Park51 and the shame of American skittishness

Park51 and the shame of American skittishness

Aug 21st 2010, 15:41 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

HIGH-PROFILE conservatives contend that no one denies that the owners of the property at 51 Park Place in lower Manhattan have the legal right to build an Islamic community centre and mosque on their property. Rather, their argument is that a building devoted to Muslim purposes mere blocks from the site of the enormously deadly attacks on the World Trade Center—attacks motivated in part by a virulently radical strain of Islam—would be in exceedingly bad taste.

However, as this week's Economist/YouGov poll shows, slightly more than half of those identifying themselves as Republican do deny that Muslims have a constitutional right to build a mosque near the World Trade Center site, as do a quarter of those identifying themselves as a Democrat or Independent. Moreover, groups of Americans have been protesting the construction of mosques in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Temecula, California, none of which are mere blocks from ground zero.

I think this adds up to fairly strong evidence that much of the opposition to the Park51 project flows from a general uneasiness about Islam, and that the argument that it is offensively provocative is to a significant extent cover for less noble sentiments. But why should Americans be uneasy about the growth of a religion that commands the allegiance of a tiny percentage of the population? Could it be that Americans, and conservatives especially, have grown sceptical of the capacity of American culture to accommodate even a little more religious pluralism?

Andrew Potter writes sensibly in the Ottawa Citizen:

It is hard not to conclude that the reason conservatives are so upset by the proposed mosque is that they don't have much faith in their own culture, and it is too bad they don't have Voltaire's confidence in liberalism. Imagine a society that could not just permit, but actually encourage Muslims to build a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero. How fearsome would that be?

Mr Potter is right, I think, that the hubbub over the Park51 project has revealed the anxiety of an American public increasingly convinced that theirs is a culture too fragile for unfettered religious freedom. One would think that the proud denizens of the home of the brave would behave rather more bravely, and would not need Canadian columnists to tell them to grow spines.

source: http://economist.com/node/21009862