The 'Scared Ground' of Ground Zero

3 Starbucks and a strip club. Is this a holy vicinity?

To begin: It is a misnomer to label the proposed Park51 a "Ground Zero mosque". The project is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero. It is an Islamic-focused community center open to all faiths and those outside the fold, will house public spaces such as theaters and swimming pools and its board includes Jews and Christians. And it is two blocks away from the WTC site. In Manhattan, two blocks is quite a distance. The WTC site cannot even be seen from Park51's location and being at Park51 one would not even know that the WTC site is nearby unless told. Consider the two block divide between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue. One would not confuse the former for the latter or place a Park Avenue shop in Fifth. A Park Avenue shop is not to be labeled a "Fifth Avenue store". And, yet, much of the media has gone along with this mislabeling. All this is to just make a technical point about terminology, but, of course, Muslims have every right - both legal and moral - to build anywhere they want and there is neither a decent nor logical reason to exclude the immediate area around Ground Zero.

To deny Muslims such a right is to tarnish all Muslims and Islam with the horrific terrorism of Bin Ladin. Muslims have nothing to explain let alone apologize for when its comes to the acts of Bin Ladin. A man and an espoused ideology which is more suited to be discussed in a course on American foreign policy than on Islam since Bin Ladin is a product of decades of American actions in the Cold War where the United States funded an Islamist fundamentalist movement in order to undercut Arab socialists and the Soviet Union. Bin Ladin, who once had contacts with the C.I.A., is a bastard child of that short-sighted, blowback-prone policy. Of course, nothing justifies the massacres of Bin Ladin (of which Muslims have suffered the most), but the accountability to be imposed is not on Muslims but on the United States government which encouraged such a jihadi ideology.

All the arguments put forth are bogus:

But that simply invites the question of why building the mosque is so tactless. It certainly would be insensitive, to use Mr Gingrich’s terms, to wave swastikas by the Holocaust Museum. But for this analogy to work, a mosque must be to 9/11 what a swastika is to the Holocaust. Happily, however, most politicians are reluctant to suggest that mosques are symbols of terrorism, or that Muslims are all terrorists.

Instead, the complaint seems to boil down to a vague sense that doing Muslim stuff near ground zero is an unhappy reminder of terrorism, because the terrorists claimed to be acting in the name of Islam. That smacks of collective punishment: I doubt, somehow, that Mr Obama or Mrs Palin would consider it insensitive to build a church near the site, say, of a cross burning carried out by the Ku Klux Klan or an abortion clinic bombed by Christian fundamentalists. I doubt also that they would want, if they thought about it a bit harder, to accept the 9/11 attackers’ assertion that they were acting on behalf of their Muslim brothers.

Moreover, the call for sensitivity cuts both ways. Muslims, both inside and outside America, have worried since 9/11 that the attacks would spark widespread reprisals and discrimination. For some, the fuss about the mosque confirms their fears. It is impossible to be sensitive both to those who see the mosque as an affront and those who see opposition to it as proof of prejudice, which is why America has a constitution to adjudicate such disputes. And in this instance, the constitution comes down squarely on the side of the mosque-builders.

One of the most absurd complaints is that this is some sort of 'scared ground'. Leaving aside once again the racist argument that a mosque is some sort of defiling presence, what is really so scared about the vicinity? It is home to centers which all people would agree nullify any sense of sacredness to the area:

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Blogger Daryl Lang, who works in the area, went out and took some photographs of buildings and locations that are the same distance from the World Trade Center site as the Park51 center will be. Among his findings? An Off Track Betting parlor, a Burger King, and a Vitamin Shoppe. (What better way to pay respect to the victims of 9/11 than to play the ponies and purchase some fish oil supplements?)

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A solemn quasi-religious center would actually make the area more scared.