I was driving to work this morning and saw a billboard titled “Remember 9/11” with an image of the collapsed World Trade Center. In smaller print on the right, it said “”Stand up and be heard. No mosque at ground zero.” You can see the sign on a video at this website.
A few weeks ago on KSL, Carole Mikita interviewed a Muslim leader here in Utah. She asked him what he thought of this idea to build a mosque near Ground Zero. He said he thought it was a terrible idea. He said they can build a mosque in many places, and thought it was quite insensitive for these Muslims to incite a controversy there.
As a Mormon, we have had plenty of problems with protests about churches or temples being built. The Boston Temple was prohibited from building a steeple for quite some time because the steeple was considered too tall. (It was eventually constructed, but the church was forced to reduce the size of the steeple.) Many groups have protested the buildings of new temples for a variety of reasons. My sister lives in Colorado, and 2 Mormon churches sit side by side because the owner of a subdivision refused to allow any churches to be zoned in a particularly large subdivision. (As I recall, the owner was either a tobacco or alcohol owner that wanted to make sure no Mormon churches were built in the subdivision–so he excluded all churches. How is this legal?)
I appreciate this Muslim leader’s pragmatism. I too wonder why Muslims in New York aren’t more sensitive to the issue. On the other hand, I don’t understand how any Mormon can support a ban on religious construction, given that we have had so many problems with constructing churches or temples. As a matter of principle, I can’t see how it is constitutional to support a ban on a Muslim mosque anywhere. What are your thoughts?
Edit on 10/3/2010
I thought it would be interesting to show photos of 2 Muslim women supporting this project. Daisy Khan and her husband are trying to build at the controversial site. Azar Nafisi escaped Iran’s regime, and wrote a controversial book.
I know looks can be deceiving, but I think these are the kinds of Muslims we should support. From their speech, I could tell they want the same principles I want. I think it is a mistake to characterize all Muslims as violent. They were articulate Americans, and deserve the same rights you and I have. I am more in favor of the mosque than I was earlier. If we turn these moderate Muslims down, we further antagonize the Jihadists. These are the people we should support. If we can’t support these people, we hurt ourselves.
Mormon Heretic 
If the proposed mosque was in a place that any visitor to ground zero was forced to either confront it or actively avoid it, then I would question the sensitivity of the local Muslims. But it is two blocks away, submerged in a sea of skyscrapers. No visitor will know it is there unless they are actively looking for it (which they might, given the publicity). So I fully understand the Muslim position and hope they complete the project just to make the point. (And I hope they follow through on their promise to make it a multifaith center).
Building a mosque at ground zero is like building a Chinese restaurant at Pearl Harbor.
My thoughts are 100% the same as this:
MH,
Just some things to note. The Muslims who reside in lower Manhattan, and who currently frequent the same building where they hold prayer services, have lived in that area of lower Manhattan for almost 3 decades. It is their home. They didn’t move there just after 9/11, and are building this mosque to spite Christian Americans. There is already another mosque just four blocks to the north of ground zero. No one has been complaining about that mosque. And, well, no one was raising a fuss about this mosque when it was first announced. In fact, consider Laura Ingraham, who had on her show the imam’s wife and who said that she liked what they were doing with the cultural center. That was in December, before it became the meme around conservative circles to be against this mosque.
Matthew Chapman,
How should I put this lightly. We fought on the Chinese side in the 1940s…
This article I came across a while back sums up pretty well how I look at this issue. Really, it wasn’t even an issue — going unnoticed for several months, from what I understand — until far-right blogger Pam Geller decided to write about the “Monster Mosque” and the issue caught fire.
Few realize that the imam, Faisal Abdul Rauf, is a Sufi Muslim. Few of the protesters would know what a Sufi is. Neither are they aware that many Muslims don’t even consider them to be Muslims.
You can see an example of Rauf’s sermons here.
I have to wonder whether even Fred Phelps wanting to build a church beside a cemetery where fallen soldiers are buried would have generated this much controversy. 🙂
Just echoing what Dan mentioned, on CNN International I saw a clip from FOX News back several months ago where the mosque plans were being discussed. Not even FOX put any negative spin on it and “everyone” knew about it.
