Quote Of The Day

Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, interviewed tonight on "60 Minutes":

If 9/11 happens again, I want to be the first to die.

I learned something else from Scott Pelley's report. Hundreds of Muslims have been worshiping in the Cordoba House building for over a year, ever since a nearby mosque lost its lease. Do Newt Gingrich and Renee Ellmer propose to evict them?

Ellmers' Glue

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for this paste wad contest between CNN's Anderson Cooper and Renee Ellmers, the Palin-backed Republican candidate in North Carolina's second congressional district who's trying to rescue her sagging campaign against Rep. Bob Etheridge with a commercial equating Muslims with terrorists.

I don't think Cooper did as well as Sullivan suggests. He didn't push hard enough when Ellmers refused to rule out the possibility that Cordoba House's Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf himself was a terrorist. Then he let her get under his skin by accusing him of being anti-religion. Near the end, she goes right over the top by saying that the residents of her district are "Christian people," insulting every non-Christian in North Carolina and the country. Lamely, Cooper just asked if she wanted Muslims' votes. I'd say that's a big no. Jews need not turn out, either.

Afterward, Cooper whined about how mean she was. It was a tie until then, but when you have to get the last word after your subject's camera's been turned off, it means you lost. What the confrontation makes you understand is that if a person has no shame and is willing to say whatever is necessary to win and get power, you can't argue or reason with her. Cooper may believe it's his job to stay neutral and get the facts. But at what point does the obligation to speak truth against ignorance and prejudice take precedence? What if she had said her district consisted of "white Christians"? We'd demand that he denounce her as a bigot. Isn't what she did say also false and incendiary and therefore just as bad?

RCP says the district's still leaning Etheridge's way, but this year, no one can tell.

Just Say Yes, Imam

The whole ministry of Faisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind Cordoba House, is based on interfaith dialogue. Here's an opportunity to have some. Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida probably wouldn't have been his first choice. Cardinal archbishops and Episcopalians make much more presentable table mates when you're planning lunch at the club. But sometimes the spirit of God chooses our conversation partners.

Rauf shouldn't be expected to bargain away his controversial lower Manhattan site to keep an oddball pastor from gratuitously insulting every Muslim in the world and putting our troops at risk. But he'd earn the respect of many Americans, and some additional leverage in his battle to make his vision a reality, by taking the meeting.

The Lapping Flames In Gainesville

Worried that the Florida Koran-burning may be on after all, Andrew Sullivan frets apocalyptically:

We live in an era of religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, exploited, used and manipulated by politicians, for their own purposes, and used by the media for its own. This has always been a dangerous and toxic combination, inimical to liberal society, dangerous to secular democratic politics, and today, something that can also lead to global warfare and destruction on an unimaginable scale.

While anything's possible, it's hard to imagine Pastor Jones' comic opera escalating quite to that extent (though they probably said the same thing when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, before the worst war in history ensued). I've felt for the last two days that Jones was feeling so much heat that he was looking for a way out, hence his jumping to take a deal that he hadn't even been offered.

He's now implying that he might go ahead with the bonfire after all. The smarter move would be to take the meeting he's evidently been offered with Faisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind Cordoba House in New York City. It speaks well of Rauf's sense of civic responsibility that he's willing to engage with Jones at all in view of the moral inequivalency of their projects. Because Rauf is obviously a class act, Jones has blundered into a richly undeserved moment of respectability. Let's hope his second 15 minutes go better than his first.

The Example Of Our Toleration

Andrew Sullivan, responding to the imam's New York Times op-ed and and summing up his reaction to the Cordoba House controversy:

I despise Islamist terror and Islamist politics. But I do not believe that we defeat them by empowering them, by giving them noxious symbols of Western intolerance in order to justify their own far far worse bigotry. We defeat them by the example of our toleration and the precision of our military power.

You Want A Piece Of My Paradigm?

In opposing the lower Manhattan community center and mosque, Newt Gingrich compared Muslims to Nazis. Faisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind Cordoba House, has finally fired back, positioning himself as a besieged, bridge-building centrist caught between radicals "on both sides." That would be anti-American Muslim extremists and, I guess, Newt Gingrich:

The wonderful outpouring of support for our right to build this community center from across the social, religious and political spectrum seriously undermines the ability of anti-American radicals to recruit young, impressionable Muslims by falsely claiming that America persecutes Muslims for their faith. These efforts by radicals at distortion endanger our national security and the personal security of Americans worldwide. This is why Americans must not back away from completion of this project. If we do, we cede the discourse and, essentially, our future to radicals on both sides. The paradigm of a clash between the West and the Muslim world will continue, as it has in recent decades at terrible cost. It is a paradigm we must shift.

