Cordoba’s Opportunity

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

The battle over a proposed $100 million mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero could well be at a turning point, the New York Times reported over the weekend. Its assessment was made after the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, came out in opposition to situating the site adjacent to the epicenter of the attacks on September 11, 2001. We telephoned Mr. Foxman to offer congratulations. It had to have been a hard call for him, with so many supporters of the project suggesting that the sole reason for opposing it had to be bigotry.

That suggestion has struck us from the start as a libel. There may be some bigots in opposition to the project, but they would be a small percentage, in our guess. We thought Mr. Foxman put it exactly right in suggesting that the fact that the Cordoba Initiative may win the right to build at the site where extremists acting in the name of Islam slew so many innocent people doesn’t make building such a center there the right thing to do. We mentioned to him that we’d been impressed with the way Sarah Palin articulated her early opposition to the project.

“She’s got seichel,” we remarked to Mr. Foxman. It was a reference to the Yiddish word that has no single-word English translation but means a combination of intelligence, wisdom, and common sense. Mrs. Palin’s short messages on Twitter were crafted as a call not on the government to prohibit the project but on the moderate Muslims themselves to — in her now classic formulation — “refudiate” the plan. Her call was for forbearance out of understanding of the special nature of the Ground Zero site in the city’s and the nation’s memory.

There is no doubt that this is an excruciating circumstance for moderate Muslims, who say that they want to create bridges to America. The situation reminds many of us of the crisis over the Carmelite nuns who wanted to establish a convent at Auschwitz. We don’t want to make any inappropriate comparisons in respect of the Holocaust, which is unique in history. But what settled that crisis with the Carmelites was the grit of a few courageous protesters, like Rabbi Avi Weiss, and the seichel of John Paul II, who grasped that the demand for forbearance was not hostility toward his religion and that understanding was not weakness.

John Paul II’s decision to move the Carmelite nuns was an important moment. It helped establish the pope’s reputation as a builder of relations between the church and the Jewish people. His establishment of relations with Israel, his visit to Yad Vashem, his visit to a synagogue were others. The Cordoba Initiative has many admirers whom we admire, including Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. But by our lights the current controversy adds up to an opportunity for the Cordoba Initiative to show its capacity for respect, understanding, and forbearance.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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