Islam: A mosque at Ground Zero

last updated 8 January 2015

“We can’t undo 9/11,” said Pamela Geller in HumanEvents.com, but surely we should “stop the jihadis from marking their territory.” In a baffling decision, New York planning officials have approved the construction of a 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center to be built just two blocks from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan. “Considering what a sensitive bunch” Muslims can be sometimes, you might think they’d refrain from building a massive mosque only 600 feet from where 3,000 Americans were slaughtered in the name of Islam. But maybe that’s the point: to use this sacred, blood-soaked ground to illustrate “Islamic domination and expansionism.” America deserves this humiliation, said Diana West in Townhall.com. The mosque’s constant, gloating presence would be a permanent reminder of our nation’s capitulation to “multiculti” political correctness—and to the myth that Islam is a religion of peace.

I wouldn’t go that far, said Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in HuffingtonPost.com. The construction of a “giant Islamic shrine” at Ground Zero is indeed “the height of insensitivity”—like constructing a Bach museum right outside Auschwitz. But what if the bulk of the building were instead given over to “a museum depicting the rise of Islamic extremism, its hate-based agenda, and how it is an abomination to Islam?” Such a monument would not only honor the 9/11 dead, but serve as a reminder, to Muslims as well as the rest of us, of the terrible price of succumbing to extremism. By the very fact of its location, said Joshua Stanton, also in HuffingtonPost.com, the mosque would have a special authority to speak for moderate Islam, and “combat destructive ideologies wherever they originate.”

Exactly right, said Talat Hamdani and Adele Welty in the New York Daily News. As the mothers of two men who died “trying to rescue those trapped in the burning towers” on 9/11, it pains us to see how the prospect of a mosque at Ground Zero has stirred up so much nastiness and anger. The U.S. is home to 8 million hardworking, peaceful Muslims, and the mosque’s construction would serve as powerful “testimony to who we are as a nation.” Internationally, it would send the vital message that America is “not in conflict with the Muslim world,” and that we are a people whose strength flows from an unshakable belief that “our commonalities as human beings” matter more than our differences.