The Sideshow Goes Mainstream: On Islamophobia and Mosque Building
I'm back from summer break, and with a vengeance I am afraid. This time, it's personal.
Normally I'm rather bemused by Tom Friedman's McEditorials, really idle randomness of thought packaged as Grand Theory, but today I was rather outraged by this latest gem. The central theme, the lamenting of the lack of courage on the part of Middle Eastern political leaders, was a thought I have myself shared before, and thus I do not object to it terribly much. It was in the closing paragraphs, where he dismisses the entire recent debate over the Ground Zero Mosque (really a community center with a prayer room in it two blocks north of Ground Zero) as a, and I quote, "sideshow", that I took deep offense.
There are two problems with this outrageous characterization, in this context. The first of them, in fact the more minor, is that for we American Muslims who are being told our religion involves the worship of monkey gods, who are being equated with Nazis, who are told by awfully hateful and intolerant people that our Prophet was the hateful and intolerant one, do not regard very much of this vitriol that suggests our presence in our own land is not welcome as "sideshow". It may well be a "sideshow" to the future of Islam in the way that the Final Solution was a sideshow to the outcome of World War II--that is to say, the Allies did not really win or lose the war because of the Holocaust. Yet I think a better word might be chosen than that--and no the Islamophobia that is hitting the airwaves is not remotely comparable to Hitler's outrages, obviously, the analogy is only to point out that to refer to a well orchestrated campaign of discrimination and marginalization of any type (horrificly unique as in the Holocaust or distressingly banal as in our case) as a "sideshow" shows markedly little sensitivity to the victims of that campaign.
The second, quite serious concern is that while I sympathize with the idea (and as I have said, I have myself posted about it ) that there is a failure of Muslim courage at times, an unwillingness to (in Friedman's words) "surprise" others by doing something they never thought a person they regarded as the enemy would do on their behalf, it is both shocking and irresponsible to do that in the very same editorial in which the community cebter with a prayer room two blocks north of Ground Zero controversy is dismissed as sideshow. Why? Because if you want that "surprise", then Imam Feisal is the one who delivers it.
Want a surprise? How about a Muslim imam walking into a synagogue and declaring, as Daniel Pearl was forced to just before being beheaded by Muslim extremist fanatics, I am a Jew. Imam Feisal did that, in a service attended by Pearl's own father described by attendants as moving. That certainly surprised me when I heard it, and would surprise anyone even vaguely familiar with the level of antiSemitic vitriol of the most pathological variety that dominates all too much of the Arab media.
Want another surprise? How about a Muslim imam who said in a public interview that he is a "supporter of the state of Israel". Friedman describes Sadat as courageous--yet no Egyptian politician worth his weight in salt calls himself a "supporter of the state of Israel" they only admit to grudging recognition. Of course nobody mentions that public act of courage by Imam Feisal on the airwaves, the only part of that interview they want to cover is the part where Imam Feisal doesn't describe Hamas as terrorist. I'll get to that in a second.
How about an Imam in America who spoke out forcefully and repeatedly against 9/11? Funny that when 9/11 happened, all sorts of people wanted to know where the Imams were who were willing to criticize it. Nobody seemed to want to cover Imam Feisal then. It's only when this community center with a prayer room two blocks from Ground Zero was being built that people thought it important to pay some attention to what Imam Feisal has been saying, in many cases so as to misrepresent him.
In fact, at times I think Imam Feisal has been too willing to surprise. The Swiss pass a law banning minarets (not buildings over a certain size, which is fine, but specifically and exclusively minarets), and he suggests that nothing requires Muslims to build a mosque with minarets, in fact they are often built to harmonize with their cultural and geographical surroundings. True, but, and I say this with the greatest respect to Imam Feisal, irrelevant. The point isn't what Muslims may build, the point is a law that prohibits us, and only us, from building a house of worship as we please because the state in question does not want to see expressions of our faith. But we're here in the West, we're not going to hide, we shouldn't have to, so get used to it.