I think Matthew Chapman’s head is going to explode.
Think about it, Dan. Matthew’s response was actually quite clever.
Ah, I totally missed it. Thanks Last.
Silver Rain at http://www.rainscamedown.blogspot.com posted on an identical topic a few days ago. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting my own response there again here, with some additions, because this IS personal.
“Perspectives about 9/11 [ and, hence, the mosque, are certainly very personal. When my wife-to-be and I grew serious about each other, I took a job with an environmental consulting firm and moved to New York to be close to her. A year or so later (about 1978-1979), my company relocated onto the 90th Floor of the South Tower. I had a window office looking out kitty corner at the North Tower for a couple of years before we moved back to the Washington suburbs with plans to start a family.
So it’s hard for me not to have some visceral images as it would have been in my old office that morning, even though I was driving to work in Maryland on the day of the actual event. When I got to work on 9/11 and turned on the internet to follow up on what I’d just heard on the radio, the first picture I saw was the fireball from the second strike engulfing my old office window. (It’s the famous picture that made the cover of Time Magazine.)
In a complex as large as the WTC, there were always little fires starting somewhere. I often saw fire trucks pull into the plaza below and their firemen run inside. I wondered more than once what it would be like to be trapped in my office if a fire got out of control. I don’t like heights to begin with, and I could barely bring myself to get close enough to the window to look down at the plaza.
Had I been still living in New York, I would have just arrived at my desk that morning in time to hear a roar, and look up uncomprehendingly as an airliner flashed in front of my eyes and detonated the offices at the left of my field of vision. Perhaps the shock wave would have blown out the glass in my own window or not, but I know I would have still been standing there in shock when the second strike engulfed me and left my wife a widow and my daughter an orphan.
So I understand what the big deal was. I remember when my own city suddenly sprouted anti-aircraft batteries on street corners. I remember in the days following how very liberal publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post were openly discussing not just whether we should go to war, but whether we would be morally justified in DOING SO USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
The American people did not go mad in our anger then, and we are not going mad over our concerns about the ground zero mosque’s real intent now.
There are more than 1 billion Muslims in the world who are peacefully serving God. Among Muslims, however, are a small percentage of violent jihadists and their enablers who would murder to rule their billion coreligionists, let alone the 5-6 billion infidels on the rest of the planet. Although they are a small percentage, their absolute numbers are staggering: they number in the TENS OF MILLIONS.
We do no one justice by pretending they aren’t there, and asking questions designed to separate the innocent from the guilty. The first WTC bombing in the early nineties was carried out under leaders in a mosque in the NY metropolitan area. The 9/11 plot relied on the cover of a mosque in Northern Virginia. The Fort Hood massacre similarly depending on an Islamist recruiting from a mosque in Northern Virginia. Do you risk letting a cancer grow because you are afraid of checking out your body to see whether a suspicious lump is cancerous or benign?
There are some very suspicious features about what ideas the mosque’s developers and imam have advocated toward the practice of Islam. There are ALSO suspicions about the self-serving financing of the iman and the developers, among the LEAST of which is the claim that he ran a 500-person mosque in a one bedroom apartment in the city on tax papers. These kinds of questions should not go unexamined.
One does not need to think that a religion is good or bad to recognize that religious individuals can be either. We should be trying to see people as individuals of worth, not as representatives of a class — favored or unfavored.
Firetag,
One of Imam Rauf’s donors happens to be Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who happens to also own the largest share of News Corp outside of the Murdoch family. Maybe we should also investigate News Corp…
NWS is a publicly traded stock, and therefore large investors ARE public information ALREADY. So I’ll accept that standard of inquiry for the mosque, certainly. Although I notice the profiling misses the point of evaluating people as individuals, I’m curious as why you think citing a rich Arab makes any relevant point.
Firetag,
I’m following the money, as you said.
