Richard Jeffrey Newman

The video speaks for itself, though I did espe­cially appre­ci­ate the woman who called out, “One nation under God, not Allah.“

Tablet and Pen: Lit­er­ary Land­scapes from the Mod­ern Mid­dle East, pub­lished by Nor­ton, is a new anthol­ogy of (obvi­ously) Mid­dle East­ern lit­er­a­ture. Here, the anthology’s edi­tor, Reza Aslan, is inter­viewed on The Col­bert Report. My favorite line is when Aslan says: “In all the secret Mus­lim gath­er­ings that we have where we dis­cuss how to bring down democ­racy, we’ve decided that it’s going to be through art.”

In the first post of this title, which I had not intended to make a series, I wrote about the par­al­lels between the rhetoric used to protest the build­ing of the Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter in down­town Man­hat­tan – I am not sure any­more whether the project goes by Park51 or Cor­doba House – and the rhetoric used to protest the build­ing of syn­a­gogues in the 18^th and 19^th cen­turies after Jews were finally granted the right to wor­ship in pub­lic. Then, as I was hav­ing break­fast this morn­ing, I read an arti­cle in The New York Times called “In Fierce Oppo­si­tion to a Mus­lim Cen­ter, Echoes of an Old Fight.” I expected to read another ver­sion of the first arti­cle I linked to – which, by the way, is from the Jew­ish Daily Forward’s web­site – but I was wrong. The arti­cle is instead about the par­al­lels between oppo­si­tion to the Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter and the oppo­si­tion that existed 225 years ago to the build­ing of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, which is about as far from Ground Zero as the build­ing in which the com­mu­nity cen­ter will be housed. Some excerpts from the article:

City offi­cials in 18^th-century New York urged project orga­niz­ers to change the church’s ini­tial loca­tion, on Broad Street, in what was then the heart of the city, to a site out­side the city lim­its, at Bar­clay and Church. Unlike the orga­niz­ers of Park51, who have resisted sug­ges­tions they move the project to avoid hav­ing a mosque so close to the killing field of ground zero, the Catholics complied.…

…

Then there were fears about nefar­i­ous for­eign back­ers. Just as some oppo­nents of Park51 have said that the $100 million-plus project will be financed by the same Saudi sheiks who bankroll ter­ror­ists, many early Protes­tants in the United States saw the pope as the enemy of democ­racy, and feared that the lit­tle church would be the bridge­head of a papal assault on the new Amer­i­can government.

The Park51 orga­niz­ers say they will not accept any for­eign back­ing. But with about only 200 Catholics in New York in the late 1700s, most of them poor, St. Peter’s Church would not have been built with­out a hand­some gift from a for­eigner — and a papist at that — $1,000 from King Charles III of Spain.

…

On Christ­mas Eve 1806, two decades after the church was built, the build­ing was sur­rounded by Protes­tants incensed at a cel­e­bra­tion going on inside — a reli­gious obser­vance then viewed by some in the United States as an exer­cise in “popish super­sti­tion,” more com­monly referred to as Christ­mas. Pro­test­ers tried to dis­rupt the ser­vice. In the mêlée that ensued, dozens were injured, and a police­man was killed.

I am glad that the Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter is no longer in the news every sin­gle day – though since I almost never watch Fox, I have no idea whether or not they are still beat­ing the daily drum of their oppo­si­tion to the project – and I was ini­tially hes­i­tant to post this because I am not inter­ested in reignit­ing debate about whether or not the com­mu­nity cen­ter should be built or any other issue sur­round­ing it. I do think, though, that it is cru­cially impor­tant to be aware of how sim­i­lar the rhetorics of appar­ently dif­fer­ent hatreds can be, because I do agree with what Rev­erend Kevin V. Madi­gan, pas­tor of St. Peters, is quoted as say­ing at the end of the article:

But he said Catholic New York­ers had a spe­cial oblig­a­tion. The dis­crim­i­na­tion suf­fered by their fore­bears, he said, “ought to be an incen­tive for us to ensure that sim­i­lar indig­ni­ties not be inflicted on more recent arrivals.”