Instead of focusing on Imam Feisal's repeated and genuine attempts to surprise, Friedman dismisses it as a sideshow, which is akin to dismissing Mandela's efforts to revive the South African rugby team as a "sideshow", and turning elsewhere, wondering why Mugabe is seizing white farmers land in Zimbabwe, surely more important to white Africans than a rugby team. But in some ways I am being too harsh to Friedman, because at least he doesn't call Imam Feisal a terrorist sympathizer, a Nazi, a hater, and whatever other vitriol is being spilled on this man. So far as I can tell, unsupported nonsense aside, the only really substantive objections are that they haven't ruled out taking money from interests connected to Saudi which as Jon Stewart points out is a sin of which Fox News is far more guilty with the billions of Saudi money invested in it. (Though the hypocrisy in this case points in both directions in the view of this iconoclastic Muslim. Prince Alwaleed, dear brother, seriously man. What are you doing? Fox? I cannot fault you more than the rest of Wall Street for being interested in profit over principle but isn't there a line somewhere? 2.7 billion bucks to THEM? After this? Sell, tank their price, it'll cost you, and them, but both will recover. And my will a point have been made.)
The more substantive objection is the refusal to describe Hamas as terrorist, and let me take a second on this one precisely because it is more substantive. I personally am not a bridge builder, as Imam Feisal is. I cannot help but call a scoundrel a scoundrel, it's my nature, and in fact it is why I have chosen to be a scholar and a professor, where I can present my ideas as I see fit to present them and leave others to make whatever use of them they will. (As a scholar, naturally as a teacher the role is different). So it is easy for me to say that when you as an organization send a child of sixteen with bombs on a belt, and nails in his pockets onto a city bus to explode himself, as Hamas clearly does by its own admission, you are a terrorist organization, period, and no level of Israeli military activity, no matter how overbearing, egregious or oppressive, can possibly justify such horrible activity. I've got no sympathy for Hamas, those people were on Jazeera for ages describing Zarqawi as a martyr and a noble fighter in God's cause, I think my views on that type of Sunni extremism have been published often enough to make that clear.
But because of that, I cannot build bridges. I can be effective as a scholar with ideas on law in any number of places in the Muslim world, I can present ideas on constitutionalism and let them flower, or antimonopoly laws or dumping laws, all of which I have done in Iraq for a long time now. But I'm not building bridges, I'm offering my own ideas on important matters of less sensitivity, and letting the sausage making of legislatures take its course. And even then when something like women's rights comes up, and some jackass calls it the global standard that citizenship passes via the paternal line only and that the world's women do not consider this relevant to the question of gender discrimination, I cannot help but call him on it, describe his position as empirically wrong, a clear violation of CEDAW and then alienate him in the process, making me the guy with much knowledge and some interesting ideas, but not the guy who can find the compromise that will please everyone, in fact he'll only manage to upset them all. Imam Feisal would try to make everyone get along, I would be the one telling the jackass to read CEDAW if he thinks he knows so much about global standards on discrimination against women.
The point is, if you want a bridge builder on sensitive political matters, then you have to take into account what they are building a bridge to. I said this to liberals who wanted to know why Obama was spending so much time engaging conservative ideas and taking seriously Republican plans (or at least in their view he was, won't enter into that debate now). He said he was a bridge builder, what did you expect I ask them. Similarly, you want to send a Muslim over to the Middle East, or even make it a non-Muslim, to build bridges, what precisely are you going to do? Lecture them on how great you are? Save the taxpayer money and cancel in that case. Or are you really trying to find areas of common ground, aware that there is much in dispute, in the hopes of advancing a particular set of interests, whatever those might be. If the latter, then you have to take into account that certain views are so entrenched, or so marginal, that it's best not to start with them. So for example a bridge building exercise that starts in Iraq with gay rights is probably strategically a little dumb, because gay rights are so marginal in Iraq you aren't likely to get anywhere. All respect to the folks who say it's about principle and we don't care what's strategically smart, in fact like I said that tends to be where I come from, but that's not where the State Department comes from or where they can afford to come from given what they do. On the entrenched side in terms of ideas in the MIddle East is very much support for Hamas. They are extraordinarily popular in so much of the Middle East that to describe them as the terrorists they are will effectively end the bridge building exercise.