Dan:
As I noted in my comment earlier, there are two possibilities: a Muslim may be a faithful servant of Allah, or an Islamist. A faithful servant of Allah, by definition, doesn’t knowingly support an Islamist. I doubt you think Fox News is secretly pro-Islamist, and arguing that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was pro-Islamist would hardly help your point. So I presume you are arguing that the Prince is one of the billion faithful Muslims who DO NOT KNOW WHO THE HIDDEN ISLAMISTS WOULD BE.
You are arguing that if I x-ray my shoulder and don’t find cancer, I should be reassured about the lesion in my foot?
I heard it was a community center rather than a mosque. Is that true?
Firetag,
who is to judge who is, as you call them, an Islamist, and who is a “faithful servant of Allah?” You? Glenn Beck? Pamela Geller? I don’t get from your comment that you’re necessarily against the cultural center. You just prefer they be closely watched. I don’t think that’s a worry. 🙂
Dan, as I understand it, we are fighting on the side of the (mostly Muslim) Iraqis in Iraq, and on the side of the (mostly Muslim) Afghans in Afghanistan.
And as far as I know from what I read in the papers, neither Al Qaeda nor the Taliban has got a permit to build anything in New York City.
No, no mistake in my original comment.
I agree with Rabbi Boteach that this site is a graveyard filled with the dust of the unburied, and therefore, the family members should have the ultimate say.
Thanks for the comments everyone. Matthew, I found your Chinese restaurant comment amusing. I couldn’t tell if you were serious or sarcastic at first–either way it was funny (and glad to see you were a bit sarcastic.) FD, long time no see–I’m sure you’ve been busy.
This is one of those really sticky issues. If these Muslims are peace loving and really follow through on the multi-cultural center, then by all means the mosque should be built. I read some comments in the Deseret News today that were pretty conciliatory. On the other hand, if they are radicals, I’m going to have a problem with the mosque no matter where it is built. I don’t want terrorists using a mosque to hide criminal activity, whether at Ground Zero or a desert wasteland.
Dan:
The people who are trying to kill you are NOT the faithful servants of Allah. The Muslims trying to murder other Muslims in order to impose their version of Islam are NOT the faithful servants of Allah. It’s a very simple test, but one where you do not get a make-up exam if you flunk.
FD, can you tell me more about Sufi Muslims? I am only familiar with Shiites and Sunnis.
Firetag,
So then a Christian trying to kill a Muslim is NOT a faithful servant of God? I mean, we have in our own scripture instances of “religious leaders” killing their own kind, in cold blood, to advance their own interests, and we consider them “faithful servants of God.”
MH,
Who gets to decide what “peace loving” and “radical” are? Once upon a time, we were considered quite radical, enough to be driven out.
dan, who decided the 9/11 hikjackers were terrorists? i’ll trust the people who made that decision.
(perhaps I don’t understand your question. what point are you trying to make?)
Good to be back, MH. 🙂 Yes, I’ve had a crazy busy summer and haven’t had much time to devote to blogs anymore, unfortunately.
Put quite simply, Sufism is Islamic mysticism. You can read more about it here and here.
Dan:
“religious leaders” killing their own kind, in cold blood, TO ADVANCE THEIR OWN INTERESTS…”
That’s the key phrase, Dan. Faithful servants of God or Allah are not out to advance their own interests. You Mormons have a marvelous term: unrighteous dominion. It applies even when the dominator promises you heaven as a result.
I get it. You’re not ok. I’m not ok. Everyone’s not ok. We are all sinners. Trying to purify ourselves of our guilt by disassociating ourselves from our own culture, delivering the innocent and the guilty into the hands of other cultures with their own sins in the process, is impossible. It doesn’t keep one from being a sinner, it just makes one dead as well as a sinner.
The business of a Christian is redeeming people, not punishing them for their sins. It’s Jesus who tries to help people live; it’s Satan who thinks everyone deserves to die — the OT term was originally tied to the idea of “accuser”, after all. Jesus is the one who walks away from earthly power.
My wife said she heard on the radio a comment concerning a christian church that wanted to re-build near ground-zero and was denied. Anyone who can confirm?
