Clearing Up the Misconceptions Around the Proposed Islamic Center on Park Place

By Gregg Chadwick


"All men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion."
- President Thomas Jefferson

Let's Define Our Terms About the Proposed Islamic Center on Park Place

I. Is the Proposed Islamic Center at Ground Zero?

No, the new building will not be at the the former site of the World Trade Center and cannot be seen from Ground Zero.

II. What is the Proposed Plan for the Building?

The Park 51 Group has proposed a thirteen story building which will include:

1. Recreation spaces and fitness facilities (swimming pool, gym, basketball court)
2. 500-seat auditorium
3. Restaurant and Culinary School
4. Cultural amenities: Art exhibitions, Musical Performances
5. Education programs
6. Library, reading room and art studios
7. Childcare services
8. A prayer area ( On the thirteenth floor will be an Islamic prayer room which will be run be run separately from Park 51 but open to the New York Community)
9. September 11th memorial and quiet contemplation space (open to all)

Cordoba House will be a center for multifaith dialogue and engagement within Park 51's broader range of programs and activities. Cordoba House will be developing under the leadership of Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, a program manager for Park 51 in the interim stage.

III. Does the City of New York own the land that the Islamic Center will be constructed on?

No, the City of New York does not own the land. Nor does the Federal Government. This is private property and the owner purchased the vacant building when no one else could see the value. This building has remained empty since September 11th when a wheel from one of the planes came crashing through the structure. Many of the buildings nearby are vacant and the neighborhood is struggling to pull away from possible blight. Businesses that existed before September 11th have failed due to the loss of foot traffic. The Islamic Center will bring people and activity into the area and will benefit the struggling shop owners nearby.

IV. The Proposed Islamic Center is Not a Mosque?

"That it may even be called a mosque is debatable. It is designed as a multi-use complex with a space set aside for prayer -- no minarets, no muezzin calls to prayer blaring onto Park Place."
-Clyde Haberman of the New York Times

Matt Sledge explains, "The 92nd Street Y, on which the Cordoba House is explicitly modeled, has a whole host of Jewish events that take place inside of it, but no one calls it a synagogue."

V. Isn't the Proposed Cordoba Center offensive to the families who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001?

Many Muslims in the World Trade Center towers died during the September 11th attacks. Their relatives mourn and shed tears the same way the families of Jews, Buddhists, Catholics, Protestants, Agnostics, and Atheists do. Some of the first responders were Muslims and perished when the Twin Towers collapsed.

VI. Just how far is the Proposed Islamic Center from Ground Zero?


Map by Matt Sledge in the Huffington Post


"From 45 Park Place, the former Burlington Coat Factory building that will make way for the Cordoba House, it's two blocks, around a corner, to get to the WTC site. Park Place doesn't lie between the construction site and any mass transit stations, so you would need to go out of your way to have it offend you."
-Matt Sledge


Matt Sledge in the Huffington Post explains his video: "If you look up the walking directions you'll notice that it takes a couple of minutes to walk the distance (approximately a tenth of a mile) between the two spots. Pretty much two minutes exactly when I took the trip with a shaky video camera. Here's the clip, first sped up to 4X speed then slowed down to 1X:"

VII. Who is in favor of building the Islamic Center?

Yesterday New York City's former Mayor Ed Koch agreed with President Obama, current New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the local community board overseeing the proposed Islamic Center's construction, that New York should "protect the legitimate rights of American Muslims to build" the proposed Islamic Center.



"As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable."
-President Barack Obama

Ed Koch writes that President Obama's "position will be remembered by later generations of Americans with the same high regard as President George Washington's letter in 1790 to the Jews of Rhode Island who built the Touro Synagogue in that state." Mayor Koch relates how Moses Seixas of the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to George Washington:

" -- a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance -- but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: -- deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine:"

President Washington responded with these powerful words:

"... The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

Gregg Chadwick
New Amsterdam
20"x16" oil on linen 2010

VIII. Is the area around the proposed Islamic Center zoned for religious centers?

Numerous religious centers and houses of worship exist in Lower Manhattan. St Peter's Church, the oldest Roman Catholic parish in New York City was built in 1840. The church was damaged during the September 11, 2001 attacks. St. Paul's Chapel, at 209 Broadway, an Episcopal church, sits opposite the east side of the World Trade Center site. It is the oldest surviving church building in the city. There already is a Mosque four blocks away from ground zero. It was created long before the Twin Towers were built.


