’an burning but in the same breath write, “I believe those who follow Islam are mistaken and misguided and need to leave Islam and receive Jesus Christ by faith as their personal Savior and Lord.” It’s why Joe Lieberman can say that burning the Qur’an is “inconsistent with American values” yet stand shoulder to shoulder with John Hagee, who has said, “Islam in general — those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews,” and whose entire worldview is predicated on vanquishing Islam. Or why Sarah Palin can say burning the Qur’an is “antithetical to American ideals,” but equate it in provocativeness to “building a mosque at Ground Zero.” Or why she can defend Franklin Graham’s insistence that Islam is an “evil and wicked religion.”

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What America left behind in Iraq

Nir Rosen reports from Iraq:

Hundreds of cars waiting in the heat to slowly pass through one of the dozens of checkpoints and searches they must endure every day. The constant roar of generators. The smell of fuel, of sewage, of kabobs. Automatic weapons pointed at your head out of military vehicles, out of SUVs with tinted windows. Mountains of garbage. Rumors of the latest assassination or explosion. Welcome to the new Iraq, same as the old Iraq — even if Barack Obama has declared George W. Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom over and announced the beginning of his own Operation New Dawn, and Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has declared Iraq sovereign and independent.

Iraq has had several declarations of sovereignty since the first one in June 2004. As with earlier milestones, it’s not clear what exactly this one means. Since the Americans have declared the end of combat operations, U.S. Stryker and MRAP vehicles can be seen conducting patrols without Iraqi escorts in parts of the country and the Americans continue to conduct unilateral military operations in Mosul and elsewhere, even if under the guise of “force protection” or “countering improvised explosive devices.” American military officers in Iraq told me they were irate with the politically driven announcement from the White House that combat troops had withdrawn. Those remaining still consider themselves combat troops, and commanders say there is little change in their rules of engagement — they will still respond to threats pre-emptively.

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Why burn Qurans when you can move a mosque?

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.

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Islam and America’s most powerful cult

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam writes:

In their spirited assault on Islam, conservatives have seized upon one notion with particular delight: the Abrahamic faith embraced by a quarter of humanity is a “cult.”

Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey popularized the claim in July when a constituent asked about the “threat that’s invading our country from Muslims”; Ramsey wondered aloud whether Islam “is actually a religion or is it a nationality, way of life or cult” and later asserted that “far too much of Islam has come to resemble a violent political philosophy more than peace-loving religion.” Soon after, some of Ramsey’s constituents set ablaze a planned mosque site near Nashville and fired shots when parishioners tried to inspect the damage.

Farther south, in Florida, Pastor Terry Jones proclaimed that Islam is not just a cult but a Satanic creation — hence his planned bonfire of Qur’ans. He is not alone among Floridians. Congressional candidate and retired Army officer Allen West announced earlier this year that Islam is “not a religion” but a “vicious enemy” intent on “infiltrating” America. Another candidate in the sunshine state, Ron McNeil, described Islam as a malicious plot to “destroy our way of life.”

And in upstate New York this August, teenagers who viewed the local mosque as a “cult house” terrorized mosque-goers by blasting a shotgun and sideswiping a parishioner.

What accounts for this renewed alacrity in attacking Islam?

Muslim paratroopers did not suffuse the skies with crescent-shaped parachutes and descend on America. Nor did Muslim terrorists unfurl prayer rugs camouflaged as conifers and seize the highways. The bleating about the Muslim “cult” was provoked by nothing more than a proposed Muslim YMCA, one which is to be headed by a State Department-sponsored Sufi imam and located no closer to Ground Zero than sundry pubs, food stands, pornography stores, and strip clubs.

To repeat the facts, however, is to miss the point. The “Islam is a cult” mantra is not an epithet: it is the axiom of a belief system that outmatches any religion in America in influence and irrationality.

Within this belief system, facts cannot weaken the pull of the idea that “whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad,’” and reason cannot compete with the coveted “habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects.”

This belief system is nationalism (distinct from patriotism), and the quoted descriptions are two symptoms of the disease as identified by George Orwell in his matchless 1945 essay on the subject.

Read the rest of Levesque-Alam’s post here.

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The “insensitive” set-up in the Quran burning stunt

“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.

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Contested America — dreams and reality

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.

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Castro: ‘No one blames the Muslims for anything’

Jeffrey Goldberg just went to visit the father of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, and was surprised and pleased to hear the 84-year-old castigate Iran’s President Ahmadinejad and denounce anti-Semitism:

Over the course of this first, five-hour discussion, Castro repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism. He criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the “unique” history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.
[…]
He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. “This went on for maybe two thousand years,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.”