Yes. It exists. It was knocked down by the collapse itself, but it is tied up in local red tape. The existence of the local red tape isn’t suspicious (when I lived near Columbia University, it took years just to reconstruct a broken escalator at the nearby subway station). What’s suspicious is the LACK of similar red tape for the mosque and the alignment of political power in the city in its support. That doesn’t usually happen in the city that has taken 9 years to get the ground zero redevopment project itself going.
Thanks FT. I think this might be what many find objectionable; the multiple standards.
I keep thinking what the reaction would be to the KKK proposing a community center in Philadelphia Mississippi.
1. It is not a mosque, it is a cultural center with a prayer room inside.
2. It is not at Ground Zero.
3. There was a Muslim prayer room in one of the towers, there is a mosque nearby which has been there for years.
4. No one cared about this issue until some right-wing hatemeister started fanning the flames.
5. Who will stand with us the next time the hot light of hate shines on us?
comparing the kkk to muslims is a bad idea. would you be comfortable comparing the kkk to mormons or catholics?
Firetag,
It’s just a coincidence. Unless you recommend that all places have equal access to red tape. 🙂
MH,
My point is that “radicalism” is a purposefully vague word (then again so is “terrorism”), thus allowing whoever the right to label someone that term. In the case of the 9/11 attackers, we don’t need an authoritative person to tell us whether or not they were terrorists. We’re capable of deciding that on our own, each one of us. But take more tame things like, blood atonement. A non-Mormon can claim that is a radical concept. It makes Mormons squirm trying to find a way to change the subject. Could a non-Mormon consider us radical for having such a doctrine in our culture? What is the logical conclusion of “blood atonement?” Typically, radicalism is used as a label by either those ignorant of the group they are labeling, or they know what they are doing, and have more nefarious reasons. I’m going to believe that most Americans are simply ignorant of Islam. However, I’m also going to believe someone like Newt Gingrich is not.
Dan:
If Mormons still practiced blood atonement, society would be down on you with everything it had. Look at the anger with which people view Mormon opposition to Prop 8. Are you then unwilling to judge societies that make homosexual practice or heterosexual adultery a capital offense?
If no one takes the personal responsibility to judge — as, you will note, you just did with Newt — all sins are justified. That leads to survival of the most ruthless, which is the exact opposite of your hope for a more just society, Dan.
MH:
A fairer comparison might be between Muslims and Catholics. Because some Catholic priests behaved immorally toward children, all priests are exposed to suspicions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Did society become more hateful of Catholics? No. Society got new information that SHOULD NOT be ignored.
It is exactly the same with Muslims. Just as we must distinguish between dangerous hidden priests and devoted servant priests, we MUST distinguish the billion faithful Muslims from those that seek to dominate others.
@Matthew Chapman
And that would be a problem why? The Chinese never attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did. And, at that, there are Japanese establishments close to Pearl Harbor with no problem.
@reed russell
But even if we should defer to the families, the families don’t agree and never will. So it is impossible to follow their preference and sensibilities.
Dan, my definition of “radicals” is someone planning or supporting terrorist attacks. Anyone preaching revolution or bloodshed in church/mosque/synagogue is a radical.
As for blood atonement, that doctrine has been put to rest, and hasn’t been taught for decades. I can understand and agree with anyone who was uncomfortable with it in the past, and I would put that as “preaching bloodshed” in church, and therefore radical. I’m glad the church has distanced itself from that “doctrine.” It was a terrible idea, and completely at odds with the concept of the Atonement.
Paul, Matthew’s comment about the Chinese was a sarcastic joke. The humor wasn’t obvious at first, but subsequent comments have cleared that up. (In other words, Matthew has no problem with the mosque in NY, or any restaurants at Pearl Harbor.)
MH
The KKK always bring out the “free speech/civil liberties/tolerance” arguments when they rear their hooded heads, but hardly anyone agrees.
Speaking of Mormons/Catholics, I’m sure if the terrorists had been of those religions, the Prophet or Pope would have made a worldwide broadcast condemning the act and issuing an excommunication on those responsible; alive or dead. Has any similar act been done by muslim clerics?
