Conservatives Offer Compromise on Ground Zero Mosque

‘With a Song in our Heart’ was fairly clever of Douthat, title-wise, concerning his column.

And when all of the community centers outside of the south and Alaska have been properly sensitized, it will be a nice memory to look back upon, especially in the midst of numerous race-card incidents by the racists on the left.

Have any studies been done on the effect immigration restrictions have on those who got in before the drawbridge closed? I’m guessing there have been but I’m just unaware of them. Because I didn’t go to Harvard.

Is it just me or does this come off as ridiculous? As if the Danish cartoons represent the behaviour and opinion of all Muslims and so by requesting a dedication from the “Ground Zero mosque”, the qualms and fears of those that can not help but associate Islam with terrorism or eccentricism or anti-Western ideologies, will some how diminish. Furthermore the very notion that a dedication is being asked by the Conservatives to what sounds like them selves and their beliefs (freedom of religion or whatever it may be)… ridiculous.

The right really is out of their minds… they clearly have no f’ing idea of the context of the cartoons: the ones that circulated in the middle east which mocked Islam were not the ones that were published in the West. The right would also be surprised to find that depictions are of the prophet are common in Middle Eastern countries.

Meanwhile, Archbishop Timothy Dolan prays that “what has turned into somewhat of a divisive issue might develop into an occasion of very civil, rational, loving, respectful discussion.” Drawing a parallel to the Auschwitz Carmelite controversy, “Keep the idea, move the address,” Dolan said. “It worked there, might work here.” For values of ‘here’ that don’t include old convents on Staten Island …

No word on whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is available to mediate on the issue of dislocating parochial schools away from churches to address the sensitivities of those subjected to the minor abuses of some of the priesthood.

You somehow left off the bit about Andy McCarthy:

National Review’s expert on Islam and former Assistant United States Attorney Andy McCarthy hailed the move: “Instead of instituting Sharia Law in lower Manhattan as the presence of the Cordoba House surely would have, the proposed Museum of Danish Mohammed Cartoons will instead reinforce American values. President Obama would understand this if he had not been born a Muslim as his long-form birth certificate likely states–something we could confirm if he would just release it.”

Dogs and Berube: The studies you ask for are a piece of cake. Rational immigrants would, of course, have been aware that the drawbridge was going to be raised.

Hertzberg isn’t very convincing. Try this hypothetical: imagine a Southern Baptist church being built at Auschwitz. The Nazis came from many backgrounds, but none of them were Baptists; Baptists (indeed, Protestants generally) are at least as fractured as Muslims; Southern Baptists could fairly be said to have done their best to oppose Hitler (I don’t know how many Southern Baptists served in World War II, but it must have been millions); etc. Nonetheless, I am certain that there would be considerable opposition, in which Hertzberg would join, to such a church. So Hertzberg’s attempt to attribute special characteristics to the Catholic church, which somehow distinguish it from Islam, is disingenuous.

… ex-governor Palin added, “Mohammed Cartoon Museum wd be a reduff to the terrorists—religious freedom is great, but people need to respect each other’s sensitivities too. Why can’t the Islams understand that?”

They’re going to sell Duff’s Beer at the MCM? That’ll show ’em, those coffee chugging radical facists. Down with coffee! No more Islam-o-drinks.

Castorp, I did indeed leave off the Andy McCarthy graf. And I probably should’ve worked in a double-twist of some kind in which Drudge links to Roger Simon’s column while missing the fact that it is, you know, tongue-in-cheek. But that would have taken me off-message.

y81:
I really don’t see why you’re so sure about what Hertzberg would think on related questions. In fact, he’s pretty clear that “church near Auschwitz” isn’t enough to necessarily make something unacceptable to him: “The rhetoric of the Carmelite/Cordoba parallel seems to assume that it was automatically wrong for a Catholic institution to locate itself in the vicinity of Auschwitz. I’m almost as skeptical of that as I am of the supposed corollary—that it’s automatically wrong for an Islamic institution to locate itself in the vicinity of Ground Zero.”

