The controversy over plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan has taken an odd twist. On one side are those making arguments in opposition to the project, along with those who merely have questions they would like answered so they can decide for themselves whether this project will honor the victims of 9/11 – or mock them. On the other side are those who support the project wholeheartedly and who respond to both arguments and questions by saying: Shut up.
Most prominent among the second group is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It would be one thing if Hizzoner were saying: “I hear your concerns and I have questions, too, but municipal laws and the First Amendment permit this project to go forward.” But he is not saying that. He is saying instead that those with misgivings about the 13-story Islamic center that is to rise near where the Twin Towers collapsed “ought to be ashamed of themselves. … It is a shame that we even have to talk about this."
Last week on CNN, I debated the issue with Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic. As soon as we were off the air he called me – at a high decibel level -- a “bigot.” I suggested it might be more persuasive were he to frame an argument for me to consider. Echoing Bloomberg, he replied that I should be “ashamed of myself.”
To Peter’s credit, he later apologized for “losing his cool.” But when I sent him some thoughts on the controversy by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer, he emailed back that I should “please stop” because he was “appalled.”
Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol describes such responses as stemming from the “self-deluding pieties and self-destructive dogmas that are held onto, at once smugly and desperately, by today’s liberal elites.” Ironically, it is a liberal intellectual historian, Paul Berman, who has thought hardest about this phenomenon. In his latest book, “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” he ponders why so many academics and journalists refuse to grapple seriously or honestly with Islam and Islamism.
By the way: Moderate Muslim intellectuals have not put their critical faculties on hold. I asked Akbar Ahmed, a professor at American University and the author, most recently, of "Journey Into America: The Challenge of Islam,” his perspective on the controversy. “Muslim leaders need to understand,” he said, “that 9/11 remains an open wound for Americans. And