By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO –The case for or against the building of the Cordoba Center (named after one of the largest and most murderous conquests in Muslim history—the 8th century establishment of the Cordoba Caliphate and the attendant genocide of Christians and Jews) roils New Yorkers and Americans alike.
Left-righteous voices such as The New York Times and Mayor Michael Bloomberg and sundry cloying rabbis have practically broken their editorial and political backs in remonstration against those who are unhappy with the prospect—systemically accusing them of bigotry, Islam-phobia, and really bad manners.
It’s not about building a mosque in New York City—there are innumerable Muslim worship centers, aid societies, academies, recruiting stations, and libraries in the city. It’s about this mosque.
I have prayed in mosques, been moved by the beauty and sanctity of such houses of God, from California to Europe to the defining Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem. I am horrified by the small, fractious, lunatic element of Israeli religious society that dares to suggest the razing of the centerpiece, golden Dome of the Rock in that city in favor of building the “Third Temple” along the blueprints of biblical hysteria.
It’s not about building a mosque in New York City—there are innumerable Muslim worship centers, aid societies, academies, recruiting stations, and libraries in the city. It’s about this mosque.
As Abigail R. Esman has astutely opined: What would be the reaction, say, of people in Beirut if a group of Jews proposed a synagogue on the camps of Shabra and Shatila, where Israeli forces more or less stood by and overlooked the massacre of hundreds in 1982? Ms. Esman, of Forbes, has also eloquently expressed:
“Everyone who was in New York at the time remembers what happened that day, when 19 Muslim men stopped the world, when ash and dust and human remains coated the streets of downtown Manhattan, when New York became something we never imagined it could be.”
This project, a blot on American memory, is scheduled to climb 13 stories above the collective graveyard of 9/11 and cost $100 million dollars. History, context, and plain sensibility all cry out against it.
Why do we remain so naïve? Why aren’t we angry enough at what was done to our people, our land, our integrity to say—not at the expense of religious democracy, but in favor of self-respect—NO, not this mosque, not this time.
Look, I’m embarrassed enough for all of us that nine years of political wrangling, economic jostling, real estate bickering, and just plain greed and indolence amongst the government agencies of New York, New Jersey, Washington, the Port Authority, and so many other small-minded agencies and people have resulted in no real evidence of a replacement tower or towers at the site of the worst terrorist attack in history.
There will be no Freedom Tower shining above New York on September 11, 2011. And it isn’t bigotry that suggests that there should not be a high-rise Islamic shrine there instead.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer and author based in San Diego. His column also appears on examiner.com