The "Ground-Zero" Rorschach

The “Ground-Zero” mosque controversy has served as a Rorschach test for how one views our enemy in the “war on terror,” and perhaps for how we view ourselves.


If the enemy is viewed as a loose collection of un-enlightened violent criminals, completely ignoring that group’s own descriptions of themselves, then any opposition to the Ground-Zero mosque is viewed as an equally un-enlightened racial prejudice.

If the enemy is viewed as an organized military and geo-political movement with only a loose and mostly illegitimate connection to Islam, then one may struggle with a difficult-to-justify discomfort over the mosque, invoking terms such as “sacred secular site” and suggest that even a Christian Church next to the site would be equally inappropriate.

But if the enemy in our war on terror is a militant theocratic geo-political wing of Islam, a “denomination” of Islam which has become associated with stoning and mutilation of women, honor killings, martyrdom, and severe dress-codes imposed by violent penalty, which seeks to reclaim Islam’s past glory through a fight to the death struggle against “the little satan” Israel, “the great satan” America, and all the institutions of liberty associated with Western civilization, then America is faced with an entirely new kind of enemy, and the Ground-Zero mosque raises entirely new questions which have yet to be asked or answered.

Preeminent among our American constitutional liberties are the first amendment guarantees: The prohibition against government infringement upon freedom of speech, freedom of religious expression, and a prohibition of government establishment of religion. In the almost two and a quarter centuries since our Constitution was written, the “establishment” clause has come to be expansively interpreted in ways that the signers of the Constitution would certainly not recognize as bearing any resemblance to their intent. The founders clearly did not want to see the creation of an American religious institution like they had left behind in Europe, wishing no establishment of a “Church of America” as had been established in England, nor “American Vatican.” But the language of their amendment has been interpreted through a succession of court decisions to something which approaches the removal of all things religious from every public space; the removal of the Ten Commandments, crosses, and prayers from parks, courtrooms, classrooms, and every other public space. Those endorsing this evolving understanding of the establishment clause will not be happy until the crosses are removed from Arlington National Cemetery.

This re-construction of our First Amendment has left our government institutions impotent to make any public assertions whatever regarding religion. Any serious student of history knows that our founders had no such disability. Our founders had the intellectual courage and sophistication to strenuously respect and defend the religious liberty of others while at the same time acknowledging God’s hand in our nation’s journey and professing their individual faith from every public podium. They exercised their right as individuals to pray and study the Christian Bible in our Capital, in our courtrooms, and insisted that the same individual rights were necessary in our classrooms. American citizens of the 18th century understood that their secular institutions, and indeed the very Western civilization notion of individual liberty itself, had grown out of Judeo/Christian religious institutions melded with influences from secular Western philosophers all the way back to the Greeks.

If our founders had been faced with some militant theocratic geo-political religion that was existentially opposed to Western civilization and democratic liberty, who was associated with the mutilation of women, and who sought to gain glory through a death struggle against America, whom they called “the great satan,” do we really believe these founding fathers would have felt their hands were Constitutionally-bound from naming this religion as the enemy of our nation? Would they have believed that the establishment clause, written to prevent government from establishing a religious denomination, could be twisted to mean they could not oppose a religious denomination who was existentially committed to their destruction and the destruction of that same Constitution?

Our founders were too committed to reason, and what has come to be called American Exceptionalism, to allow any such national suicidal martyrdom.

What is happening within Islam today is very like what happened long ago within the Christian Church, with different factions each considering themselves the “true” religion, and denouncing all other claimants to be “no-religion-at-all.” Christianity eventually reached peaceful accommodation with numerous denominations along a variety of doctrinal divisions; some considering themselves very close “brothers and sisters in Christ,” others viewed as distant cousins, and a few rejected as apostate non-Christians, but with each peacefully and emphatically respecting the rights of the other. Islam has some recognized denominational division, such as between Sunni and Shia, sometimes peacefully, but no other religion in the modern age has been invoked by so many committed to such extremely violent struggle. Suicide bombings, justification of the killing of non-combatants, be-heading prisoners, calls for the complete annihilation of entire religious and ethnic groups; this is the posture of a large sub-segment of those who lay claim to be “the true Islam.” Muted claims by others within Islam, that theirs is a religion of peace, cannot erase the fact that many study the same book of teachings, invoke the same figures as holy, and yet arrive at some entirely opposite doctrinal imperatives.