In fact, there is some level of hypocrisy by critics of the community center with a prayer room two blocks north of ground zero on this matter given the ubiquity of that opinion. So, for example, we are told by Christopher Hitchens or Rick Lazio that this Imam is some sort of terrorist sympathizer because he won't condem Hamas as terrorist. But they are also categorically supportive of the intervention in Iraq that led to the fall of Saddam Hussein and generally supportive of the fledgling Iraqi democracy. The problem being, you won't find one Iraqi politician of import who would describe Hamas as terrorist. You won't find one who describes themselves as a supporter of Israel, as Imam Feisal does. You won't find one that even is willing to admit they'd shake hands with an Israeli government delegation. I exclude Mithal al-Alusi, he is marginal, but anyone from Ayad Allawi to Moqtada Sadr would not describe Hamas as anything but freedom fighters, and would if accused of shaking hands with Israeli delegations, as the secular Ayad was, object vehemently and vociferously, as the secular Ayad did. And if that's Shi'i dominated Iraq, despite Hamas affinity for Zarqawi, you can imagine the balance of the Muslim world.
I wonder why Lazio and Hitchens then don't think that the Iraqi intervention has led to the election of terrorists? The views of as I said even the most moderate major Iraqi politicians are far more extreme than those of Imam Feisal. There is some irony to the Lazio insistence that there are millions of peaceful Muslims but Imam Feisal isn't one, when in fact if he applied the absurdly stringent test he applies to Imam Feisal he's not going to find a single Muslim leader of import, one with a genuine following in the Muslim world, who isn't a terrorist sympathizer. Let him try if I be wrong, these peaceful Muslims don't actually exist in the books of the Islamophobes, they never manage to attach names to them (or if they do they are nonbelieving, cultural Muslims--Salman Rushdie the most famous. No beef with Rushdie but if you have to be a nonbelieving Muslim to be a good Muslim in the book of these folks, not sure how you can possibly claim to have no problem with Islam or anyone who reveres it as a faith). For the most part, these "good Muslims" are only paraded about as abstractions to prove a lack of objection to the faith that is at the core of so much of the vitriol. Gingrich, for example, thinks that you can be a Muslim and a patriotic American he says, there are lots of peace loving Muslims he says, yet putting a community center with a prayer room near Ground Zero is like putting a swastika near the Holocaust museum.
Hmmm. So there are peaceful Muslims, millions of them, namely the ones who accept the equating of Islam with swastikas. Nobody has managed to find those folks. Also absent are the bulk of the Republican party which seems more intent on misrepresenting Imam Feisal than on castigating Gingrich for an outrageous analogy like that. I used to wonder with some bemusement how there could be gay Republicans. Legitimate as economic conservative ideas might be, legitimate as much of the core Republican message of smaller government and lower taxes might be (not saying I agree, but certainly well within the core of legitimate debate), and sympathetic as some within the gay community might have been to that message, the determined efforts to marginalize homosexuality by Republican leadership to stoke votes seemed so sinister that I would have thought a gay person of conscience could not really vote for the party at least at the national level (naturally individual candidates are another matter). After the really sick stereotyping of Hispanics during immigration debates, I began to think the same thing about Hispanic Republicans. And now, despite the traditionally pre-Bush strong ideological affiliation of many nonblack American Muslims to the Republican party (I can understand why--I have seen what excessive regulation, bloated governments and socialized industries can do to an economy in Iraq), I am starting to wonder how those few Muslims who remain Republican manage to justify it to themselves--when a national Republican leader, a former House Speaker, compares Muslims to Nazis, and nobody in the party rushes to object. All rather shocking. But hey to Friedman it's a sideshow so let's pretend it doesn't exist and then criticize the Middle East for some obvious failings, and also point out (often, elsewhere) how they always blame others for their problems rather than looking at their own internal problems. We in the US don't do that. We just call those problems sideshows. Good for us, big pat on the back.