Accord­ing to an arti­cle by Steven Green­house in The New York Times, that’s around 25% of the 3,386 reli­gious dis­crim­i­na­tion claims filed with the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion (EEOC) in the year end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 2009 – an awful lot con­sid­er­ing that Mus­lims make up less than 2% of the pop­u­la­tion in the United States. It’s also 20% more com­plaints than were filed by Mus­lims in 2008 and 60% more than in 2005.

The com­plaints allege harass­ment and other forms of dis­crim­i­na­tion that range from name-calling to the dis­rup­tion of prayer breaks. The EEOC has filed some pretty high pro­file law­suits in response to some of the com­plaints. In August, for exam­ple, the EEOC brought a suit against JBS Swift on behalf of 160 Somali immi­grants, claim­ing that “super­vi­sors and work­ers had cursed them for being Mus­lim; thrown blood, meat and bones at them; and inter­rupted their prayer breaks.” Other com­pa­nies against which the EEOC has filed include Aber­crom­bie & Fitch and a Four Points by Sher­a­ton Hotel.

Green­house ends his piece with a story about Imane Boud­lal, who is from Casablanca, Morocco. My own sense is that Ms. Boud­lal is being unrea­son­able, but I am curi­ous what oth­ers think – and let me also say here that any­one who tries in dis­cussing this post to use Boudlal’s story to under­cut the over­all point of this post or of Greenhouse’s arti­cle will be banned from this thread. Here are the last three paragraph’s of the article:

Imane Boud­lal, a 26-year-old from Casablanca, Morocco, had worked for two years as a host­ess at the Sto­ry­tellers Café at Dis­ney­land in Ana­heim, Calif., when she decided she would begin wear­ing her hijab at work dur­ing Ramadan last month. Ms. Boud­lal said her super­vi­sors told her that if she insisted on wear­ing the scarf, she could work either in back or at a tele­phone job. She refused and has not worked while the dis­pute continues.

Dis­ney offi­cials said her head scarf clashed with the restaurant’s early-1900s theme, and they pro­posed a period hat with some scarf that would fall over her ears. Ms. Boud­lal rejected that as un-Muslim. “They wanted to hide the fact that I looked Mus­lim,” she said.

Michael Grif­fin, a Dis­ney spokesman, said the company’s “cast mem­bers” agree to com­ply with its appear­ance guide­lines. “When cast mem­bers request excep­tions to our poli­cies for reli­gious rea­sons, we strive to make accom­mo­da­tions,” he said, adding that Dis­ney has accom­mo­dated more than 200 such requests since 2007.

Or at least that’s what Frank Rich, cit­ing Salon’s Justin Elliott, wrote in his August 22 op-ed col­umn, “How Fox Betrayed Petraeus.” (You can find links if you click through to the whole column.)

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.”

As well Ingra­ham might. Rauf is no ter­ror­ist. He has been repeat­edly sent on speak­ing tours by the Bush and Obama State Depart­ments alike to pro­mote tol­er­ance in Arab and Mus­lim nations. As Jef­frey Gold­berg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a mov­ing eulogy at a memo­r­ial ser­vice for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Jour­nal reporter mur­dered by Islamist ter­ror­ists in Pak­istan, at the Man­hat­tan syn­a­gogue B’nai Jeshu­run. Pearl’s father was in atten­dance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Chris­tians and Jews. Per­haps the most threat­en­ing thing about this fledg­ling multi-use com­mu­nity cen­ter, an unabashed imi­ta­tor of the ven­er­a­ble (and Jew­ish) 92^nd Street Y uptown, is its poten­tial to spawn yet another cov­eted, impossible-to-get-into Man­hat­tan pri­vate preschool.

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).

I haven’t yet had a chance to read Elliot’s piece, but I will.

