Dear George,

I disagree strongly with Jean Wyant's emotional call-out against a group of civic-minded Muslims who wish to organize a peaceful, community-based Islamic cultural center and prayer room, Cordova House, in downtown New York. Furthermore, I cannot agree that emotion, rather than considered thought, is a righteous justification for public action.

She writes that "erecting a lasting monument to the religion which inspired those attacks, is hurtful beyond measure". She is, I think, wrong and wrong. "[T]he religion" did not "inspire those attacks." They were carried out by persons acting in the name of their beliefs in a particularly narrow interpretation of this many-sided Abrahamic faith. Those men, we ought to remember, claimed to be morally outraged by our government's military presence in their holiest places, thus violating those holy places. Surely Jean Wyant knows the difficulty and complexity of our relations with Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq (which we invaded illegally), Yemen, and Israel, all of which had -- as has been shown -- just as much "influence" as religious beliefs had on these attackers.

And, I must ask, with due respect and patience, beyond which measure is her hurt?

For, how much more revenge do Americans wish to extract from our nebulous enemies? Isn't it enough to have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis in the last nine years? In New York, nearly three thousand people -- of all faiths, many backgrounds, and several kinds of citizenship -- died. Hundreds of people died in the Pentagon. Dozens of people died in the Pennsylvania plane crash. In the rebuilt Pentagon there is an Islamic prayer center. Indeed, to draw upon a more distant example, near the site of the Pearl Harbor monument is a Shinto temple. Meanwhile, no monument has been built in New York, in good part (one learns) because of commercial disputes still unsettled over the site of the World Trade Center.

For whom, please, is Jean Wyant speaking? For which of those "families, friends, coworkers, and the many who honor the victims' memory"? If I count myself among the many, and yet speak in support of this peaceful, well-meant, American Islamic center, can it be said with any truth that I honor their memory less? No, it cannot be said with any truth at all that I honor their memory less. Indeed, because most of those who died were Americans, who were my fellow citizens united by virtue of our Constitution, rather than by religion, race, ethnicity, or nationality by blood, I would like to think and act in the spirit and letter of the Constitution, that is, reasonably, rather than from emotion. For emotion, I say again, is the frailest, most deceptive foundation on which to set any public decision.

And from where has this sudden eruption of emotion come? Not Jean Wyant's, I hope -- I mean, the horrendous distortions and lies which sweep across the right-wing media? From where has this mob-like outcry come? Because it has come all of a sudden. The Park51 -- Cordova House -- plan was announced five months ago. It was not opposed, as far as one can see, by anyone, until Rupert Murdoch took up the cudgel. See Frank Rich's column in last Sunday's New York Times for substance and citation. I quote:

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

Where were the anguished families, friends, coworkers, and many others? One wonders. For there was no public commentary, let alone outcry, Frank Rich writes.

In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son.* Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

Frank Rich pushes further into the murk:

At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified “reports” that Park51 has “money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.” As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.

Jean Wyant -- surely not meaning to echo Murdoch and the blogger Pamela Geller Oshry* -- desires "these Islamic leaders" to move their center to a non-controversial site, and claims that, "No, this is about core civic and human values coming to the fore in a situation that has no equal." Which core civic and human values those might be, she does not say. Yet certainly, we have had other such "situations" in our dark and bloody history, for which we as a people, as the citizenry, have been reluctant to accept responsibility. I would have thought that New York's wonderful, loud, side-by-side diversity, and the old American habit of newcomers adding their ways to the mix, would have encouraged this civic and humane gesture toward reconciliation that seemed to be coming to fruition, till Murdoch and his ilk began spreading their poison.

I do not know what Jean Wyant feels or thinks herself, as she seems to be speaking on behalf of unnamed anguished people, but I can't help but fear that, no matter her intention, her letter adds to the outcry of what I will indeed call bigotry, and I hope she will reconsider. For the consequences of the Islamophobic shouting have begun. The first hate-crime has already occurred: the newest New York attack, the stabbing of a Muslim cabbie. Do readers not think there will be more such crimes? Sadly, I say I do think so. And I see, further, that far, far, far from the site of the New York attacks in Murfreesboro, Tenn., plans by Muslims -- including Iraqi refugees, who are here because they supported this country in its (illegal) invasion! -- are vehemently, though I hope not violently, opposed by American citizens. What justification can there be for this? That the sensibilities of Tennesseans will be grievously hurt if an Islamic center is put up near them?

Enough. Whipped-up public emotion is like a powder keg. Ignorance is a fuse. Demagoguery is a fuse. Hatred is a fuse. Fear is a mighty short fuse. Anguished feelings, or the claim of anguished feelings, looks rather like a match. Whose hand will strike that match?

Or, whose hand will extinguish it?

Yours,
Katherine McNamara (Electronic mail, August 26, 2010)

*Pamela Geller Oshry, a blogger quoted by Murdoch's Post, as noted by Frank Rich, above, also "believes" that President Obama is not the son of the senior Barak Obama, but the illegitimate son of Malcolm X. http://gawker.com/5071373/bombshell-obama-malcom-x-love-child