More furor over mosque

The controversy over a proposed Muslim community center two blocks from New York’s “Ground Zero” grew more heated this week, with the proposed site attracting dueling demonstrations as key New York officials lined up on opposite sides of the battle. New York Gov. David Paterson proposed moving the Cordoba House project to an alternative site, while New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said it should stay put. With emotions running high, New York police this week arrested a man who allegedly stabbed a Muslim taxi driver in his cab. The driver was hospitalized in stable condition; the attack is being treated as a hate crime.

Nationwide, opposition to the project remains solid, with polls showing about 60 percent of Americans opposed to the center. Paterson said it would be “a magic moment in our history” if the project were moved to another site. Bloomberg said moving it “would undercut the values and principles that so many heroes died protecting.” The project’s sponsors have vowed not to move.

Americans “know offensiveness when they see it,” said Kyle Wingfield in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And Cordoba House, so near to where terrorists murdered thousands “in the name of Islam,” is offensive. These “reputedly moderate Muslims” have a strange way of improving Islam’s relations with the West.

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The proposed mosque is “clearly permissible under the First Amendment,” said Martin Robins in The Washington Times. But that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate. So long as they don’t give way to “irrationality and emotion,” opponents of the center are right to make “fervent requests that it be built somewhere else.”

“This is not a complicated matter,” said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. Unless “you believe that an entire religion of upward of a billion followers” attacked us on 9/11, instead of a few twisted extremists, Cordoba House belongs exactly where it is planned. “In this case, the difference between compromise and defeat is nonexistent.”