The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Face­book page, say­ing that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Out­reach Cen­ter is indeed invit­ing peo­ple to burn a Quran on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2010. It’s easy to dis­miss this as quack­ery, as not worth giv­ing the atten­tion that it got through CNN’s cov­er­age, but the truth is that if we don’t pay atten­tion to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is – and it’s grat­i­fy­ing to see that the Face­book page protest­ing the event has close to twice as many fans as the Face­book page announc­ing the event – it will spread. More than that, though, it will become – it already has become, actu­ally, and this is kind of fright­en­ing – part of the way per­cep­tions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:

Rick Sanchez, I think, proves him­self to be a par­tic­u­larly inept inter­viewer here – I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usu­ally bet­ter than this – but one of the things that dis­turbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pas­tor, is his but-there–are–moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “mod­er­ate Muslims” – and more about that phrase in a moment – are some­how the excep­tion to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hid­den, and so you have to know the secret code or some­thing to get them to reveal them­selves. Equally trou­bling to me, though, is the way the phrase “mod­er­ate Mus­lims” has taken on the same descrip­tive weight and author­ity as, say, Ortho­dox Jew or Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, as if “mod­er­ate” were some­how actu­ally a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actu­ally con­tributes to rather than decon­structs the way in which Islam is being defined as a pro­foundly hos­tile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world polit­i­cal stance towards the West, broadly speak­ing, and the United States in par­tic­u­lar, rather than as a reli­gion. This is to me – and I’d be inter­ested to hear what other peo­ple think of this – very sim­i­lar to the way in which the anti­se­mitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18^th cen­tury, and cer­tainly the 19^th cen­tury on, and it is cer­tainly one of the under­ly­ing assump­tions – i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world – of the “World Zion­ist Con­spir­acy” theories.

It’s also worth not­ing that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups – Mus­lims and homo­sex­u­als – are god­less accord­ing to Jones, a logic sim­i­lar to the one that cre­ated the asso­ci­a­tion between being Jew­ish and homo­sex­u­al­ity, to men­tion being com­mu­nist, Jew­ish and homo­sex­ual, that was an impor­tant point of anti­se­mitic rhetoric in this coun­try dur­ing 50s, 60s and even 70s.

It’s easy to dis­miss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, espe­cially when his argu­ments for why Islam is a devil’s reli­gion, as quoted in the text accom­pa­ny­ing the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:

“I mean ask your­self, have you ever really seen a really happy Mus­lim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real reli­gion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

“No, to me it looks like a reli­gion of the devil.”

The prob­lem is that Jones and com­pany are only giv­ing expres­sion to the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of what an awful lot of peo­ple in the United State., con­sciously or not, already believe. The term Islam­o­pho­bia may be rel­a­tively new, but the (often racial­ized and racial­iz­ing) hatred of Mus­lims has a long his­tory in this coun­try – and that is some­thing I will per­haps write about in another post – a his­tory that pre­dates the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks not by decades, but by cen­turies, and its assump­tions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our cul­ture as the assump­tions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.

I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a com­par­i­son to be made between the way in which anti­se­mitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s cam­paign against the Jews and the way Islam­o­pho­bic rhetoric has been more and more mak­ing its way into our pub­lic dis­course. Indeed, I think this com­par­i­son would prob­a­bly work with the rhetoric of any geno­ci­dal cam­paign, though I do not think and I am not imply­ing that this is the begin­ning of some kind of anti-Muslim gov­ern­ment action. Rather, I think, plain and sim­ple, that those com­par­isons should make clear to us how imper­a­tive it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of peo­ple like Terry Jones go unan­swered.

From an August 11^th arti­cle by Jonathan D. Sarna pub­lished on The Jew­ish Daily Forward’s web­site:

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood on Gov­er­nors Island, in sight of the Statue of Lib­erty, and force­fully defended the right of Mus­lims to build a com­mu­nity cen­ter and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, he expressly made a point of dis­tanc­ing him­self from an ear­lier leader of the city: Peter Stuyvesant, who under­stood the rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and state alto­gether dif­fer­ently than Bloomberg does.

As gov­er­nor of what was then called New Ams­ter­dam, from 1647 – 1664, Stuyvesant worked to enforce Calvin­ist ortho­doxy. He objected to pub­lic wor­ship for Luther­ans, fought Catholi­cism and threat­ened those who har­bored Quak­ers with fines and impris­on­ment. One might eas­ily imag­ine how he would have treated Muslims.

