No Return

The New York Times goes to bat for the Ground Zero mosque Cordoba House the Park51 project (what are the odds, huh?), this time employing an argument I haven't heard before. Apparently, Muslim workers helped construct the Twin Towers, and there was a Muslim prayer room on the premises. For some unaccountable reason, though (bigotry/Islamophobia/xenophobia etc.), Americans seem loath to acknowledge that and have a nasty habit of harping on the Towers', er, deconstruction:

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

Those were the days, eh, habibi? Too bad the jihadis had to go and spoil it all.

Update: The prefect song for Mr. Abdus-Salaam.

Update: A lim for him:

A non-alien, Abdus-Salaam,
Is feeling excessively glum.
The infidel glowers
About those Twin Towers
And no longer is calling him "chum".