I do think that there’s an important distinction Hertzberg ignores, which is the difference between the position of Catholics in Poland, and that of Muslims in the US. It seems to me that “keeping one little area of Poland Jewish” is a more defensible cause than “keeping yet another area of the US non-Muslim.”

I may be misunderstanding MORE DOGS intent, but after the Chinese exclusion act of 1882 there was a widespread combination of apartheid and terror against the Chinese who were already here. In several towns in the West (Pendleton that I can think of off the top of my head, I’ve run across others) there was a whole underground city populated by the Chinese lest they be lynched by showing their faces on the streets. And in the old railroad town of Rock Springs (where Dick Cheney got his start) there were a whole series of incidents which led to an international agreement between the US and Chinese governments, I believe stationing Chinese observers or troops on US soil. Among the terror one can cite the burning of Chinese fishing camps on the Monterrey Peninsula, probably similar things in other places.

I doubt Mr. Douthat knows about any of this, any more than he bothered to learn Latin or Greek before taking cheap shots at the Harvard Classics Department.

“there was a whole underground city populated by the Chinese lest they be lynched by showing their faces on the streets. ”

Now to be fair to us Americans, we also had plenty of Sundown Towns where black people could not show there faces on the street after sundown lest they be lynched. That just shows how egalitarian Americans can be.

Taking this latest report at face value, and assuming it’s correct, I’d have to say that this will be remembered as the moment when the conservative movement jumped the shark. That is an utterly disastrous suggestion, and one that (if this report is correct, and today’s date isn’t April 1) will cling to the Republicans who support it like a tar baby in years, nay decades, to come.

Tony, every day is (or may be) April 1 here at CT. I did like that Unitarian Jihad link. I thought it was going to be a rock band or something (tell me that’s not a great name for one).

I once described myself as a lapsed Unitarian, until a friend pointed out that this was mathematically impossible.

That Douthat piece was a supreme example of the sort of moral contortions conservatism must do to remain consistent with itself. They have a word for this when they think liberals are doing it: Moral Relativism – arbitrarily defining morals to fit one’s craven needs. But unlike liberals, who simply don’t believe morals were handed down from God, but arise from human experience and ought to be defined as such, conservatives have to find ways of making their absolutes fit their prejudiced and bigoted traditions.

I haven’t read the Hertzberg piece, but I know he’s a hypocrite because there’s no way he’d ever support the construction of office buildings at Aushwitz, yet at Ground Zero, he doesn’t seem to mind.

Would Ms Geller approve the placing of a Swatstika at Yad Vashem? Or a convent at Auschwitz? Or a church at Gamla Uppsala?

I once described myself as a lapsed Unitarian, until a friend pointed out that this was mathematically impossible.

It’s like falling out of bed when you’re sleeping on the floor.

Rick:

Oh, I agree. This is the treatment I think her work deserves: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2010/8/12hague.html

I just thought Lindsey’s point about her absolutism was interesting–and posted it because the comment above alluded to the same thing in another context–since I had generally focused on her didactic prose “style” and glorifying of the rich and scorning the poor as a source of conservative affinity.

For my part, I’m pretty sure that Hendrik Hertzberg will decide to have a turkey club sandwich for lunch today.

I knew you were going to say that.

So Rand, in spite of herself, has been a huge influence on the right and this goes to the story of the libertarian streak in modern conservatism.

This makes me think less well of Brink Lindsey, whom I had seen up to now as offering reasonable accounts of a point of view with which I disagree. I doubt she was original enough to have been an influence on American rightwingers (she tapped into the Zeitgeist more plausibly), and it’s as bizarre to suggest we need a “story” about the rightwing streak in modern conservatism as for leftists to claim they are the real conservatives.

