Now American Muslims seem to have their own form of blowback, as the campaign against the “Ground Zero Mosque,” an Islamic community center located near Ground Zero, has become a national phenomenon causing its own form of blowback for mosque projects around the country.
In the news for several months, the heated debates over the planned mosque near Ground Zero in New York making headlines in recent weeks, newspapers are now reporting that demonstrations are taking place across the United States where other mosques are planned.
Protesters, sometimes aligned with the conservative Tea Party movement, are now rallying against proposed mosques in places such as Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Temecula, California.
American citizens nowadays are in the midst of a debate on how to uphold the country’s democratic values, and whether allowing Muslims the same religious freedoms enjoyed by other Americans would indeed threaten these values.
A two-year study conducted by professors with Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the University of North Carolina, has concluded that contemporary mosques are actually a deterrent to the spread of militant Islam and terrorism.
Many mosque leaders, according to the report, have put significant effort into countering extremism through efforts such as building youth programs, sponsoring anti-violence forums and scrutinizing extremist teachers and texts.
Sarah Palin and former House speaker Newt Gingrich have also voiced their opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque plan.
“The craven silence of leading Democrats is equally unforgivable. President Obama, accused by some opponents of being a ‘secret Muslim’, has yet to utter a single word in support of the project,” wrote Medhi Hassan recently in The Guardian, entitled: “This Isn’t the America I Love”
“The mosque row has become a struggle for the soul of the United States, the nation where freedom and democracy is supposed to reign supreme.”
The New York Times’ Lauren Goodstein wrote about several of the anti-Muslim protests, and found them to be “a typical stew of religion, politics and anti-immigrant sentiment.”
A Muslim-American doctor attempting to open one of the proposed centers tells her, “Every new group coming to this country — Jews, Catholics, Irish, Germans, Japanese — has gone through this. Now I think it’s our turn to pay the price, and eventually we will be coming out of this, too.”
In the Washington Post, Matthew Yglesias recent wrote: “This year, us-vs.-them controversies are proliferating, linked by a surge in xenophobia. This is our summer of fear.”
Yglesias says Republican efforts to profit from xenophobia that is “playing well politically. Politicians are making hay out of the mosque only because public opinion seems to oppose it… This hostility is not about the midterms; it is a consequence of the economic downturn, every bit as much as foreclosures and layoffs. When personal incomes stop growing, people become less broad-minded, and suspicion of foreigners and other ethnic groups grows. We have seen this time and again, in this country and in others.”