Atheism's Useful Idiots

In their opposition to the lower Manhattan mosque, atheists and the movement once known, ironically enough, as the religious right are combining their efforts, no doubt without meaning to, to weaken the First Amendment's command that government leave religion alone.

As I wrote yesterday, it endangers everyone's freedom when powerful politicians try to hold religious leaders publicly accountable for their beliefs, whether it's Muslims' conception of the state, the weird stuff in the Book of Mormon, Roman Catholics' opposition to abortion, or for that matter the Episcopal Church's prevailing support for gay marriage.

Notwithstanding that danger, the unlikeliest of anti-religion coalitions has taken shape in opposition to the mosque. We all know about Baptist-turned-Roman Catholic Newt Gingrich comparing Muslims to Nazis. Religionists from Gary Bauer to Hindu Human Rights Watch are on board as well. But you don't have to be faithful to ride their train to glory. Atheist Charles Krauthammer is one of the mosque's most strident critics. Atheist Christopher Hitchens doesn't oppose it per se, but he thinks Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf should be called to account for his favorable view of Iran's theocratic regime.

I don't question the motives of everyone in the atheist party. Krauthammer's position is consistent with his years of hawkish commentary about Islamic fundamentalism. Hitchens has been harder on Imam Rauf's GOP critics than on the imam himself. To paraphrase Sen. Mitch McConnell, both say they're supporters of the U.S. Constitution's religion protections, and I take them at their word.

But it's also true that a dominant theme of the post-Sept. 11 neoatheist movement is that religion does more harm than good. In the U.S., it does its nasty business under the mighty wing of the Constitution. As leading atheist voice Sam Harris wrote in 2006:

Religion is the one area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give good evidence and valid arguments in defense of their strongly held beliefs.

Well, not anymore, at least if you're a moderate imam following in a 1300-year-0ld Abrahamic tradition who has Jewish and Christian admirers and a wife who lobbies for women's rights within Islam. If that's you, and you want to build a community center in lower Manhattan that includes a tiny worship space, now you have to answer Christopher Hitchens' questions about your views on Iran. You also have to "give good evidence and valid arguments" to the Republican Party and maybe even, if the pressure keeps up, to the agencies of the City of New York that will decide your project's fate.

Krauthammer says he's not calling on government to stop the mosque. Sarah Palin summed up that argument in her Facebook challenge to President Obama: "We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they?” Palin should use her bully pulpit for a civics lesson in tolerance and freedom of religion. Instead she, fellow ex-governor George Pataki, a former speaker of the House, and other current and former officeholders are creating a hostile environment for a perfectly legitimate faith community.

As the debate becomes more and more noxious, can government action, perhaps in the form of the kind of dodge recently suggested by Chapman University constitutional law professor Hugh Hewitt, be far behind? Of course thanks to all the political and rhetorical firepower and the public's susceptibility to anti-Muslim tendencies, the anti-religion coalition might be able to drive Imam Rauf's establishment out of town without even bothering to enable a constitutionally inconvenient regulation or law such as Hewitt suggests respecting the establishment of a religion.

But just you wait. Whether they succeed in their efforts or not, the atheists and rightists will soon part company. Someday, the political winds will shift. The case of the inconvenient mosque would be a useful precedent for harassing others with unpopular or controversial views such as Roman Catholics, orthodox Jews, Mormons, and even Rick Warren and his fellow Southern Baptists. Should that moment come, religion's enemies would smile as they remembered the day when Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin became their useful idiots.

Imam Rauf: "I Am A Jew"

Jeffrey Goldberg on Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim cleric behind the lower Manhattan mosque:

In 2003, Imam Rauf was invited to speak at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the journalist murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan. The service was held at B'nai Jeshurun, a prominent synagogue in Manhattan, and in the audience was Judea Pearl, Daniel Pearl's father. In his remarks, Rauf identified absolutely with Pearl, and identified himself absolutely with the ethical tradition of Judaism. "I am a Jew," he said.

There are those who would argue that these represent mere words, chosen carefully to appease a potentially suspicious audience. I would argue something different: That any Muslim imam who stands before a Jewish congregation and says, "I am a Jew," is placing his life in danger. Remember, Islamists hate the people they consider apostates even more than they hate Christians and Jews. In other words, the man many commentators on the right assert is a terrorist-sympathizer placed himself in mortal peril in order to identify himself with Christians and Jews, and specifically with the most famous Jewish victim of Islamism.