To conclude, and in the interests of fairness and completeness, I do not think much, or actually most, public objection to the community center with a prayer room near Ground Zero is actually based on bigotry, only the most outspoken. All of it is wrong, but some is based on I think ignorance, but of the geographical not ethnocentric variety. Two blocks from Ground Zero would, in the context of Dublin Ohio where I spent most of my childhood, be awfully close, hence the comparison to the past objection of a Carmelite convent near Auschwitz. But this is Manhattan, where I spent much of my adult life (or at least that part of it I lived here and not the Muslim world whether Indonesia or Iraq), and two blocks is nothing. You're back in the city at that point. Those of us who have been to Auschwitz know there is nothing there--it's not a city, it's a moving memorial to horror of the most brutal variety imaginable. You stick a convent there, then there's a memorial to horror, and a convent. If that was what we were talking about, the opposition would be viable at least. It doesn't work in the context of Manhattan, where a block away there's a strip club (Pussycat Lounge, passed it a number of times) and a couple of liquor stores on the same block. I promise you if Auschwitz was where it was, and two blocks away there was a liquor store, and three blocks away there was a Pussycat Lounge, and in between some nuns wanted a convent, and then some organization opposed the convent, but not the Pussycat Lounge or the liquor store, both of which they were fine with, then I'd have to wonder whether the "Sacred Ground" objection was genuine. As I said, I think most Americans haven't really understood these facts, or at least have not internalized them, which might help explain why Manhattanites in particular have less a problem than others in the country, and why a majority of Americans don't mind a mosque two blocks from their house, but oppose the community center with a prayer room two blocks north of Ground Zero
HAH
Normally I'm rather bemused by Tom Friedman's McEditorials, really idle randomness of thought packaged as Grand Theory, but today I was rather outraged by this latest gem. The central theme, the lamenting of the lack of courage on the part of Middle Eastern political leaders, was a thought I have myself shared before, and thus I do not object to it terribly much. It was in the closing paragraphs, where he dismisses the entire recent debate over the Ground Zero Mosque (really a community center with a prayer room in it two blocks north of Ground Zero) as a, and I quote, "sideshow", that I took deep offense.
There are two problems with this outrageous characterization, in this context. The first of them, in fact the more minor, is that for we American Muslims who are being told our religion involves the worship of monkey gods, who are being equated with Nazis, who are told by awfully hateful and intolerant people that our Prophet was the hateful and intolerant one, do not regard very much of this vitriol that suggests our presence in our own land is not welcome as "sideshow". It may well be a "sideshow" to the future of Islam in the way that the Final Solution was a sideshow to the outcome of World War II--that is to say, the Allies did not really win or lose the war because of the Holocaust. Yet I think a better word might be chosen than that--and no the Islamophobia that is hitting the airwaves is not remotely comparable to Hitler's outrages, obviously, the analogy is only to point out that to refer to a well orchestrated campaign of discrimination and marginalization of any type (horrificly unique as in the Holocaust or distressingly banal as in our case) as a "sideshow" shows markedly little sensitivity to the victims of that campaign.
The second, quite serious concern is that while I sympathize with the idea (and as I have said, I have myself posted about it ) that there is a failure of Muslim courage at times, an unwillingness to (in Friedman's words) "surprise" others by doing something they never thought a person they regarded as the enemy would do on their behalf, it is both shocking and irresponsible to do that in the very same editorial in which the community cebter with a prayer room two blocks north of Ground Zero controversy is dismissed as sideshow. Why? Because if you want that "surprise", then Imam Feisal is the one who delivers it.
Want a surprise? How about a Muslim imam walking into a synagogue and declaring, as Daniel Pearl was forced to just before being beheaded by Muslim extremist fanatics, I am a Jew. Imam Feisal did that, in a service attended by Pearl's own father described by attendants as moving. That certainly surprised me when I heard it, and would surprise anyone even vaguely familiar with the level of antiSemitic vitriol of the most pathological variety that dominates all too much of the Arab media.
Want another surprise? How about a Muslim imam who said in a public interview that he is a "supporter of the state of Israel". Friedman describes Sadat as courageous--yet no Egyptian politician worth his weight in salt calls himself a "supporter of the state of Israel" they only admit to grudging recognition. Of course nobody mentions that public act of courage by Imam Feisal on the airwaves, the only part of that interview they want to cover is the part where Imam Feisal doesn't describe Hamas as terrorist. I'll get to that in a second.
How about an Imam in America who spoke out forcefully and repeatedly against 9/11? Funny that when 9/11 happened, all sorts of people wanted to know where the Imams were who were willing to criticize it. Nobody seemed to want to cover Imam Feisal then. It's only when this community center with a prayer room two blocks from Ground Zero was being built that people thought it important to pay some attention to what Imam Feisal has been saying, in many cases so as to misrepresent him.