As an elder statesman and revolutionary leader, Castro retains some influence, but to say ‘no one blames the Muslims for anything,’ makes it sound like he’s a man living in a time warp.

Has the post-9/11 Islamophobia now sweeping Europe and rising in America, somehow escaped Castro’s attention? Does he not know that even in Germany, whose national consciousness should have been permanently seared by the memory of the horrific consequences of ethnic hatred, anti-Muslim rhetoric now finds a widening and receptive audience. “Germany is slowly becoming a state that is dominated by exaggerated fears and that exhibits the beginnings of an Islamophobic society,” writes Erich Follath in Der Spiegel.

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Pastor Jones’ phony Muslim-friendly posture on CNN

In an interview on CNN this morning, Dr Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who has organized “International Burn a Koran Day” for September 11, said:

We want to send a clear message to the peaceful Moslems. We have freedom of speech. We have freedom of religion. They are more than welcome to be here. More than welcome to worship. More than welcome to build mosque[s].

Say what? In July, Jones was asked whether he thought Muslims would turn to Christ as a result of his Quran-burning event:

This is our prayer and desire that they would seriously reexamine their religion. They will then come to the conclusion that Islam is of the devil and Christianity is the only true religion.

Jones now tells CNN that Muslims are welcome to worship in America but in a broadcast of his “Braveheart Show” in May he said:

We must demand that all Moslems that are here, they adapt to our values — they become Americans. If they want to stay Moslems, with their culture, with their Islamic law, then they can stay in Moslem dominated countries.

He now says Muslims are more than welcome to build mosques in America. In May he said:

We should stop immediately, stop right now, the building of all mosque[s] in America…

So, Jones says Muslims are welcome to build mosques in America and that no more mosques should be built. Muslims are welcome to worship here, but if they want to practice their religion they should live in a Muslim-dominated country.

Is that supposed to be a clear message?

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Pastor Jones’ Quran burning stunt

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said the planned burning of Qurans on Sept. 11 by a Florida church could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.

Gen. David Petraeus said the Taliban would exploit the demonstration for propaganda purposes, drumming up anger toward the U.S. and making it harder for allied troops to carry out their mission of protecting Afghan civilians.

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen. Petraeus said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

On August 19, an internal warning issued by the FBI’s Jacksonville office stated:

The nature of this event… will likely garner the same, if not a larger, scale of international attention as historically similar events. This attention will most likely have political and national security implications which could involve the boycott of American goods and services, violent demonstrations within the United States and abroad, threats and/or acts of violence from terrorist organizations and/or lone extremist actors, and further segregation between the Muslim and non-Muslim American communities.

Even if the Dove World Outreach Center yields in response to the US government’s security concerns, much of the damage has already been done.

Pastor Terry Jones’ planned Quran burning is like every other act of book burning throughout history — from the actions of the Inquisition to those of the Nazis: a perverse celebration of ignorance.

There are countless books not worth reading but virtually none worth burning. Indeed, the very fact that individuals or groups of people feel driven to burn particular books, generally says less about those books than it does about the impoverished minds of the book burners.

Pastor Jones is presumably reveling in his fifteen minutes of fame, but in his cheap suit he should be seen for what he is: a member of a tawdry class of American religious hucksters who ply their trade by capitalizing on the ignorance in which too many unfortunate souls here pride themselves.

Here he is in action.

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Ground zero church launches with anti-Muslim, anti-Mormon sermon

Justin Elliot reports:

To an audience of about 50 people — fully half of whom were members of the press — Pastor Bill Keller launched his 9-11 Christian Center at ground zero this morning with a fiery sermon targeting Muslims and Mormons as hell-bound followers of false faiths. Keller took aim in particular at Glenn Beck, a Mormon, and Imam Rauf, the organizer of the Park51 Islamic community center.

Keller, an extremist Internet evangelist from Florida, spoke at a drab ballroom of the Marriott hotel two blocks south of ground zero for the launch of his Christian Center, a response to Park51. He told the audience, which included a couple of 9/11 Truther protesters, that he is scouting three possible locations for a permanent church.

Keller regularly assails Muslims as pedophiles and attacks Mormons and gay people. But his church has drawn no objections from opponents of the mosque who have consistently argued that the neighborhood around ground zero is sacred ground. Keller also has a history of trying to profit off of political controversies; last year, for example, he hosted a Birther infomercial.

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Anti-Israel economic boycotts are gaining speed

In Haaretz, Nehemia Shtrasler writes:

The world is changing before our eyes. Five years ago the anti-Israel movement may have been marginal. Now it is growing into an economic problem.

