Gingrich and Cordoba
Issandr El AmraniWhen I was in New York about two months ago, the controversy over Cordoba House, the mosque being built near the site where the World Trade Center once stood, was just getting going. I remember seeing conserative blogger Pamela Geller on Mick Huckabee's Fox News show (when in the US I watch Fox News compulsively) calling the project, which is designed to promote cross-cultural understanding, as a desecration of the memory of those who died on 9/11. As Geller engaged in tarnishing an entire religion (what else can it be called?) and Huckabee politely nodded, I wondered how mainstream this stupidity had become.
A couple of days ago the prominent Republican Newt Gingrich — often said to be one of the smartest guys in his party — joined Geller's campaign. Gingrich wrote:
There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.
The proposed "Cordoba House" overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks - is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites. For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.
Gingrich is clearly actually a moron, on at least two counts. First, why does he want the US to follow the same policies as Saudi Arabia? Is that the standard he sets for the country? When will Freedom House condemn this dangerous voice against freedom of religion?
Secondly — and this is pretty galling from a historian — the Cordoba mosque was built on the site of a Spanish Visigoth church, but only after it had been a place of worship for both Christians and Muslims, and Emir Abdel Rahman actually bought the property and then began building what is generally recognized as one of the most beautiful buildings on the planet. It was after the Reconquistada, along which came the Inquisition that drove Jew and Muslim from Spain, that the building was converted into a church and its interior symmetry ruined by the construction of a huge, and ugly, Baroque wooden chapel inside it.
Geller and her friends like to describe the Cordoba House project as "the Islamic supremacist mosque", which reminds me of another supremacist project Geller has no problem with: Israel. It's amazing, and I'm sure no coincidence, the overlap you get between anti-Muslim fanatics and those who support Israel's wars and land grabs. Geller notably once ranted:
Israel is essential. And I pray dearly that in the ungodly event that Tehran or its jihadi proxies (Hez'ballah, Hamas etc) target Israel with a nuke, that she retaliate with everything she has at Tehran, Mecca, and Medina...............
Not to mention Europe. They exterminated all their Jews, but that wasn't enough. Those monsters then went on to import the next generation of Jew killers.
LoonWatch has more of the same. To me it seems clear that Geller and her ilk have embarked on a project to fan Islamophobia because it is convenient for another cause, maintaining US public opinion (already fed years of anti-Arab propaganda) on Israel's side as the legitimacy of the Zionist project erodes globally. They want to carry out this Muslim-bashing for its own sake, of course, but also comes with a nice benefit of boosting Israel, which has long had an interest in spreading anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hysteria. Sooner or later — and I think sooner — these people will start discrediting themselves and the causes they support.
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Reader Comments (8)
Excellent post Issandr.
As a New Englander who literally saw the smoke from the towers on 911 across Long Island Sound: Why should we care what people from Georgia (Gingrich) or Alaska (Sara Palin, who recently gave her opinion on the mosque) think about building houses of worship in New York City? These are the people who complain talk about urban America as not being the "real" America, after all. In any case the opposition to the mosque proceeds from three things: opportunism, demagogy and ignorance. At every level the opponents make their historical and cultural illiteracy evident both in terms of "Islamic" history in the world in general and the history and activities of Muslims in the NYC area. To think a Republican said this about a mosque once:
"I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole stren...gth for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience.
This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are."
http://mongolia.usembassy.gov/06/28/09.html
What's fascinating is that they people who write these rants against the Cordoba building don't know anything about the project. It's not even located at ground zero. It's in the same neighborhood but not at ground zero itself. Even if it was a ground zero, I think it would be sending a good message: this is what religious tolerance looks like.
The other point the ranters are missing is that the group pushing the Cordoba initiative are uber moderates Muslims, probably more liberal than your average American Muslim. I actually sat next to Daisy Khan, Iman Fayzal's wife, at a friends wedding and I am telling you there is no mistaking her for anything vaguely close to an extremist. Equating The Cordoba initiative to Islamic terrorist is like equating YMCA to the Ku Kluc Klan. They are both respectively nominally Muslim and Christian but they a really different beasts.
This debate is just a manifestation of a more disturbing phenomenon, the reemergence of hate speech in the American polity. I was never a big fan of "politically correct" talk but lately I find the amount of public display of intolerance in the media shocking. I am talking abourt racism here, with the tea party, and islamophobia with this latest debate.
Overall, an excellent post. While I agree that there's a lot of overlap between pro-Israel advocacy and Islamophobic sentiment, it's worth pointing out that local Jewish groups have endorsed the Cordoba Center:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/jewish_leaders_back_ground_zero_islamic_center
Succinct yet superb historical account of what the Cordoba Mosque is about for those who are lazy to find out for themselves, or perhaps are just in denial of what Islam stands for.
As a resident of NYC, I was both shell-shocked and ashamed to see posters on the local transportation authority buses that call for people to visit sites and call toll-free number with slogans such as "Leaving Islam?" "Fatwa over your head?" "Is your family threatening you?". Why these negative emotions from these ads? Well, the precedence this incident sets was beyond me. Will it be tolerated to have similar ads targeted against any other faith?! But then again, if we all realize who is behind that campaign, we will be more understanding of where this all comes from. The entire campaign was funded by the organization Stop Islamization of America. And who is the head leader of this organization? None other than Pamela Geller herself.
30 city buses with figures averaging 8000 dollars per bus (I guess per week).
Time for everyone to wake up and call things by their names ... in this case blunt racism!
Jamila El-Gizuli
I never heard this business about Gingrich being the smartest person in the party, from my DC days in the mid 90s I just remember him being a total buffoon. He was always claiming he knew a lot about history and then completely twisting it for his own stupid purposes. I seem to recall some particularly egregious statements about why women shouldn't serve in the military because "they get infections or something while men like to wriggle around in the mud" and then some other stupid stuff about hunting giraffes. He's always been an idiot and completely misinterpreting the significance of Cordoba would be typical.
here's that quote:
"If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don't have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they're relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn't matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes."
That quote is quite something, Paul.
It's certainly incongruous for these Republicans to claim they're fighting for the beliefs/intentions of our founding fathers when those gentlemen spoke very clearly to freedom of religion (and the equal rights of all regardless of creed). I'd like to hear an answer as to whether these wingnuts think an Iranian citizen has it worse than a Palestinian under Israeli rule.