Cordoba House

It’s late August, and in accordance with the carefully balanced cycle of the seasons we are treated to back to school shopping, meaningless NFL preseason games , and the annual manufactured media controversy meant to fill the news vacuum resulting from Congress’ August recess. This year’s ragefest is particularly contrived and insidious. I’m of course referring to the debate over the proposed construction of the Cordoba House Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan. The Cliffs Notes version of this dispute plays out as a contest between opportunistic right-wingers looking to gin up support of a increasingly nativist base of party voters, and a disjointed collection of interests-supporting religious tolerance and freedom. The approach of the radical right is as obvious as it is grotesque. Their first order of business has been in the area of labeling. By referring to the proposed Cordoba House project as the “ground-zero-mosque,” they seek to tap into negative feelings toward the Islamic community whose genesis goes back much earlier than that September morning. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand, designed to create a guilt-by-association dynamic, and sentence the Islamic community to an ongoing sort of collective punishment. The deceit doesn’t stop there; the proposed center is not in fact on the site of the World Trade Center, but located two blocks away in the former location of a Burlington Coat Factory. This line of rebuttal, while necessary to correct the factual record, simply demonstrates how far our collective discourse has degenerated. In this context what we are essentially debating is the size of an Islamic-free zone. In a country that holds religious freedom to be among its bedrock principals, this development does not bode well for our chances to move toward mutual understanding and fulfilling our promise of a “more perfect union.”