Until now boycott organizers had been on the far left. They have a new ally: Islamic organizations that have strengthened greatly throughout Europe in the past two decades. The upshot is a red and green alliance with a significant power base. The red side has a name for championing human rights, while the green side has money. Their union is what led to the success of the Turkish flotilla.

They note that boycott is an especially effective weapon against Israel because Israel is a small country, dependent on exports and imports. They also point to the success of the economic boycott against the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The anti-Israel tide rose right after Operation Cast Lead, as the world watched Israel pound Gaza with bombs on live television. No public-relations machine in the world could explain the deaths of hundreds of children, the destruction of neighborhoods and the grinding poverty afflicting a people under curfew for years. They weren’t even allowed to bring in screws to build school desks. Then came the flotilla, complete with prominent peace activists, which ended in nine deaths, adding fuel to the fire.

But underlying the anger against Israel lies disappointment. Since the establishment of the state, and before, we demanded special terms of the world. We played on their feelings of guilt, for standing idle while six million Jews were murdered.

David Ben-Gurion called us a light unto the nations and we stood tall and said, we, little David, would stand strong and righteous against the great evil Goliath.

The world appreciated that message and even, according to the foreign press, enabled us to develop the atom bomb in order to prevent a second Holocaust.

But then came the occupation, which turned us into the evil Goliath, the cruel oppressor, a darkness on the nations. And now we are paying the price of presenting ourselves as righteous and causing disappointment: boycott.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday fiercely attacked the diplomatic process with the Palestinians that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu began in Washington last week, telling Israel Beiteinu activists in the capital that a peace deal is “unachievable.”

In a lengthy address to more than a thousand supporters at the Rimonim (formerly Shalom) Hotel, Lieberman criticized previous governments and his own for not learning the lessons of 17 years of failed diplomatic negotiations.

He said he gets asked all the time why he is against hope, and he responds that he is for hope but against illusions.

“It must be understood that signing a comprehensive agreement in which both sides agree to end the conflict and end all of their claims and recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is a goal that is not achievable in the next year or in the next generation, so any historic compromises or painful concessions won’t help,” he said.

The best that could come out of the talks was a long-term interim agreement with the Palestinians, Lieberman said.

He promised that his party would fight against further construction freezes and unilateral concessions.

“Seventeen years should be enough time to realize what is and is not possible. I know there is pressure to continue the freeze, but I don’t know a single reason to do so.

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No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare

Those are the words of James Madison, cited by Fareed Zacharia as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches.

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.

The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted.

An overreaction in response to national shock may reasonably describe what happened, but it doesn’t explain what made America so susceptible to the shock or so ripe for such an overreaction.

America suffers from a cultural deficit that is largely a product of geography. Cultural self-awareness depends significantly on the ability to understand ones own culture as it appears from the outside, yet most Americans swim inside the fishbowl of this culture with only the vaguest sense of what lies beyond. This profound insularity makes America perpetually vulnerable to global shocks of any kind.

The planners of the 9/11 attacks seemed to grasp a core dimension of this culture: that television is the primary medium that shapes a cohesive American identity. The attack of the World Trade Center thus became an attack on America by being televised.

As a culture that understands itself through television, America grasps images more readily than ideas.

The collapsing Twin Towers meant all sorts of things. It meant that the tallest buildings in New York City turned out to lack the structural integrity they might have been expected to have. It meant that security procedures in American airports were wholly inadequate. It meant that successive US governments had operated with a false sense of impunity as their policies bred hostility across the Middle East.

Yet few of these practical or abstract meanings registered as clearly in American consciousness as did the imagery of American power suddenly made impotent.

A crudely simplistic response — they made us look weak so now we’re going to show ’em we’re strong — thus won national support with barely more than a squeak of dissent.

“They” became a category into which all manner of “enemies” could be haphazardly squeezed: al Qaeda, Islamic extremists, the Taliban, Muslims, Arabs, enemies of Israel, anti-Americans, haters of freedom. Understanding who they were, mattered less than being convinced that they were out to get us.

Having signed on to the idea that war was unavoidable, few questioned a concomitant assumption: that a war of supposed necessity would — for the average American — necessitate no personal involvement.

We could watch, cheer, even march against it, or be utterly indifferent, because the function of this war was as much as anything else to perpetuate the anesthetized state of consciousness that sustains the American way of life.

“Go shopping” was not a throwaway remark from a stumbling president. It was a religious injunction to a population that had been trained to value material comfort more than life itself. The shock of 9/11 might have provoked an overreaction but it also proved to be a shock that could quite easily be absorbed; a shock that far from waking up America, barely interrupted its sleep.

Where else could the most massive expansion in government seen in recent decades have so been readily supported by people who profess an abhorrence for big government?

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