Who decides which group can call itself Islam? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and Christian Scientists each invoke the name of Christ, but most Baptists or evangelicals would not consider those groups Christian, yet neither side takes prisoners or beheads anyone. The fact is that in every other case, we accept the label that a group chooses for itself even when we disagree with that group’s beliefs. We all need to come to grips with the simple fact that our enemy in the “war on terror” is a group that considers itself the only “true” Islam, that they view their struggle as an existential struggle for the glory and honor of their religion, in short that they are in a “religious war.” The West rightly shrinks from the notion of religious wars. The West has fought some terrible religious wars; not more terrible than the wars with atheists, but terrible enough. Like it or not, the West, once again finds itself, by no choice of its own, at war with a religion. To be sure, the enemy is not everyone who calls themselves Islamic, but we can be forgiven if we struggle to draw out these distinctions, when those within Islam itself have failed to come to grips with these differences.

There is a critical distinction between being “at war with a religion” versus being in a “religious war.” A religious war is a war between two religions, each motivated by their own religious doctrinal imperatives. In the war on terror, our enemy claims to be motivated by their religious beliefs (and who are we to dispute such a claim), but we are clearly motivated by a desire for peaceful accommodation through law and some reasonable facsimile of order which respects the rights of individuals. To repeat: We are not in a religious war, but we clearly are at war with a self-proclaimed religion.

Making matters more difficult is that this enemy does not see itself first as being members of a national group, but as an international religious group which would lay claim to the entire globe, by force if necessary. Infiltration into every continent and every nation, creating tentacles of violent struggle everywhere is a primary tactic of this enemy. We are not met on a battlefield with clearly demarked enemy lines. By design, this enemy hides behind non-combatants, daring us to attack, in order to use a naïve or complicit international press to attack our honor. We strive for super-human restraint to combat this evil, such as the world has never seen. This enemy historically celebrates their victories by building mosques in the place of former holy sites of their conquered enemies. The imam leading the group to build this mosque has at least equivocated when called upon to take sides against those who represent the violent denomination of Islam. Dissembling and subterfuge have been tactics employed by this enemy. They believe they have no moral imperative to honesty except to other fellow believers. David Horowitz has correctly pointed out that one way to distinguish which “Islam” you are dealing with is to ask their member to denounce Hamas and Hezbollah publicly as evil terrorists. Fellow believers whose sympathies are aligned with these violent extremists find it very difficult to make clear very public denunciations of their allies.

These are the inescapable facts of the so-called “ground-zero” mosque. As a point of precise distinction, the building in question, the former Burlington Coat factory, is not simply “close” to the site of the attack, but large parts of the aircraft-turned-missile on 9/11 crashed into this very building, doing a good deal of damage; it was within the immediate incident perimeter of the original 9/11 attack.

Even if we could be convinced that the group who seeks to build this mosque had no association whatever with the Islamists who perpetrated the attack on 9/11, construction of this mosque would be celebrated by those Islamist terrorists as yet a further twisting of the knife in America’s side that was 9/11. The very desire by any member of Islam to build a mosque in this location, knowing full well how it would be viewed by our enemy, is tantamount to an admission that they are not on our side in this struggle, but their true heartfelt sympathies lie with the terrorists. Even if they had no part in this attack on America, they are happy to “twist the knife.” Constructing this mosque in this site would be like some secret handshake, known only to fellow believers, which would celebrate this “victorious battlefield” in the war for global domination by Islam.

Setting aside our courtroom-crafted contemporary Constitutional precedents for the moment, any nation whose founding document precludes it from resisting the encroachment of an infiltrating enemy, or even of naming that enemy, is doomed. America cannot be allowed to be so doomed, we must honor the heritage handed to us by our founders, and correct if necessary the error that has crept into our own understanding of our founding documents, if indeed such creepage has brought us to a position where we cannot defend that heritage.

If we believe any of the words in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, this mosque must not be allowed to be built at this site!