In fact, at times I think Imam Feisal has been too willing to surprise. The Swiss pass a law banning minarets (not buildings over a certain size, which is fine, but specifically and exclusively minarets), and he suggests that nothing requires Muslims to build a mosque with minarets, in fact they are often built to harmonize with their cultural and geographical surroundings. True, but, and I say this with the greatest respect to Imam Feisal, irrelevant. The point isn't what Muslims may build, the point is a law that prohibits us, and only us, from building a house of worship as we please because the state in question does not want to see expressions of our faith. But we're here in the West, we're not going to hide, we shouldn't have to, so get used to it.
Instead of focusing on Imam Feisal's repeated and genuine attempts to surprise, Friedman dismisses it as a sideshow, which is akin to dismissing Mandela's efforts to revive the South African rugby team as a "sideshow", and turning elsewhere, wondering why Mugabe is seizing white farmers land in Zimbabwe, surely more important to white Africans than a rugby team. But in some ways I am being too harsh to Friedman, because at least he doesn't call Imam Feisal a terrorist sympathizer, a Nazi, a hater, and whatever other vitriol is being spilled on this man. So far as I can tell, unsupported nonsense aside, the only really substantive objections are that they haven't ruled out taking money from interests connected to Saudi which as Jon Stewart points out is a sin of which Fox News is far more guilty with the billions of Saudi money invested in it. (Though the hypocrisy in this case points in both directions in the view of this iconoclastic Muslim. Prince Alwaleed, dear brother, seriously man. What are you doing? Fox? I cannot fault you more than the rest of Wall Street for being interested in profit over principle but isn't there a line somewhere? 2.7 billion bucks to THEM? After this? Sell, tank their price, it'll cost you, and them, but both will recover. And my will a point have been made.)
The more substantive objection is the refusal to describe Hamas as terrorist, and let me take a second on this one precisely because it is more substantive. I personally am not a bridge builder, as Imam Feisal is. I cannot help but call a scoundrel a scoundrel, it's my nature, and in fact it is why I have chosen to be a scholar and a professor, where I can present my ideas as I see fit to present them and leave others to make whatever use of them they will. (As a scholar, naturally as a teacher the role is different). So it is easy for me to say that when you as an organization send a child of sixteen with bombs on a belt, and nails in his pockets onto a city bus to explode himself, as Hamas clearly does by its own admission, you are a terrorist organization, period, and no level of Israeli military activity, no matter how overbearing, egregious or oppressive, can possibly justify such horrible activity. I've got no sympathy for Hamas, those people were on Jazeera for ages describing Zarqawi as a martyr and a noble fighter in God's cause, I think my views on that type of Sunni extremism have been published often enough to make that clear.
But because of that, I cannot build bridges. I can be effective as a scholar with ideas on law in any number of places in the Muslim world, I can present ideas on constitutionalism and let them flower, or antimonopoly laws or dumping laws, all of which I have done in Iraq for a long time now. But I'm not building bridges, I'm offering my own ideas on important matters of less sensitivity, and letting the sausage making of legislatures take its course. And even then when something like women's rights comes up, and some jackass calls it the global standard that citizenship passes via the paternal line only and that the world's women do not consider this relevant to the question of gender discrimination, I cannot help but call him on it, describe his position as empirically wrong, a clear violation of CEDAW and then alienate him in the process, making me the guy with much knowledge and some interesting ideas, but not the guy who can find the compromise that will please everyone, in fact he'll only manage to upset them all. Imam Feisal would try to make everyone get along, I would be the one telling the jackass to read CEDAW if he thinks he knows so much about global standards on discrimination against women.
The point is, if you want a bridge builder on sensitive political matters, then you have to take into account what they are building a bridge to. I said this to liberals who wanted to know why Obama was spending so much time engaging conservative ideas and taking seriously Republican plans (or at least in their view he was, won't enter into that debate now). He said he was a bridge builder, what did you expect I ask them. Similarly, you want to send a Muslim over to the Middle East, or even make it a non-Muslim, to build bridges, what precisely are you going to do? Lecture them on how great you are? Save the taxpayer money and cancel in that case. Or are you really trying to find areas of common ground, aware that there is much in dispute, in the hopes of advancing a particular set of interests, whatever those might be. If the latter, then you have to take into account that certain views are so entrenched, or so marginal, that it's best not to start with them. So for example a bridge building exercise that starts in Iraq with gay rights is probably strategically a little dumb, because gay rights are so marginal in Iraq you aren't likely to get anywhere. All respect to the folks who say it's about principle and we don't care what's strategically smart, in fact like I said that tends to be where I come from, but that's not where the State Department comes from or where they can afford to come from given what they do. On the entrenched side in terms of ideas in the MIddle East is very much support for Hamas. They are extraordinarily popular in so much of the Middle East that to describe them as the terrorists they are will effectively end the bridge building exercise.
