I spent my summer last year working for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. I personally looked through every file of the nearly 3,000 victims from the World Trade Center, Pentagon, Pennsylvania and 1993 attacks. I spoke with the families and next of kin of many who died on Sept. 11, and I still carry many of their stories with me to this day.

But the debate about Park51, a planned 13-story community center near ground zero that will include a Muslim prayer space, is not about them. Rather, it is a debate about the extent of religious freedom in America.

On Thursday, Oct. 7, Lauren Tousignant wrote an opinion piece on the planned construction of Park51. Although the article is a confusing jumble of several different opinions, Ms. Tousignant’s general attitude is that, as indicated by the editorial’s title, Park51 should not be built because of its ‘timing, not religion.’

I have been reading and hearing that explanation for months, and it still strikes me as thinly veiled religionism.

At the beginning of the article, Ms. Tousignant herself admits she originally opposed the community center because ‘Muslims had attacked us’ on Sept. 11 and any financial supporters of the projects must be ‘terrorists.’ It would appear Ms. Tousignant’s prejudices have not disappeared, but rather have found rationalization in a new — but equally weak — argument.

The allegations that it is ‘too soon for the Cordoba House to be built’ and that ‘the continued persistence to build at Park51, even after New York City offered alternative locations,’ leaves the project open to suspicion imply that it is acceptable to set arbitrary limits on the location and timing of religious practice and that Islam is synonymous with terrorism.

Freedom with strings attached is not freedom. Ms. Tousignant does not offer any clear explanation of her stipulations to Muslims’ right to build a mosque in New York City. Who decides the distance at which a mosque no longer insults ‘the memory’ of Sept. 11? Should Masjid Manhattan, a mosque that stands four blocks away from ground zero, be moved to a new location? And how long until mosques can be built in proximity to ground zero? Never?

As several Supreme Court justices, presidents and other commentators have written and said before in words far more eloquent than my own, it is hardest — but most crucial — to grant freedom to those with whom we disagree or do not understand. Ms. Tousignant hits upon this very point, writing, ‘Many Americans are skeptical of the Islamic faith.’ As if to prove her own point, Ms. Tousignant writes, ‘It’s often difficult to differentiate between those who practice Islam and those who take it to the extreme.’

There is at least one small distinction to be observed: One group hijacks planes and flies them into buildings, whereas the other does not.

Why should regular Muslims be judged against the actions of Islamists? Terrorists have as little to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan have to do with Christianity. Ms. Tousignant may have attended last week’s lecture by Daisy Khan, the wife of the imam behind Park51, but she failed to grasp Mrs. Khan’s message that ‘the terrorists and extremists do not talk for 1.5 billion Muslims.’

Muslims should not be penalized for the ignorance of Ms. Tousignant and others like her. Nor should our national security be threatened by the material for terrorist propaganda this outrageous debate has provided by revealing the intolerant double standard by which some Americans view the Muslim community. (As one Taliban official told Newsweek in reference to the Park51 controversy, ‘Showing reality always makes the best propaganda.’)

We can only ‘begin understanding our fellow American Muslims’ when we allow them the same freedoms that are enjoyed by Christians and Jews in this country. The First Amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect the minority from the majority, particularly when the views or beliefs of the minority are unpopular. To forbid Talat Hamdani, whose son died while rescuing victims from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, from praying near the site of her son’s sacrifice simply because she calls God by the same name the hijacking terrorists did would be to forsake the very rights for which our American soldiers fight and die overseas.  

Ms. Tousignant properly identifies the media as the ‘ones who ultimately created and sensationalized this controversy,’ but her editorial does little more than perpetuate this shameful behavior.

Stephen Barton

Senior international relations, economics, and Russian studies major

 

Published on October 17, 2010 at 12:00 pm