When Jew­ish refugees arrived in his city, in 1654, Stuyvesant was deter­mined to bar them com­pletely. Jews, he com­plained, were “deceit­ful,” “very repug­nant” and “hate­ful ene­mies and blas­phe­mers of the name of Christ.” He wanted them sent elsewhere.

Stuyvesant’s supe­ri­ors in Hol­land over­ruled him, cit­ing eco­nomic and polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. He con­tin­ued, how­ever, to restrict Jews to the prac­tice of their reli­gion “in all quiet­ness” and “within their houses.” Being as sus­pi­cious of all Jews as some today are of all Mus­lims, he never allowed them to build a syn­a­gogue of their own.

It was not until the early 1700s that Jews won the right to wor­ship in pub­lic in New York City. In Con­necti­cut that right was not granted until 1843, and the reac­tion of The New Haven Reg­is­ter, which “viewed the syn­a­gogue as a pub­lic defeat for Chris­ten­dom,” is instructive:

“The Jews…,” the paper thun­dered, “have out­flanked us here, and effected a foot­ing in the very cen­tre of our own fortress. Strange as it may sound, it is nev­er­the­less true that a Jew­ish syn­a­gogue has been estab­lished in this city — and their place of wor­ship (in Grand Street, over the store of Heller and Man­del­baum) was ded­i­cated on Fri­day after­noon. Yale Col­lege divin­ity deserves a Court-martial for bad generalship.”

It took an act of Con­gress, signed by Pres­i­dent Franklin Pierce, for Jews to be able to wor­ship in pub­lic in Wash­ing­ton, DC, where some con­tended that the Reli­gious Cor­po­ra­tion Act granted the right to pur­chase real estate only to Chris­t­ian churches; and just in case you think that Jews no longer run into such prob­lems in the United States, Sarna cites a case from 1999 in which “oppo­nents of a new Ortho­dox syn­a­gogue seek­ing to build in New Rochelle, N.Y. [used] warn­ings [about] ‘rats,’ ‘traf­fic’ and ‘creep­ing com­mer­cial­iza­tion’ [to hide their] real fear, [which was] that ‘the iden­tity of the neigh­bor­hood would change.’”

Mus­lims have been wor­ship­ing in pub­lic near Ground Zero for three decades. The Cor­doba House com­mu­nity cen­ter will not, in other words, be bring­ing some­thing entirely new to the area. Rather, it will pro­vide much needed space for a com­mu­nity that already exists there – not to men­tion the much needed space it will pro­vide for Mus­lims and peo­ple of other faiths to inter­act. The sim­i­lar­i­ties between much of the rhetoric being employed to argue against the build­ing of Cor­doba House and The New Haven Register’s The Jews have out­flanked us ought to dis­turb us all.

I first read about the ADL’s state­ment sup­port­ing those who would stop the build­ing of Cor­doba House, a Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter mod­eled on the YM/YWHA’s and CA’s you can find all over New York City over at The Debate Link. In read­ing the state­ment, I was struck by these two paragraphs:

How­ever, there are under­stand­ably strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties sur­round­ing the World Trade Cen­ter site.  We are ever mind­ful of the tragedy which befell our nation there, the pain we all still feel – and espe­cially the anguish of the fam­i­lies and friends of those who were killed on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001.

The con­tro­versy which has emerged regard­ing the build­ing of an Islamic Cen­ter at this loca­tion is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process.  There­fore, under these unique cir­cum­stances, we believe the City of New York would be bet­ter served if an alter­na­tive loca­tion could be found.

