Head to Head: 9/11 wounds re-opened by mosque

 It’s been almost a decade since the attack on the American homeland on 9/11.  In the past nine years, plans have been made and committees have been created to transform ground zero into a national memorial. Yet, when I was there this past May, ground zero still looked largely like it did the day those planes took down the two towers.

The area looks like nothing more than another construction zone, filled with rubble and dust, some machinery and orange barricades.  As you step off the subway and walk down Fulton Street, it’s easy to imagine what it must have looked like with the two monstrous towers looming over the city.  It also is easy to imagine that a very young person could walk by without any idea of what happened there that fateful day nine years ago.  What they will be able to remember is the mosque that has plans of being built.

The actual location of the mosque, about two blocks from ground zero in Lower Manhattan, was home to another building that was damaged during the September 11 attacks.  When the mosque is built, therefore, there will be one more memorial to Islam and still none in the place where the twin towers once stood.

This delay in the building of a national 9/11 memorial is not the fault of radical Muslims, but the fault of an America who has had its security, spirit and economy crushed over the course of the nine years that the country has attempted to recuperate from these attacks.  

However, the inability of Americans to recover is the fault of a few particular Muslims that chose to fly those planes into American buildings on 9/11, killing some 3,000 Americans.  And the delay of the monument, as well as the building of a the mosque, will be the fault, again, of a few particular Muslims that re-open the wounds of 9/11 and wave their flagrant disregard in the face of America and in the faces of those families that lost its mothers, fathers, daughters and sons at the hands of a group of people claiming jihad in the name of their Islamic faith.

I recognize the fact that in America, we are given a great deal of freedoms.  Freedoms earned for us by our military men and women who still are stationed in foreign countries, fighting a war with no foreseeable end.  But on the cover of “The Economist,” right after September 11, 2001, was the headline: “The day the world changed.” And while we retain a number of freedoms, we have given up the one that we once so enjoyed, which was the freedom to believe that the United States of America is invincible, to live our lives in a manner that exploits that belief.

Maybe then, we also give up the right to be incredibly insensitive toward tragedy.

I would liken the building of this mosque to the outrageous funeral protests of the Westboro Baptist Church.  Do people have a right to protest at soldiers’ funerals? Sure, they do, but in the court case against the Phelps family, the District judge ruled that there are, in fact, limits on that right.  The protesting family was found guilty for “infliction of emotional distress.”  There seems to be hardly any other reason for Sharif El-Gamal, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Nour Mousa to be building the mosque in this precise location than infliction of emotional distress.

This also could be likened to the building of the Catholic convent at Auschwitz in the ’80s.  After years of controversy and meetings at Geneva, the convent eventually was moved, and the Catholic nuns inhabiting the convent were evicted from the camp after an order came from the Vatican.  Catholicism as a whole is not the enemy, but the fact that so many died there in the name of the faith was important enough for the pope to recognize the necessity of removing the convent.

The fact that there is even a question of whether or not the mosque should be built at this particular space seems already to be a win for radical Muslims, and I have a feeling that our emotions are being played like a fiddle by some of those who would wish us harm.  Again, it is not Islam that is inherently wrong, but rather the political message sent by this construction — a space for prayer to a god who supposedly instructed a few men to kill thousands in his name.

Ultimately, we need to appraise how much memories are worth, how deserving of respect our fellow Americans’ agonizing loss is.  The question here is not about rights, it’s about sensibility and the idea that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.