Fear breeds Hate
I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised, but I'm pretty flabbergasted at the way the so-called controversy around the so-called World Trade Center Mosque (really an Islamic center proposed for 2 blocks away) has been portrayed in the media. For one, I can't believe that anybody even takes the argument seriously enough to report about it. I've railed about it before, but ignorance and stupidity doesn't count as an "opinion". When the media attempts to report even-handedly, it should be reporting ideas that have weight, not bullshit. Perhaps the news outlets are afraid to further alienate the Tea Party people who hate anything that doesn't agree with them, even if it is the truth.
The way I see it the protests are clearly un-American. After all, what could be more important than the 1st Amendment? (You know, that quaint idea of freedom of religion.) There's a lot of ignorance and fear and hate wrapped up in these protests that conflate all the world's roughly 1 billion Muslims with the handful involved in al-Qaeda. It's not disrespectful to build a mosque at ground zero (even if that were in fact the case) - certainly no more disrespectful than building a church. Would it be disrespectful to build a mosque on the sites of mosques al-Qaeda has attacked in Iraq? There were, in fact, Muslim victims of 9/11. America is not a Christian nation, despite what some of these folks would believe or desire.
Karen Hughes, writing in The Washington Post, makes the galling suggestion that the planners of the Islamic Center cave-in to the protestors and just move the center; she wishes to make the controversy go away by advising the planners to take the high-road. I disagree, completely. Because this has become an issue of hate, the Islamic center should be built exactly as planned. To give in to hatred is only to encourage it. Hughes' refusal to condemn the protestors for the hatred they endorse (despite disingenuous claims to the contrary) is a failure of responsibility of the highest order.
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