Castorp, I think you nail it wrt “rich people,” but in my comment I’m just trying to make sense of that couple of sentences, which I think can’t be done. How can Rand, a rightwinger, have “influence[d] the right” “in spite of herself”? I can see arguing that she wasn’t a conservative, but not that she wasn’t a rightwinger. I can see arguing that libertarianism is not conservative, but not that a supporter of McCarthyism can be said to have been picked up on by the right “in spite of herself.” I think Rand has a lot in common with Hayek. Based on this sentence, I half expect Lindsey to imply Hayek was a lefty too.

You are right it is a very sloppy use of the word “right.” There is no sense in which Rand can be considered anything other than on the right, even if she is not a Burkean or Social Conservative.

Yes, I see ,Michael Berube. I shortened my original text, but should not have done so. I see no parallels here. Ms Geller wants to assert her notion of freedom by using the cartoons. The examples I chose are 1. offensive and imaginary (the Swatstika), 2. insensitive at best (the convent), and 3. a deliberate act to assert religious superiority and de facto authority (Gamla Uppsala). Their aims are surely not to display one idea of freedom.

LFC:

If you are interested in a ‘demolition’ of Douthat’s argument from someone who grants his ‘cultural’ vs. ‘constitutional’ views see Conor Friedersdorf: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/08/urging-assimilation-sans-bigotry.html

But although Douthat’s history is somewhat crude and skewed and leans too much to the ‘consensus’ rather than ‘conflict’ side of the old historiographical debate familiar to generations of high school students, that doesn’t necessarily mean that his basic argument about the differing views of the U.S. (‘cultural’ vs. ‘constitutional’) is wrong.

No, but it is nonetheless wrong. Identical or very similar arguments have been advanced against every other wave of immigrants — not just Chinese but also Irish, Italians, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, and if you look far back enough, even Germans and Scandinavians. As a descendant of the Pennsylvania “Dutch” myself, I can comfortably laugh at the idea — once seriously advanced by people very like Douthat — that their descendants would never learn English or integrate into American culture. Therefore, I’m inclined to be skeptical when the same arguments that epically failed on the Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans, among others, are deployed against Latin Americans, Indians, Iranians, or Arabs.

Personally I’m for more strip clubs at ground zero.

y81, I agree with you that Herzberg was mostly unconvincing on the convent at Auschwitz, but the convent at Auschwitz was a pretty poor parallel.

First of all, Herzberg was most convincing when he stressed that the proposed convent was to be within the historical Auschwitz site – which isn’t really true for a now-closed Burlington Coat Factory two blocks away, especially as the Concentration Camp was rather more isolated than is ground Zero.

But there are just so many non-parallels; in no particular order:
The whole of Auschwitz is dedicated to memorializing what happened there, while – even were Park51 within Ground Zero, which it isn’t – Ground Zero is not similarly dedicated, and will contain a memorial but will be mostly offices and other commercial properties.
The specific organization under discussion in the one case (the Catholic Church) had a fifteen-hundred-year history of persecuting and slaughtering the principal victims of Auschwitz, a legacy that led directly to the crimes perpetrated there. The specific organization under discussion at Park51 is dedicated to better ties between Muslims and non-Muslims. Even if we paint with a broad brush and consider the proposed community center at Park51 to represent “all Muslims” it would not be accurate to say that “all Muslims” share a legacy of violent atrocity against the West, or against the World Trade Center.
The principal victims at Auschwitz were murdered specifically because their ancestors had rejected assimilation, Christianity, and Catholicism – all while the Church, at best, stood by. A Catholic shrine that in essence (and in some statements explicitly) appropriated their suffering in the service of the greater glorification and sanctification of Christianity and Catholicism would be gravely insulting, similarly to but more concretely and therefore more strongly than was seen when Mormon missionaries announced that they had posthumously converted, and thus saved from damnation, the souls of those slain at Auschwitz. The victims of 9/11 were murdered to reject either American power or coexistence; I’m not aware that the Park51 group has a position on American power, and they’re avowedly in favor of coexistence.

