Rabbis Rally in Support of Ground Zero Mosque

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Rabbis Rally in Support of Ground Zero Mosque

Mara Gay

Contributor

NEW YORK (Aug. 5) -- Rabbis rallied near the World Trade Center site today in support of a planned Islamic center known as the ground zero mosque.

About 20 religious leaders and activists gathered on the street in lower Manhattan today where the mosque is to be built. They said the Cordoba Initiative, the group sponsoring the cultural center, was welcome in New York.

"We need this Islamic center to preach love and respect in contrast to those who preach hate and destruction," Rabbi Richard Jacobs of the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., told reporters.

The rabbis said controversy surrounding the project, which will include a space for prayer, is rooted in intolerance against Muslims.

Spencer Platt, Getty Images

Rabbi Arthur Waskow speaks at a news conference near the World Trade Center on Thursday in support of a proposed mosque near ground zero.

"Many people still think of Muslims as terrorists," Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, co-chair of Rabbis for Human Rights, told AOL News today in New York. "My hope is that a center like this will help people understand that not all Muslims are violent."

The rabbis also denounced the words of the Anti-Defamation League. The Jewish organization said earlier this week that it would not support the mosque out of respect for the families of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks who oppose the project, and because of concerns about whether the Cordoba Initiative has ties to terrorism.

In a statement Wednesday, the ADL said that "building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain." The statement also said the public has a right to know "what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values."

Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia said the ADL is wrong on the issue, and told reporters he greeted the group's position with "sadness and surprise."

Critics of the project, many of them family members of victims in the Sept. 11 attacks, say the mosque would be an insult to those who died just blocks away at the World Trade Center at the hands of Muslim extremists. But the Cordoba Initiative cleared a major hurdle Tuesday when a New York City panel voted not to label the building designated for the project a historical landmark, paving the way for construction.

Daisy Khan, the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement and one of the project's sponsors, was at the rally as well, but declined to address criticism of the project or respond to any questions. She said bridging the gap between the Muslim and Jewish community is "the task of this generation."

Discuss

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Another example of Jewish support for a maligned mosque.

Mosque moves closer to opening

June 28, 07 12:06 AM

By David Abel, GLOBE STAFF

Rabbis came in yarmulkes, priests wore their Roman collars, and imams dressed in knitted caps and the loose-fitting gowns called thobes.

About 300 people, from Jews in sandals to suited Christians to Muslims in sequined veils, gathered beneath the arched brick entrance of the city’s newest mosque Wednesday to mark completion of the first stage of its construction.

They also prayed for tolerance in the wake of controversy and a lawsuit that has raised questions about who paid for the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center and how it obtained the land in Roxbury.

"This mosque is intended to be a place that opens its doors and provides opportunities for all religions and all different ethnicities and different communities to find a place of dialogue," said Bilal Kaleem, executive director of the Boston chapter of the Muslim American Society.

The mosque, scheduled to open in three to six months depending on construction and fund-raising, sparked a lawsuit that contended the Islamic Society of Boston bought the land from the city in 2003 at an unfairly low price.

The lawsuit filed by a Mission Hill man was dismissed in February. Last month, the Society dropped its own lawsuit that alleged media outlets and others had defamed it in an attempt to halt construction of the 70,000-square-foot mosque on Malcolm X Boulevard.

At the evening event, which the Society called an "Intercommunity Solidarity Day," local officials, activists, and religious leaders praised the Society for finishing the project.

Rabbi Moshe Waldoks of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline said he hoped the mosque would serve as a beacon of peace.

"Our hope and prayer is that we will foster in this place a mighty bulwark against those forces of darkness and treachery that use religion as a tool for death and destruction," he said. "As we witness the daily acts of murder in the name of God, we must all do what we can to teach and demand that religion and its adherents are never exploited for nihilistic politics, for purposes of power and greed.

"We in the Jewish community are hopeful that the entry of our Muslim brothers and sisters into the marvelous tapestry of human experience that is Boston will become partners in spreading the deep truth of the interconnectedness of all human beings," he added.

Edited August 6, 2010 by Sofiyya

[Sofiyya 1,687]

A Christian perspective on why the mosque deserves support.

