Obama’s Mosque Misjudgment

Obama’s Mosque Misjudgment

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/08/16/obama%E2%80%99s-mosque-misjudgment/

Posted by Rich Trzupek on Aug 16th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Barack Obama delivered the message loud and clear and his target audience surely understood it, as the president no doubt intended. No amount of half-hearted clarifications after the fact could distort the meaning of what the president in effect told Muslims during last Friday’s state dinner: ‘I’ve got your back.’ The plan to construct the thirteen story Park 51 Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan is a lightning rod among Americans of all political persuasions and it is thus unthinkable that the president could “misspeak” when he decided to weigh in on this polarizing issue.

There was nothing wrong with the first part of Obama’s statement: “As a citizen and as President, I believe that Muslims have the right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.” You would have to search far and wide to find Americans who would disagree with that sentiment. However, when one combines that sentence with what immediately followed, the sum of the president’s message was both a gross distortion of the controversy surrounding the Ground Zero mosque and a wink and nod to Muslims everywhere: “That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan.”

Any attempt to turn this issue from one involving propriety and provocation into a debate about freedom of religion in America is transparently ludicrous. The fact that the president made such a statement during a state dinner honoring Ramadan in front of a largely Islamic audience is beyond ironic. Freedom of worship in America is a sacred tradition, as well as a constitutional right, while, in many Muslim states, practicing any religion other than Islam is a crime. Yet here was the president of the United States assuring Muslims from around the world that America would protect a principle that most Islamic states disdain.

There is nothing about this controversy that involves freedom of religion. Muslims can and do build mosques in all corners of the United States. It is the location of this particular mosque that most Americans have a problem with, a location that many believe was deliberately and provocatively chosen. Surely, Obama understands this. If, as the project’s sponsors claim, Muslims want to promote healing and reconciliation, Americans of all stripes have made it abundantly clear that two blocks from Ground Zero is the wrong place to do it. It is a strange sort of “reconciliation” when the aggrieved party is expected to endure an insult as part of the healing process. Muslims are forever droning on about how the West needs to be more respectful of their culture and traditions. And, should someone offend Muslim sensibilities – by portraying Muhammad in cartoon form, for example – riots, protests and murders inevitably follow. Yet, when the sandal is on the other foot, the people whose lives were changed forever after an attack made in the name of a religion are supposed to meekly accept an edifice celebrating that same religion in the very place where the attack happened. Ground Zero is sacred ground to Americans and building a mosque upon it is no more acceptable to us than constructing a synagogue in Mecca would be to Muslims, the difference being that only one of those two projects would ever stand a chance of moving forward.

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