The World Trade Center Mosque and the Constitution

AUGUST 30, 2010
By MARK HELPRIN

The plan to erect a mosque of major proportions in what would have been the shadow of the World Trade Center involves not just the indisputable constitutional rights that sanction it, but, providentially, others that may frustrate it.

Mosques have commemoratively been established upon the ruins or in the shells of the sacred buildings of other religions—most notably but not exclusively in Cordoba, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and India. When sited in this fashion they are monuments to victory, and the chief objection to this one is not to its existence but that it would be near the site of atrocities—not just one—closely associated with mosques because they were planned and at times celebrated in them.

Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant. the rest

Holy War Over Ground Zero
Aug 30, 2010
Joseph Bottum

There, the sign that says “Sharia,” the hand-drawn letters dribbling down in streaks as though they were bleeding. And there, another sign—this one reading “No Mosque at Ground Zero” in patriotic red, white, and blue.

And there, the off-duty policemen come to join in, and there, the bikers up from Pennsylvania, and there, the microphoned speakers crying out “This is our cemetery”—“This is sacred ground.” And there, the film crews watching like hawks for violence, and there, the on-duty policemen, also watching like hawks for violence, and there . . . and there . . .

Flags and shouts and placards and confusion. The whole messy, strange, inspiring, disturbing thing—an August 22 rally against the building of a mosque near the site in New York where the World Trade Center once stood...