With the full understanding that I am opening up to potentially fiery and racist feedback, I am hoping to comment on an issue that I believe deserves very little attention—and that is the inescapable furor surrounding the construction of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”.
I try to pay attention to actual news stories on a very minimal basis, because they are too often tainted with a poisonous political favor and unfair endorsement of other groups. But as my friends and family realize how often I balance fairly many issues clearly in my regular “Deuteronomy 4:4” feature, they encouraged me to comment.
That is why I wrote this.
In keeping with Cicero’s doctrine that a compelling speaker need make a story that only resembles the truth, as opposed to actually being truthful, firebrands have blown this story out of control. Just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, to use Voltaire’s words—this “Ground Zero Mosque” is not on Ground Zero, nor is it actually a Mosque.
Okay, maybe it has a prayer space, in addition to more pronounced community spaces with myriad purposes, which seem to greatly outnumber said prayer space. I cannot list them all here. However, its primary function is more similar to a compacted Roman Forum than a house of worship.
Would I call the Roman Forum a Roman Temple? Most certainly I would not, whether worship spaces were present there or not. The inclusion of the prayer space and the “mosque” label invokes images of cultural dominance that the words “community center” would not possess. And which word or words do you hear to describe Park51 more often?
Instead of informing, it seems that newscasters seem more intent on manipulating people on puppet strings of fear and guilt. Knowledge of facts bestows reason. Pathos does not.
Luckily, the Interfaith Justice League informed me via e-mail about the issue before any biased reporter did. Many other sane sources, including my own father, noted that it was a mosque by the same means the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven is a synagogue. In other words, it is no such thing. And even if it were, its role as a solely religious function is minimal.
The biggest problem is one that I really have not heard yet, but it seems so obvious: it has not been built yet, and ultimately its true function, which will come about by means of its execution, will come forth. Whatever it is on paper, it does not instantly equate to what it will be in space until people enter it.
Right now it seems that any article on the web that posts on this topic will become rife with hateful remarks preaching ignorance and prejudice on all sides.
I am no Islamist, and I cannot judge what makes a swimming pool or a theater “Muslim” until someone teaches me. But I will wager that if it belongs to everyone, and hopefully it will, then it can teach tolerance that will make cruelty throughout the world vanish, at least on some level.
Any true problems can only arise with the location after it has been in use for some time. But until then, given my naïve understanding, I hope that the site will be open to people of all faiths and opinions, and each person will be told, in the words of the late Shel Silverstein, “come sit by my fire, for we have some flax golden tales to spin”…ones of a better future with fewer generalizations, attacks, and hateful causes.