Build Imam Rauf's Mosque So American Muslims Won't Feel Sad and Afraid

That's the gist of another New York Times article that tries to drum up sympathy for a supremacist structure on hallowed ground, and does so by enlisting that hoariest of bogeymen, a "backlash":

For nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, many American Muslims made concerted efforts to build relationships with non-Muslims, to make it clear they abhor terrorism, to educate people about Islam and to participate in interfaith service projects. They took satisfaction in the observations by many scholars that Muslims in America were more successful and assimilated than Muslims in Europe.

Eboo Patel, the director of an interfaith youth group, said some politicians were whipping up fear and hatred of Muslims.

Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism. The knifing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City has also alarmed many American Muslims.

“We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?” said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. “In no other country could we have such freedoms — that’s why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don’t want Muslims here anymore.”

Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”

That was a refrain echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on...

Really? And what sort of  "trajectory" did they think they were on--the type where a taqiyyah-spouting imam could bamboozle the credulous kafir into letting him plant his triumphalist structure in the most inapporpriate place possible? If that's the trajectory they're seeking then all I can say is Mecca, we have a problem. A big one.

In the Solway piece I linked to earlier, he writes that the Rauf mosque controversy has been

framed as a conflict between those who believe the site is hallowed ground that should be dedicated to the memory of the thousands who perished there, and those who stand behind the multicultural mantra of religious tolerance for all, including for those who are themselves intolerant or cleave to a patently supremacist ideology that has America’s demise at heart. The larger issue, then, has to do with the concept of “tolerance, “which is understood as embracing all forms of political ideologies without demanding reciprocity from the beneficiaries of such largesse—a dangerous inanity that author Howard Rotberg in a recent book has labelled “Tolerism”—is both preposterous and suicidal. The stretching of the First Amendment to serve as an umbrella for a religious faith that advocates the reduction and even in some cases the extinction of all its competitors, as well as the submission of all non-Muslims to an imperial Caliphate, and that furnishes its adherents with the doctrinal weapons to carry out the program, is a perversion of thought. We have been spoiled, it seems, by too many years of unlimited credit, not only fiscally but in the realm of untenable ideas.

That's the Times's thinking for you--perverse and untenable.