These words raise, of course, the obvi­ous ques­tion: Sup­pose the build­ing at stake were a Jew­ish com­mu­nity cen­ter and sup­pose the peo­ple opposed it were doing so out of “strong pas­sions and keen sen­si­tiv­i­ties” that were anal­o­gous to what the peo­ple who oppose the Cor­doba House feel, would the ADL argue that such a build­ing in a such a place was “coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to the heal­ing process” and urge that the cen­ter be built else­where? More than that, though, I found myself won­der­ing about whose feel­ings the ADL is being so con­sid­er­ate of here. As Michael Bar­baro wrote on July 30^th in an arti­cle on The New York Times web­site–the arti­cle was on the front page of the July 31^st edi­tion of the paper – attribut­ing the point to Oz Sul­tan, Cor­doba House’s pro­gram­ming direc­tor, “He said that Mus­lims had also died on Sept. 11, either because they worked in the twin tow­ers, or responded to the scene.”

Sul­tan was respond­ing to a state­ment made by Abra­ham Fox­man, ADL’s national direc­tor, to the effect that the peo­ple whose feel­ings his orga­ni­za­tion feels ought not to be hurt by the build­ing of cen­ter at its cur­rent loca­tion are the fam­i­lies of those who died in the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks. Mr. Sultan’s response, of course, is pre­cisely to the point, and I don’t think there isn’t much else to add to that. I do find Foxman’s rea­son­ing, at least as it is quoted in Barbaro’s arti­cle, pro­foundly trou­bling, though:

Asked why the oppo­si­tion of the [Sep­tem­ber 11^th vic­tims’] fam­i­lies was so piv­otal in the deci­sion, Mr. Fox­man, a Holo­caust sur­vivor, said they were enti­tled to their emotions.

“Sur­vivors of the Holo­caust are enti­tled to feel­ings that are irra­tional,” he said. Refer­ring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 vic­tims, he said, “Their anguish enti­tles them to posi­tions that oth­ers would cat­e­go­rize as irra­tional or bigoted.”

It’s hard for me to know where to begin tak­ing this apart. First, though, let me say that I do think Fox­man is right about this: peo­ple who have been through trauma are enti­tled to their feel­ings about things that may force them to return to or relive that trauma, and even when those feel­ings are irra­tional, the valid­ity of the feel­ings them­selves should not be ques­tioned, even when those feel­ings can rea­son­ably be cat­e­go­rized as “big­oted.” The rest of us, how­ever, should not be held hostage to the legit­i­macy of those feel­ings. More, pre­cisely because those feel­ings can be rea­son­ably cat­e­go­rized as big­oted, defer­ring to them in mat­ters of pub­lic pol­icy and dis­course can end up per­pet­u­at­ing that big­otry in con­crete ways. Wit­ness the ADL’s state­ment which, even grant­ing the most gen­er­ous pos­si­ble read­ing – and I am not sure what that would be – mar­gin­al­izes Mus­lims sim­ply for being Muslim.

Even more than that, though, I think it is cyn­i­cal beyond belief for Fox­man to enlist the moral author­ity that inevitably attaches to men­tion of Holo­caust sur­vivors, espe­cially because he is him­self a sur­vivor, to jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. It is insult­ing of my intel­li­gence; triv­i­al­iz­ing of the Holo­caust; it ren­ders Mus­lims invis­i­ble on all kinds of lev­els by equat­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11^th vic­tims’ fam­i­lies with the Jews; and it is, fun­da­men­tally, more about guilt-tripping the peo­ple who want to build the Cor­doba House and their sup­port­ers than it is about a search for heal­ing and that can be noth­ing but, to use Foxman’s own word, counterproductive.

I have not been fol­low­ing the Cor­doba House issue very closely and so I have not read much about the ques­tions that have been raised about some of the sources for its fund­ing, but I would like to say this: even if it turned out that Cor­doba House were being funded with money that could be tied back to the same peo­ple who per­pe­trated the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks, or some sim­i­larly objec­tion­able group, [ETA: the fact of that fund­ing would be the rea­son to pre­vent the build­ing of the Cor­doba House any­where in the United States; the fact of that fund­ing] would still not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion that would not jus­tify the ADL’s posi­tion. I hope that those ques­tions about fund­ing, if they have been legit­i­mately raised, are resolved pos­i­tively and that the Cor­doba House gets built. The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing it con­vinces me that we really, really need it.