And the odd thing is, is that the ‘mosque’ proposal is actually bringing people closer together. It has forced the liberals to circle the wagons against the GOP bigots with the muslims on the inside.

I guess Harry Reid skipped “circle day” in kindergarten.

What happened to the gay bar idea?

I guess Harry Reid skipped “circle day” in kindergarten.

There is precious little that’s “liberal” (in the USian sense) about Harry Reid. And what little there is is dwarfed by crass self-interest and opportunism.

As is the case with about 80-90% of his fellow Democrats.

“It is a matter of when rather than if they start targeting Jews.”

Doubtful. Behind closed doors with some people, there will continue to be anti-semitism, but as for what is said out in the open, being pro-Israel and pro-Jewish is one of the excuses for hating Muslims and Arabs.

“But hey, expostulating (or expectorating) about how the other side is bigoted or insensitive or racist of murderous or whatever is much more interesting to most people than real estate finance.”

That’s a non-sequitur.–Me

Actually, I take that back. You’re absolutely right. The racism of the opposition to the mosque is much more interesting than real estate finance. But your “hey” sounds like you are really making a different point–that we should be focusing on the finance and not on the bigotry.

Complainers like Geller need to put their money where their mouth is (are?): sign a lease for that anti-muslim storefront and open it up.

One condition: it’s a co-op and every conservative e-thug blogger has to work the counter two days a year.

But hey, expostulating (or expectorating) about how the other side is bigoted or insensitive or racist of murderous or whatever is much more interesting to most people than real estate finance.

As D. Johnson points out, this is a pretty peculiar thing to say. It is, after all, the bigots who are pushing the whole big, scary mosque thing. You need to head over to one of their blogs and tell ’em how they needn’t fret, and should instead focus on real estate finance.

Here’s an article from Slate back in two-double-ought-one, “The Mosque to Commerce.” It points out that the original architecture on the site was inspired by Islamic models:

We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex’s name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center’s architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family’s patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences.

I got the link from Tyler Cowan, who got it from Brad DeLong.

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Conservative bloggers are raising funds to buy up land around each site of a U.S. drone attack on Pakistani soil, so they can install little crosses in memoriam, with the name of the missile the drone dropped etched on the cross.

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Hertzberg now has his Religious Building Placement Analogies 2.o post up–Shinto Shrine at Pearl Harbor. He warms up with Newt’s Nazi Sign at the Holocaust Museum travesty (which was incredibly weak sauce even for Newt).

And you know who wouldn’t have wanted a Southern Baptist Church at Auschwitz?

I am breaking a rule by telling this story, but it was thirty years ago: As a young lawyer I was asked what I thought about a Japanese company that was selling some kind of timeshares at Waikiki. The way the deal was set up, they should arguably have had to register it as an offering of securities; to get around that, they said OK, we will just not sell to any US citizens, so the SEC has no jurisdiction. The question for me was whether they can do this without violating the Fair Housing Act.

So anyway, the file I was given included a glossy 24-page brochure — all in Japanese only, of course, but I paged through it anyway, and when I got the the staples, the double page center spread was — the Arizona Memorial.

I was not offended, of course; but I was certainly curious, and remain so today, about what the text on that page said. I thought about it again when touring the Rheinland recently, on being informed wherever we went that the medieval street scene we were looking at was a reconstruction built in in 1954,

(My personal answer to the question, BTW, was yes, because you can’s discriminate on the basis of national origin and “US” is a national origin. But we didn’t do anything about it.)

I find it interesting the symbolic response to an Islamic center is not a Christian center, but instead a gay bar.

Hey, I guess promiscuous gays are just the best in America values has to offer the world.

Wouldn’t the Iraq war have been more successful if the US military had recruited gays and sent the gays into Iraq because they represent American values best?