Richard Jeffrey Newman

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.