Assimilation or Alienation: The Politics of the Ground Zero Mosque

I couldn’t agree with The Economist more in its defense of the Cordoba House:

For a while America seemed less vulnerable than Europe to home-grown jihadism. The Pew Research Centre reported three years ago that most Muslim Americans were “largely assimilated, happy with their lives… and decidedly American in their outlook, values and attitudes.” Since then it has become clear that American Muslims can be converted to terrorism too. Nidal Malik Hassan, born in America and an army major, killed 13 of his comrades in a shooting spree at Fort Hood. Faisal Shahzad, a legal immigrant, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square. But something about America—the fact that it is a nation of immigrants, perhaps, or its greater religiosity, or the separation of church and state, or the opportunities to rise—still seems to make it an easier place than Europe for Muslims to feel accepted and at home.

It was in part to preserve this feeling that George Bush repeated like a scratched gramophone record that Americans were at war with the terrorists who had attacked them on 9/11, not at war with Islam. Barack Obama has followed suit: the White House national security strategy published in May says that one way to guard against radicalisation at home is to stress that “diversity is part of our strength—not a source of division or insecurity.” This is hardly rocket science. America is plainly safer if its Muslims feel part of “us” and not, like Mohammad Sidique Khan, part of “them”. And that means reminding Americans of the difference—a real one, by the way, not one fabricated for the purposes of political correctness—between Islam, a religion with a billion adherents, and al-Qaeda, a terrorist outfit that claims to speak in Islam’s name but has absolutely no right or mandate to do so.

Why would any responsible American politician want to erase that vital distinction? Good question. Ask Sarah Palin, or Newt Gingrich, or the many others who have lately clambered aboard the offensive campaign to stop Cordoba House, a proposed community centre and mosque, from being built in New York two blocks from the site of the twin towers. Every single argument put forward for blocking this project leans in some way on the misconceived notion that all Muslims, and Islam itself, share the responsibility for, or are tainted by, the atrocities of 9/11.

Alienation, in other words, is one chief push-factors that drives young Muslims to Jihadism, and the best way to protect the American way of life from home-grown terrorism is to ensure a welcoming political and cultural environment that allows Muslims across the country to assimilate into that way of life. 

As a result, there is something deeply troubling—even nauseating—about the way Gingrich and Palin are playing on ignorance and religious bigotry to turn Islam in general, and Cordoba house in particular, into the GOP’s new political bogyman. They, and others, have whipped the Republican base into such a frenzy with their incendiary rhetoric that the New York Times reported last week in a chilling story that proposed mosques are being met with opposition across the country by Tea Party and anti-immigrant groups. 

In all of these recent conflicts, the Times notes, “opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution” with Shariah law. 

The supreme irony, of course, is while Cordoba house has become the newest political football and people across the country are mobilizing against it, a majority of Manhattan residents support the construction of the Islamic cultural center, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.

Nevertheless, hostility toward this new hot-button cultural issue has gotten so acute that now even Democrats Harry Reid and Howard Dean have buckled to this xenophobia, because of election year anxiety, by suggesting the mosque should be relocated—the epitome of weak leadership.  I am left to wonder, as Michael Cohen does in a recent column, whether George W. Bush would have cowered in the same way.

Oddly, the answer is likely, no.  In the weeks after 9/11, Cohen points out that President Bush stated in a speech:

"Our nation must be mindful that there are thousands of Arab-Americans who live in New York City, who love their flag just as much as [we] do. And we must be mindful that as we seek to win the war, that we treat Arab-Americans and Muslims with the respect they deserve ... the attitude of this government [is] we should not hold one who is a Muslim responsible for an act of terror.”