Why I support the mosque in Manhattan

Today's guest blogger is Brian McLaren, who began his career as a college English teacher, and then served for twenty-four years as a church planter and pastor in the Washington, DC, area. Now he is a popular blogger and speaker, author (the most recent of his eleven books is A New Kind of Christianity), and activist, especially focusing on the spiritual life and its intersection with the planet, poverty, peace, and pluralism.

I don't really like proof-texting - pulling a verse out of context to try to prove a point. I'm not even a big fan of the fact that the Bible is divided up into chapters and verses. It wasn't always that way - our modern schema of chapters and verses is a relatively late addition to the Bible, having evolved since the 13th Century. Chapter-and-versification allows people to kidnap a quote out of its context in a longer narrative and apply it in potentially irresponsible and harmful ways, as if the Bible were a legal constitution and its verses were articles, sections, subsections, and amendments in a legal code.

But I'm about to engage in chapter-and-versing, consciously and intentionally - and with regard to context, because in this case, the ancient text applies powerfully to our own situation in America today. Consider Exodus 23:9:

"Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt."

The command was originally for the Jewish people. After a famine, they became refugees in Egypt and eventually were enslaved for generations by Pharoah's regime. But according to the Bible, God isn't on the side of the oppressors; God sides with the oppressed, and so God liberated them from slavery. God then led them through the wilderness and ultimately provided them a place to live. The oppressed became the blessed.

But being blessed by God gave them no excuse to oppress others, so they were commanded to never forget - never forget what it's like to be oppressed, so you never become complicit in the oppression of others. The command is repeated often, and even strengthened, as in Leviticus 19:33-34:

When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

You find a similar strengthening of the command in Deuteronomy (10:19):

[The LORD] defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.

Lately I've been thinking about Exodus 23:9 and its companion verses in relation to the current controversy about a group of Muslim citizens - full American citizens in a democracy, not even aliens! - seeking to build a mosque in Manhattan. Among others, Sarah Palin has called for peace-loving Muslims to "refudiate" the mosque, calling it a provocation and saying that it stabs the hearts of people in the heartland. But I wonder if people in the heartland have forgotten that they are only a few generations away from ancestors who were also immigrants, who came to the United States in many cases to experience freedom of religion.

Shouldn't it stab the hearts of caring Americans like you and me to imagine forbidding Muslims to experience the same freedom of religion in their new homeland that our own ancestors sought here in the past? Shouldn't we remember how it feels to be seen as aliens, and shouldn't we love our Muslim neighbors as ourselves, wanting the same religious freedom for them that we cherish?

That's why I think it's valid to bring Exodus 23:9 and its companion verses into the equation at times like these. We Christians - and Jews too - should enthusiastically support Muslims in their desire to build a center devoted to peaceful religion near the site of an atrocity committed in the name of violent religion. We are not called to mistreatment, prejudice, oppression, or even to mere tolerance - we are called to something far higher: to empathy, to generosity, to hospitality, and to love, fueled by empathy and memory. To violate those values should truly stab the heart of all Christians everywhere.

Knowing that Sarah Palin respects the Scriptures, I think if she gives it a second and prayerful thought, she couldn't help but change her mind.

The content of this blog reflects the views of its author and does not necessarily reflect the views of either Eboo Patel or the Interfaith Youth Core.

BY EBOO PATEL | JULY 30, 2010; 2:14 PM ET

Edited August 6, 2010 by Sofiyya

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Why I Love the Mosque

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Michael Bloomberg's lofty defense of that so-called Ground Zero mosque, which won de facto approval yesterday, missed a larger point: It's good strategy.

I suppose I take the idiot idealist's position of what has come to be known as the Ground Zero mosque (even though, it has been pointed out repeatedly, the description is not accurate), which is pretty much what Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid out in his speech on Governor's Island Tuesday: We ought to be better than the worst thing that happened to us, and if a Muslim group comes to us in peace, we must accept the gesture or—here it comes—the terrorists win.

If something goes wrong later on—if members of the American Muslim community turn out to be bad actors—we have our warm reception of Cordoba House to hold up as evidence of our goodwill.