In fact, there is some level of hypocrisy by critics of the community center with a prayer room two blocks north of ground zero on this matter given the ubiquity of that opinion. So, for example, we are told by Christopher Hitchens or Rick Lazio that this Imam is some sort of terrorist sympathizer because he won't condem Hamas as terrorist. But they are also categorically supportive of the intervention in Iraq that led to the fall of Saddam Hussein and generally supportive of the fledgling Iraqi democracy. The problem being, you won't find one Iraqi politician of import who would describe Hamas as terrorist. You won't find one who describes themselves as a supporter of Israel, as Imam Feisal does. You won't find one that even is willing to admit they'd shake hands with an Israeli government delegation. I exclude Mithal al-Alusi, he is marginal, but anyone from Ayad Allawi to Moqtada Sadr would not describe Hamas as anything but freedom fighters, and would if accused of shaking hands with Israeli delegations, as the secular Ayad was, object vehemently and vociferously, as the secular Ayad did. And if that's Shi'i dominated Iraq, despite Hamas affinity for Zarqawi, you can imagine the balance of the Muslim world.
I wonder why Lazio and Hitchens then don't think that the Iraqi intervention has led to the election of terrorists? The views of as I said even the most moderate major Iraqi politicians are far more extreme than those of Imam Feisal. There is some irony to the Lazio insistence that there are millions of peaceful Muslims but Imam Feisal isn't one, when in fact if he applied the absurdly stringent test he applies to Imam Feisal he's not going to find a single Muslim leader of import, one with a genuine following in the Muslim world, who isn't a terrorist sympathizer. Let him try if I be wrong, these peaceful Muslims don't actually exist in the books of the Islamophobes, they never manage to attach names to them (or if they do they are nonbelieving, cultural Muslims--Salman Rushdie the most famous. No beef with Rushdie but if you have to be a nonbelieving Muslim to be a good Muslim in the book of these folks, not sure how you can possibly claim to have no problem with Islam or anyone who reveres it as a faith). For the most part, these "good Muslims" are only paraded about as abstractions to prove a lack of objection to the faith that is at the core of so much of the vitriol. Gingrich, for example, thinks that you can be a Muslim and a patriotic American he says, there are lots of peace loving Muslims he says, yet putting a community center with a prayer room near Ground Zero is like putting a swastika near the Holocaust museum.
Hmmm. So there are peaceful Muslims, millions of them, namely the ones who accept the equating of Islam with swastikas. Nobody has managed to find those folks. Also absent are the bulk of the Republican party which seems more intent on misrepresenting Imam Feisal than on castigating Gingrich for an outrageous analogy like that. I used to wonder with some bemusement how there could be gay Republicans. Legitimate as economic conservative ideas might be, legitimate as much of the core Republican message of smaller government and lower taxes might be (not saying I agree, but certainly well within the core of legitimate debate), and sympathetic as some within the gay community might have been to that message, the determined efforts to marginalize homosexuality by Republican leadership to stoke votes seemed so sinister that I would have thought a gay person of conscience could not really vote for the party at least at the national level (naturally individual candidates are another matter). After the really sick stereotyping of Hispanics during immigration debates, I began to think the same thing about Hispanic Republicans. And now, despite the traditionally pre-Bush strong ideological affiliation of many nonblack American Muslims to the Republican party (I can understand why--I have seen what excessive regulation, bloated governments and socialized industries can do to an economy in Iraq), I am starting to wonder how those few Muslims who remain Republican manage to justify it to themselves--when a national Republican leader, a former House Speaker, compares Muslims to Nazis, and nobody in the party rushes to object. All rather shocking. But hey to Friedman it's a sideshow so let's pretend it doesn't exist and then criticize the Middle East for some obvious failings, and also point out (often, elsewhere) how they always blame others for their problems rather than looking at their own internal problems. We in the US don't do that. We just call those problems sideshows. Good for us, big pat on the back.