IX. Who is Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf?

"A vast common ground does exist, a point that the leader of the Cordoba Center, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, evokes in his book "What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America." There is no better way to defeat the morally bankrupt ideology of al-Qaida than to seek that common ground."
-Professor Parvez Ahmed

"Imam Feisal has participated at the Aspen Institute in Muslim-Christian-Jewish working groups looking at ways to promote greater religious tolerance," Walter Isaacson, head of The Aspen Institute told the Huffington Post. "He has consistently denounced radical Islam and terrorism, and promoted a moderate and tolerant Islam. Some of this work was done under the auspices of his own group, the Cordoba Initiative. I liked his book, and I participated in some of the meetings in 2004 or so. This is why I find it a shame that his good work is being undermined by this inflamed dispute. He is the type of leader we should be celebrating in America, not undermining."

Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf actively promotes peace and understanding between religions and defines what President Obama called for in his comments at the White House on Friday evening during a dinner to mark the start of Ramadan:

"A nation where the ability of peoples of different faiths to coexist peacefully and with mutual respect for one another stands in contrast to the religious conflict that persists around the globe."

X. What do New Yorkers think?

"The people who live and work here are not obsessed with 9/11. The blocks around Ground Zero are like every other hard-working neighborhood in New York, where Muslims are just another thread of the city fabric. At this point the only argument against this project is fear, specifically fear of Muslims, and that’s a bigoted, cowardly and completely indefensible position."
-Daryl Lang

Blogger Daryl Lang, a New York City resident, posted this week a provocative collection of photos that depict the current neighborhood around the World Trade Center site. Businesses in the two block radius range from a strip club, to fast food joints, to an off track betting parlor.


Photo by Daryl Lang from his post “Hallowed Ground”: A few photos of stuff the same distance from the World Trade Center as the “Ground Zero Mosque” from his wonderful blog: History Eraser Button.

XI. What do you think about the Proposed Islamic Center?

"If there is going to be a reformist movement in Islam, it is going to emerge from places like the proposed institute. We should be encouraging groups like the one behind this project, not demonizing them. Were this mosque being built in a foreign city, chances are that the U.S. government would be funding it."
-Fareed Zakaria


September 11, 2001 will not be forgotten. But as the rubble is cleared and wounds heal, life continues in Lower Manhattan. Hard working New Yorkers of all faiths and cultures try to find their own small part of the American Dream. Are we going to allow fear mongers to push the Park 51 project out of lower Manhattan? Ed Koch reminds us of an ugly moment in American history and encourages us " not to do again, albeit in different form and to a different group, what we did to Japanese-Americans during World War II when we rounded them up without cause. No Japanese-American was ever charged with treason, notwithstanding that they were placed in internment camps for the balance of the war."
The Park 51 project should be built in Lower Manhattan and all Americans should celebrate our freedoms by supporting all faiths and all cultural groups. Moments such as these define the character of the United States.



"We're all about multiple points of entry, offering programming in the areas of arts and culture, education and recreation. Within that larger vision, Cordoba House will be a center for multifaith dialogue and engagement within Park51's broader range of programs and activities."
-From the Cordoba House website


More at:
Matt Sledge
Read Daryl Lang's complete post and view all of his photos at:
“Hallowed Ground” A few photos of stuff the same distance from the World Trade Center as the “Ground Zero Mosque”:
Park 51's Cordoba House website

New Momentum for Health Reform: President Obama's Weekly Address

Bono and Edge on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross

Bono and Edge appeared on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross
In the first segment check out Bono as he squirms "Stop! Oh, no!" when Ross airs a clip of U2 doing "Street Mission" on TV in 1978. The highlight of the second segment is the story of Barack Obama's witty comment to Bono at a prayer breakfast in DC when Bono attempted to evade then President Bush's photo op. Obama's words to Bono,"Nice work with the hug dodge."

2008 The Year and More in Images

The New Yorker Endorses Obama

In 4,214 words the editors at The New Yorker have endorsed Obama for President. The endorsement itself is not surprising but I am heartened by the ferociousness with which they go after Bush ("the Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction"), McCain ("John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor"), and Palin ("Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility").

In a piece entitled The Choice the editors begin,

"Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?"

The editorial continues with a list of Bush and the Republican's failed economic policies:

"The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure."

And of course there is the debacle of the pointless war in Iraq:

"there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability."

The editors continue:

"The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe."

The editors are severely disappointed in McCain:

"Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A." "McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic."

The editors find much to approve of in Obama's intelligence, gravitas, ideas and leadership:

"By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, 'A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.' Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector."

Obama's "proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”

And the New Yorker provides a dire analysis of the Supreme Court's future if McCain were to win:

"The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If McCain means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion."

The warning grows fiercer:

" Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither."

"Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care."

What of the future?:

"The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years."

And McCain's character?:

"Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump McCain "is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace."

Obama's character:

"By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm ... Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness."

Obama's literary merit:

"Almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition."

"A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility."

Obama's eloquence:

" Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern."

A President for the 21st Century:

"The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama."

Complete editorial at: The New Yorker Chooses Obama