This is pretty typical of the incredible and irrational sentiments that have attached themselves to what is officially known as Cordoba House. What has not been pointed out in response to that specious argument is that the opponents are not simply being inflammatory when they refer to it mostly as a phenomenon of geography: Obviously, the idea was to build an Islamic center near the 9/11 site—that it's in fact closer to the Burlington Coat Factory is kind of a cute point, but not convincing. So let's, at the very least, deal with Cordoba for what it is: an attempt by moderate Muslims to be part of this miserable legacy, because, as they want us to know, they are loyal Americans, too.

Given that this is the premise, it's odd that the whole Islamophobic crowd—the Fox News hysterics, the Palinolithics, the various Cheneys, the assorted terror mongers—doesn't welcome Cordoba House for the kinds of cynical, obnoxious reasons that any savvy political player would instantly recognize: Which is to say, if the people behind Cordoba really are so dangerous, then for heaven's sake, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

If the destroyers of civilization—which is what many believe Muslims to be—come to you with irenic intent, insisting that they want to pay homage and honor to a disaster caused by the evildoers of their own kind, it strikes me as a good idea to just work with them. Not because you like them or agree with, but because they are here and that's that, and it seems that when they are trying to be decent, the wisest move is to respond in kind. That way, if something goes wrong later on—if members of the American Muslim community turn out to be bad actors—we have our warm reception of Cordoba House to hold up as evidence of our goodwill. It's a bargaining chip.

Basically, if everyone thought of this a bit more as realpolitik and a bit less as an existential crisis—which it is not; the United States will be just fine—this would all be less complicated. Obviously, the Jewish mayor of New York City and the Jewish borough president of Manhattan—both of whom are supporters of Cordoba—have adopted that stance, so I am not sure why an assortment of people who don't live here can't manage it.

One of the especially nice things about New York is that Jews, Muslims, and life's whole ridiculous assortment of crazies all live together quite comfortably. The particular offense of the attacks of 9/11 was that it brought religious tension to a city—possibly to a whole country—that simply did not have that particular problem. When I got to law school in 2004, I befriended many Muslim-American students—a lot of them were the children of pediatricians in Grosse Point or cardiologists in Short Hills, and they mostly reminded me of suburban Jews I'd known—who had a sudden interest in the legal system after being so frequently targeted for extra security checks in airports. I generally found that talking to any of them about the Middle East—or a zillion other highly caffeinated topics—was a far calmer experience than any conversation I could possibly have with, say, a typical European ideologue who has an anti-Israel reflex and no sense of history. That was never the case with my classmates, who were informed and who had nuanced views of the Islamic world. It came down to this: They're American. They live here.

I'm surprised that American exceptionalism hasn't taught people opposing Cordoba something about the process of joining this society. The United States has been defined by its ability to integrate immigrants, and turn them into Americans. Every wave of migrants from every part of the world has managed to find its place here, while still maintaining its ethnic identity. This is not something that happens in, say Europe, where women from Saudi Arabia living in London never give up their burqas, and where Algerians in the cities outside Paris riot because after generations they still don't feel French.

But the American Dream is such a pretty windmill to chase that it's not a problem to get new arrivals to join in the pursuit. People come here, they start watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey, they start reading vampire novels, they start eating Chicken McNuggets—it takes very little time for them to become soft and stupid like the rest of us. This country does not routinely produce radicals; numbskulls, maybe.

So I'm not scared of Cordoba House, with or without its Wahabi backers. Yes, of course, there will be Muslim extremists, some of them even from the United States, as we have already seen. There will be trouble. Whether or not there's a Cordoba House, there will be trouble. So we can welcome the Ground Zero mosque for all the right and good reasons—or we can welcome it because it's good strategy. Nothing wrong with that: New York City was built on people doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

[mawilson 2,133]

Why build it there when the idea of a mosque so close to Ground Zero clearly upsets a lot of people?

Why make yourself a target and create controversy?

Unless this particular mosque is not just a mosque but a symbol of Islamic victory over the infidels?

[^_^ 5,021]

Islamic victory? 3000 of ours died and two of our buildings were destroyed. We've now destroyed two entire nations. Victory is clearly ours and a small gesture like this does not change that at all. We can afford this grand gesture because there is no doubt that in the end analysis who died in greater numbers (they did).

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Why build it there when the idea of a mosque so close to Ground Zero clearly upsets a lot of people?