Seriously? Its not the same. At all. Muslim terrorist blew up the WTC buildings. Of course its insensitive to build a mosque there, especially when in practice, Islam builds mosques over places of religious victory. Mormons aren’t blowing up tobacco farms and then asking to build temples there. And they will move to anyplace, just so long as they are able to build.
non-muslims label these religious fighters as radical islamists or terrorists, but in reality they are islamic fundamentalists. How do you think Islam spread as quickly as it did? It wasn’t by missionaries, it was by the sword and it was done in the name of Allah. The whole concept behind fundamentalist Islam is that the entire world MUST be converted to Islam or eliminated. There are Muslims that no longer agree with this fundamentalism, but it is at the heart of Islam…like it or not.
Fundamentalism is fundamental to all religion, by definition. I’m willing to work with the best of all religions, and I have no clue what religion my ancestors were following in the 7th Century. (Fortunately, the requirement for baptism of the dead isn’t part of my canon.)
Mark, the concept of excommunication is a Christian invention. Muslims and Jews don’t excommunicate anybody. I have a Jewish friend that told me this. I even asked him if a Jew would be excommunicated for murder and he said “no.” The rationale is that God will be the judge of the murderer not man. However, in answer to your question, there are muslim clerics that have denounced terrorism. I watched CNN 2 weekends ago, and there is a new ad campaign by Muslims aimed at saying basically, “Hey, we’re Americans too, and the terrorists attacked us.” There are moderate Muslims the denounce this, but they don’t get near the publicity as the knucklehead who wanted to burn a Koran.
Olive, check your history. Christians are just as guilty of turning other religion’s houses of worship into Christian edifices. As for Mormons, perhaps you forget the Utah War, and the Missouri War. I blogged about the Missouri War previously. And let’s nor forget that the Crusades were against Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Jews. Pretty much every religion has things to be embarrassed about. Jihad is just the religious atrocity du jour.
FT – I agree. We even have fundamentalist Mormons that adhere to the teachings of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, that mainstream LDS no longer practice.
I’m torn on this kind of thing. On one hand, I agree with the decision to distance the church from practices like polygamy and blood atonement, but on the other hand shouldn’t truth be eternal? I don’t buy the milk before meat argument. How many thousands of years are we supposed to keep drinking milk? I also don’t buy the evolving argument…again, isn’t truth eternal?
Sorry for the hi-jack, just thinking out loud.
MH – weren’t the Crusades a retaliatory act? The whole premise was to reclaim Jerusalem wasn’t it?
Bishop Rick, the very first Crusade has an ignominious beginning. When the Roman Empire crumbled, it was due to the much more crude European barbarians attacking the borders, combined with internal corruption in Rome. Pretty much all of northern Europe was much less civilized than the Roman Empire.
Tired of the endless wars in Europe, the pope proposed a Crusade as a war to turn away from fighting each other and “reclaim Jerusalem.” It worked for a bit, as it did seem to unite Europe against a common enemy of Islam (which nobody previously cared about), but the Christians attacked cities along the way and the pope excommunicated them for their atrocities. And when they got to Jerusalem, they were slaughtered by the Muslims anyway.
Some of the subsequent Crusades met with more success, but the original Crusade was just an attempt to quit fighting with each other. The pope knew it was a disaster, and somewhat regretted the decision to inspire a Crusade. In one of the later Crusades, Catholics attacked Orthodox Christians in Constantinople, weakening Eastern Christianity so much that Turkey turned from a Christian nation to a Muslim nation. Yes, the pope excommunicated the soldiers involved, but hurt Christianity permanently in Turkey. It’s a terrible atrocity.
I think BR is referring to the fact that the First Crusade itself occurs three and a half centuries AFTER Muslim armies were expelled from France at the Battle of Tours, paving the way for the existence of the Holy Roman Empire itself. Islam was already in major military expansion in the non-Christian world when it first contacted the Christian Empires in the East.
firetag, I am making a distinction between the roman empire and holy roman empire. they are 2 completely different empires separated by centuries.
Yes, they are, but the Roman Empire lost the West to the barbarians long before the East in Constantiople fell. Islam was able to move across North Africa and cross into Spain and France long before it came up against the heart of the Christian lands. The entire movement within the Arab world and westward to and across Gibralter was military.
