Hallowed Ground and Charlatans...

There has been a lot of banter recently about WTC/ Ground Zero site as being hallowed ground.  For those who lost family members in the devastating terrorist attacks, the site no doubt invokes many passions and notions of what is sacred.  However, the argument that is being offered is not about Ground Zero per se, but about the appropriate manner of land usage surrounding the site and lower Manhattan specifically.

McClatchy Press has a good summary of the debate currently raging in the MSM about the proposed Cordoba cultural center to be constructed at Park51 place, two blocks from Ground Zero.  I'll highlight a few of the important points.

• Current plans for the cultural center include, "a 13-story, $100 million multi-use facility that's modeled after the city's popular 92nd Street Y. It would house a pool, gymnasium, a 500-seat auditorium for public events, and a Sept. 11 memorial, in addition to a prayer space."  Portraying the center, one that will ostensibly be used primarily as a gymnasium and memorial to the 9-11 victims, as solely and explicitly as a mosque, is simply dishonest.
• No one religion or ethnicity was targeted during the attack.  People from numerous countries and many religions, including Islam, died on that day.  All those people died because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.
• The article provides some of the other commercial and non-profit activities within proximity of Ground Zero:  a strip club called the New York Dolls gentleman's club, an off-track betting parlor and smaller mosque that's been there for four decades. The New York Daily News recently tallied the businesses within a three-block area of the World Trade Center site — 17 pizza shops, 18 bank branches, 11 bars, 10 shoe stores and "17 salons where a girl can get her lady parts groomed."
• The people behind the center have been applauded by both the Bush and Obama Administrations, as voices of religious moderation and have assisted America's state department and intelligence units against violent extremism.

Although a number of prominent politicians, such as NY's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have supported the proposed cultural center, many others have issued vitriolic and unsubstantiated statements.  For example, Newt Gingrich stated that because Saudi Arabia does not permit churches and synagogues in their country, then it is natural that Americans should equally be permitted to engage in such territorial and religious bigotry.  Apparently the former Speaker of the House of Representatives is unable to remember that the US constitution's first amendment explicitly and unequivocally guarantees the right to individual religious worship:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Equally, perennial buffoon Sarah Palin, has demanded that Muslims "refudiate" the project.  As an American, she is entitled to her own demented view of a flat earth-centric universe; however, she is not entitled to her own exclusive language.  Palin is a dangerous and deranged demagogue who is interested solely in extending the cult of Sarah to television viewers and right-wing radio listeners in America's racist and conservative conclaves.  Her bizarre contribution to the argument, while confusing to those of us in the reality-based universe, serve to divide Americans and further inflame international hostilities towards the nation as a whole.

Anytime government in collusion with popular sentiment serves to undermine the liberties and rights of law-abiding minorities, then it is not a matter of democracy, but a question of injustice.  America has a long and sordid history of intolerance, bigotry, and violence against minority groups.  Do we really need to be reminded that the only reason America exists today, is because it murdered its original inhabitants, stole their land, and broke nearly every treaty ever signed with them in the past 200+ years?  We and civil minded Americans should step back and think about what Abraham Lincoln said on his first Presidential inaugural address to the citizens of America:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.