To conclude, and in the interests of fairness and completeness, I do not think much, or actually most, public objection to the community center with a prayer room near Ground Zero is actually based on bigotry, only the most outspoken. All of it is wrong, but some is based on I think ignorance, but of the geographical not ethnocentric variety. Two blocks from Ground Zero would, in the context of Dublin Ohio where I spent most of my childhood, be awfully close, hence the comparison to the past objection of a Carmelite convent near Auschwitz. But this is Manhattan, where I spent much of my adult life (or at least that part of it I lived here and not the Muslim world whether Indonesia or Iraq), and two blocks is nothing. You're back in the city at that point. Those of us who have been to Auschwitz know there is nothing there--it's not a city, it's a moving memorial to horror of the most brutal variety imaginable. You stick a convent there, then there's a memorial to horror, and a convent. If that was what we were talking about, the opposition would be viable at least. It doesn't work in the context of Manhattan, where a block away there's a strip club (Pussycat Lounge, passed it a number of times) and a couple of liquor stores on the same block. I promise you if Auschwitz was where it was, and two blocks away there was a liquor store, and three blocks away there was a Pussycat Lounge, and in between some nuns wanted a convent, and then some organization opposed the convent, but not the Pussycat Lounge or the liquor store, both of which they were fine with, then I'd have to wonder whether the "Sacred Ground" objection was genuine. As I said, I think most Americans haven't really understood these facts, or at least have not internalized them, which might help explain why Manhattanites in particular have less a problem than others in the country, and why a majority of Americans don't mind a mosque two blocks from their house, but oppose the community center with a prayer room two blocks north of Ground Zero
HAH
I’ll preface my comments by stating categorically that I’m opposed to terrorism. And it’s clear that Hamas has resorted to acts of terrorism in its defense of Palestinians and its struggle for collective self-determination on their behalf. But to look at Hamas as a terrorist organization simpliciter strikes me as singularly unhelpful and unduly reductionist. Why? Because much of what Hamas as an organization and religious and political movement does falls well outside the scope of terrorism, one reason it was able to garner widespread electoral support. And we might consider precisely why Hamas has resorted to acts of terrorism when it otherwise exhibits rationality as a collective actor, at least from the vantage points provided by political science and sociology. Given the striking asymmetrical nature of the conflict with the state of Israel, and the early use of such acts in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it’s quite understandable why members of Hamas thought it necessary to resort to this kind of political violence: it proved successful in the past in bringing attention to the Palestinian cause and did not preclude the PLO’s eventual official recognition as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” And of course the PLO itself would come to formally “reject violence and terrorism.” Keeping acts of terrorism in historical and political perspective enables one to sympathize with Hamas while at the same time appreciating what might be done to prompt Hamas to forswear resort to such tactics, which is not the same as refusing to use violence as a justified means of individual and collective self-defense (as in the Just War tradition or as similarly sanctioned within Islamic legal traditions under the rubric of ‘jihad’).
Part of the aforementionedhistorical and political perspective involves an appreciation of the fact that states, notably the United States, have themselves engaged in acts of what we rightly call “State terrorism,” as in the indiscriminate firebombing and dropping of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities during World War II or in the illegal bombing of Cambodia (and Laos) during the Vietnam war, terrrorist acts of a wholly different order of moral magnitude than anything done imagined by Hamas or any other Palestinian group or faction for that matter. Of course, as our parents taught us, “two wrongs don’t make a right,” but it helps make transparent the hypocrisy and self-righteousness that are part and parcel of the condemnation of Hamas by outside parties. Indeed, let’s recall the fact that the “founding fathers” of Israel introduced novel forms of terrorism into the Middle East conflict and relied on egregious acts of “ethnic cleansing,” forms of violence that directly contributed to the success of the Zionist and colonialist settler project that led to the state of Israel.
Part 2 to follow.
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It seems the second and third parts of my comment have not appeared so here's the link to a post where I complete my thoughts on this subject: http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2010/09/hamas-terrorism.html
Thanks,
Patrick
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Did I delete them? if so I am sorry about that, it wasn't intentional. I post everything you comment Patrick though admittedly not as quickly as I should.
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