MH, I understand that the initial crusade was conjured up with a hollow call to arms against Islam. My point is that Islam is not a religion of peace. It is an archaic religion of domination and injustice. Any religion that can condemn a woman to death for the sin of being raped by her brother is jacked up. There is NOTHING good about Islam. There may be good people trapped in that sorry excuse for a religion, but that does not change the fact that Islam is evil. If I had my way, it would be eradicated. The world would be better off.
I’m not sure where I found them, but I read a couple articles by Muslims who disagreed wtih the building of the Mosque near ground zero. They believed that it was inappropriate and was akin to rubbing salt in the wounds of Americans after 9/11. They believed it will do nothing to generate good will, but will instead cause greater persecution of Muslims in the US. Their position was that if the intent is for outreach and understanding, then the Mosque should not be built and the feelings of those who were affected should be respected. I believe that true Muslims would be respectful of that. However, those who are not will have no qualms about building a Mosque near ground zero.
FireTag, fair point, but Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have all been spread primarily through military means. I’ve already discussed Joshua’s Unholy War, spreading Judaism to unwilling Canaanites. The Crusades and the Inquisition were pretty coercive ways to spread Christianity. The current Jihad, and previous wars (as Bishop Rick has mentioned) have been by military conquest. I am not as familiar with Far Eastern religions of Confucianism, Buddhism, or Hinduism, but I know that Muslims have clashed with Buddhists and Hindus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so I suspect those religions aren’t without blood on their hands either.
Bishop Rick, your comments in #47 seem to be painting Islam with a broad brush. If you listen to Osama Bin Ladin, he references Christian Crusaders as if Christians are still trying to re-implement these terrible wars from centuries ago. Bin Ladin makes the same case about Christianity. If I may use your wording, but modify it to Christianity, “There is NOTHING good about [Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism, etc]. There may be good people trapped in that sorry excuse for a religion, but that does not change the fact that [pick a religion] is evil. If I had my way, it would be eradicated. The world would be better off.”
Your comments above seem to be no different than anyone that claims the FLDS is the “proper” representation of all Mormons. As I understand FLDS, they still restrict the priesthood, practice polygamy, believe in blood atonement, etc. I have a post on fundamentalist Mormons soon. There were murders between the LeBaron and Allred polygamist groups. There are people out there who paint with the same broad brush about Mormonism, saying essentially, “There is NOTHING good about [Mormons]. There may be good people trapped in that sorry excuse for a religion, but that does not change the fact that [Mormonism] is evil. If I had my way, it would be eradicated. The world would be better off.
(Some of the people who say that like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee.) They point to MMM and the Missouri Mormon War to paint all Mormons as believing in blood atonement, polygamy, etc. Such characterizations aren’t fair or accurate.
I don’t know if you read my post on the difference between Arabs and Persians. (It’s my most popular post of all time.) Anyway, the woman in the post (I called her Ann) is a Shiite Muslim from Iran. She is a wonderful person, extremely tolerant, and big opponent of Ahmadinejad. She believes that the previous election was a fraud, and most Iranians don’t like him either. She wasn’t at all happy in Iran, which is why she left. She and her husband came with me and my wife to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir one Sunday morning, and she was greatly impressed with the choir. Portraying her as “good people trapped in that sorry excuse for a religion” is a gross stereotype, unless you too feel that you are a “good [person] trapped in that sorry excuse for a religion”. I find such rhetoric wrong and unhelpful.
MH:
This link is very current and speaks to the fact that the ancient strain, not the modern strain of Islam, is still alive and strong.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/perfect-man-un
Perhaps the analogy is if the FLDS had become the dominant strain of Mormonism or the Pope today could still unleash a military machine like the Roman legions. We need to deal with people as individuals, not groups as a whole — but we have to deal with the people history has placed in our path.
I doubt the writer of the linked article knows a thing about the particularly JST version of Genesis, but its rendition of the alternate plans of salvation advocated by Christ and Lucifer are unpleasantly visible in Iranian fundamentalist thinking.
My family, too, has friends who fled Iran and have relatives behind. Remember them in your prayers. They’re going to need a lot of them.