Lost In a Mosque Charade

The debate over the placement of a "mosque" - actually an Islamic community center - near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan is depressing.

Michael Bloomberg is the only one making sense in this debate. He says that Muslims are a part of the community in the city and a part of the American fabric and that they should be allowed to build their community center where they want to. The New York mayor was quick to point out that American Muslims died on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center was destroyed, and that the hijackers shouldn't be seen as a true reflection of Islam. He sounds a lot like George Walker Bush, who, on September 20, 2001, said in an address to Congress that the terrorist not be allowed to blaspheme a proud religion.

Most Republicans, of course, don't see it Bush's way or Bloomberg's way. There are legitimate reasons for not allowing an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site,. of course, but opponents of the planned center aren't offering them. They're too busy likening Muslims to the Nazis, as Newt Gingrich did when he suggested that building a Nazi Party office near the American Holocaust Museum would be similarly offensive. President Obama has iterated the constitutional right for Muslims to build a center near Ground Zero, but he has neither endorsed nor condemned the actual plan. But his insistence that Muslims have the constitutional right to build a house of worship where they choose, whether one agrees with the location or not, has only encouraged Republicans to represent the President as being out of touch with those who flatly oppose it.

I watched a debate on PBS's NewsHour between New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and Mohammed Hameeduddin, the Muslim mayor of Teaneck, New Jersey. Hameeduddin lamented the distraction from economic issues because of the Islamic center debate, only for him and Lazio to be distracted from that debate by discussing taxes and Lazio's supporters. Lazio's demeanor made his upstaging of Hillary Clinton during the 2000 Senate debate seem gentlemanly, and Hameeduddin's demeanor wasn't that much more inspiring. Gwen Ifill almost (no, maybe completely) lost control of the debate. It played more like an unruly edition of Ed Schultz's MSNBC Rapid Fire segment where three topics are put up for discussion and too much time is spent by panelists interrupting each other on one topic. I don't watch PBS for that. Ed Schultz's show, yes. The NewsHour, no.

Obama is wise to remain neutral on the Islamic center issue, even if Republicans attempted to represent his comments differently. Everyone else is generating more heat than light.

They tried to talk it over, but the words got in the way.