I have to admit I hadn’t been paying very close attention to the news coming out of New York about the so-called “Ground Zero” mosque, at least I wasn’t until I happened to tune into National Public Radio yesterday where I caught a good part of the program “On Point,” a product of WBUR in Boston, but heard across the country. On this particular broadcast host Tom Ashbrook discussed the controversy surrounding the proposed religious center with three religious thinkers: Rabbi Avi Weis (leader of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale),  Professor Martin Marty (an ordained Lutheran Minister) and Imam Mahdi Bray (executive director of Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation).

While what I heard of their conversation was civil and by and large respectful, the nature of the discourse in general has been highly charged and often quite negative. As I look back through media reports on this issue, I have been surprised to find the degree to which this controversy is so intensely polarizing. One thing I was not expecting was the profoundly oppositional stance of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization for which I normally have enormous respect. While the ADL has clearly stood up for the rights of Muslims and other religious minorities in the past, I have to admit I am somewhat puzzled by their reaction to the proposed mosque. Frankly, as long as the proposed Islamic center is what it its backers say it will be  - an Islamic community center – then I have hard time seeing what the problem is. I can understand, to a degree, why people feel strongly about whatever is built near this space, but from what I have read there is no reason to think that the proposed center is going to be a front for terrorist activity or a center for the dissemination of radical Islamist ideas. And it is this idea which seems to be lying just beneath the surface of this less-than-civil debate. A prime example of this is person I heard the other day on a news program, who asked the question as to how Americans would respond if supporters of Timothy McVeigh had wanted to build a church across the street from the site of the Murrah Federal Building, implying that the two things were analogous. 

The more I think about that question, though, the more I realize that in order to ask such a question, one must be proceeding from a place of serious ignorance, and here is how I would answer their question : If a Christian congregation wanted to build a church across the street from the site of this terrible act of domestic terrorism, and the church did not have ties to  terrorists or espouse an extremist agenda of hate and violence, then it would be fine with me. By the same token, if a group of Muslims want to build a mosque in New York City and they have no ties to Al-Queda or other fundamentalist Islamist groups that advocate violence, then I see no problem with that either. I think what this debate about the mosque has exposed is that by and large, a good segment of the American public cannot make distinctions between a religion and the dangerous fringe elements which can be found at the edges of any faith community and as in any debate, it is often the angriest and most shrill voices on both sides of the issue that are heard as they drown out any notions of nuance, moderation or understanding. It is a climate of fear and hate that is fueling this discussion, and I believe it is incumbent upon those of us who care not just about freedom of religion, but about returning some semblance of respect and decorum to the national discussion about religion in America, to speak up and join the conversation.

-Daniel E. Levenson

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

The New Vilna Review