By John Ballard
This factoid needs wider circulation.
A mosque, Masjid Manhattan, has been holding services on Warren Street, four blocks north of the World Trade Center, for the last 40 years. (It�s about a block west of the Tweed Courthouse, if you know the area.) From the mosque�s website:
Our members are city, state and federal employees, as well as professional employees of the Financial [District] who come to our Masjid to perform their daily prayers. Masjid Manhattan and its members condemn any type of terrorist acts. In particular, the attacks of 9/11 where non-Muslims as well as Muslims lost their lives.
(UPDATE: Masjid Manhattan includes this disclaimer on its website: �Please be advised that we are by no means affiliated with any other organization trying to build anything new in the area of downtown Manhattan.�)
It is significant that Masjid Manhattan was started in 1970 because the World Trade Center also opened at the end of that year. The first tenants moved into the North Tower in December 1970; the South Tower opened a year later, in January 1972.
The fact that Muslims have been worshiping four blocks away from Ground Zero for so long makes it hard to argue that it�s a sacrilege to have an Islamic presence so close to the site of the attack by their fanatical coreligionists. (So should the fact that about 60 innocent Muslims died in the trade center on 9/11 � roughly 2 percent of all fatalities.)
Demagogues like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and outgoing Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams � who resigned from TPE in June, well before his rant against �Colored People,� in order to work full time on stopping the Park 51 project (and note that he lives in Sacramento) � have been doing everything they can demonize the center � to �Shirley Sherrod� it, if you will � depicting it as a deliberate affront by all Muslims everywhere to the memory of the victims of the attack. But the backers of the Cordoba Initiative say the mission of the new facility is outreach:
Park 51 is a creation of the American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative, an organization that seeks to improve relations between Islam and the West.
�This is a way for me to give back, as a New Yorker, to my community,� Soho Properties developer and project backer Sharif El-Gamal told The Jerusalem Post. �I�m a New Yorker. This is about giving back to a city that�s given us so much.�
Gamal pointed out that the proposed center would not be �on Ground Zero,� but two city blocks away, and would include a September 11 memorial.
According to the Cordoba House NYC Web site, the 13- story project would include a 500-seat auditorium, swimming pool, art exhibition spaces, bookstores and restaurants.
�There will be a mosque component, which will be a separate not-for-profit component of the project,� Gamal said. �It�s going to be a small component in a community center, just like the 92nd Street Y has a synagogue.�
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So much simmering xenophobia. This is getting tiresome. Even worse, it's getting scary. The uproar over a planned mosque near the site of the WTC attack may derive from ignorance but that does not make it any less challenging. I want to believe that reasonable arguments might calm the rage but that clearly is not the case.The Arizona anti-immigrant backlash and a rash of copy-cat initiatives across the country in other states grow in the same toxic soil.
All over the world refugees flee across national borders for a variety of reasons from escaping ethnic persecution to looking for employment. One of the most dramatic displacements of people in our lifetime is the Iraqi diaspora, caused in great part by American intervention in that country's affairs. Except for the indigenous peoples, America is populated by the most migrated roots on the planet. But some of the most unsympathetic people anywhere want to criminalize others following the same path.
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