Why make yourself a target and create controversy?

Unless this particular mosque is not just a mosque but a symbol of Islamic victory over the infidels?

I have similar questions, like why are some people upset? Why should their being upset circumvent the right of others to own property, and worship freely? Do they feel that they are entitled to have a proprietary interest in grief, healing and private property in lower Manhattan?

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Islamic victory? 3000 of ours died and two of our buildings were destroyed. We've now destroyed two entire nations. Victory is clearly ours and a small gesture like this does not change that at all. We can afford this grand gesture because there is no doubt that in the end analysis who died in greater numbers (they did).

Not only that, but 400 innocent Muslims died in the buildings and on the planes on 9/11. Over a billion other Muslims became victims of Muslim haters. Loss had no religion that day.

[alienlovechild 75]

Islamic victory? 3000 of ours died and two of our buildings were destroyed. We've now destroyed two entire nations. Victory is clearly ours and a small gesture like this does not change that at all. We can afford this grand gesture because there is no doubt that in the end analysis who died in greater numbers (they did).

There were more than two buildings destroyed on 9/11.

Victory is ours? Any peace treaties signed that I missed?

[mawilson 2,133]

I have similar questions, like why are some people upset? Why should their being upset circumvent the right of others to own property, and worship freely?

Does it matter why they are upset? Let's assume the worst - that they are bigots, hypocrites,

idiots, Muslim haters. If they are wrong and Islam is truly a religion of peace, shouldn't the

proper response be one of forgiveness and acceptance? Shouldn't your Muslim brothers and sisters

rise above the pettiness and narrow-mindedness and lose themselves in the love for

Allah...somewhere else?

[sandinista! 1,816]

yes, black people should have just forgave and accepted their separate lunch counters and drinking fountains. there's other places to eat and drink. jews should have just accepted and forgave wasps who didn't want to have to golf behind them at their country clubs. lots of other green places to putt exist. gay people should just get over it if a landlord doesn't want rent them an apartment cause they're the same gender..there's lots of other apartments out there. the whole 14th amendment is just ridiculous because all those pesky, whiny minorities in the united states couldn't "rise above the pettiness and narrow-mindedness and lose themselves in the love for _______ ... somewhere else". this country has been there before already. it wasn't better for it. and going somewhere else didn't change it, fighting for their rights no matter how uncomfortable or pissed off it made some people did.

[ready4ONE 5,400]

Not only that, but 400 innocent Muslims died in the buildings and on the planes on 9/11. Over a billion other Muslims became victims of Muslim haters. Loss had no religion that day.

I think "radical Islamists" a term I realize you protest, have shown repeatedly to care nothing of innocent lives, Muslim or Infidel.

I still believe the site of this mosque is provocative, if not wrong. The beauty of our society is we can have our opinions. Given the problems image wise this mosque has created, not sure what the purpose is of placing the mosque at ground zero. I believe if they have the permits in place though, it is their right. Even if in exercising that right they are being fairly insensitive as well as provocative.

[BishopM 114]

I didn't read all the articles because I am tired at the moment. However, I am glad to see the Rabbis supporting the Mosque. The Book of Genesis is very clear on the validity of the Islamic religion. Christians (at least Catholics, like me) clearly recognize this as well.

Plus, in my opinion, it is good to see the Rabbis step up because now as much as any other time the USA (and world) needs a 'Nation of Priests' which is the Levite nation according again to the Books of Moses. Its quite beautiful, for Muslims/Jews/Christians alike for those who have eyes to see...in fact, it is Holy, no other words fit.

However, I read somewhere that the Mosque would be dedicated on 9/11 (sorry...no weblink to add credibility to an otherwise webcredit only world) and it does seem that from a mere point of compassion and understanding that any other of the days within the year could be chosen...it is courtesy and a sign of respect.

Peace/

Edited August 6, 2010 by BishopM

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

Does it matter why they are upset? Let's assume the worst - that they are bigots, hypocrites,

idiots, Muslim haters. If they are wrong and Islam is truly a religion of peace, shouldn't the

proper response be one of forgiveness and acceptance? Shouldn't your Muslim brothers and sisters

rise above the pettiness and narrow-mindedness and lose themselves in the love for

Allah...somewhere else?