The wisdom of Hendrik Hertzberg

A debate is currently raging in this city about a proposed Muslim cultural centre in downtown Manhattan. On September 11, a friend and I went down to the World Trade Centre site to see the memorial service that is held each year. We missed the service, but saw the awful flocks of conspiracy theorists and anti-Islam groups who used the occasion to promote their particular brand of bigotry. It was incredibly distasteful. I think The New Yorker's Henrik Hertzberg had the right idea when he wrote this on the day -

"Fortuitously, there exists one location that would be ideal for the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” That location would be . . . Ground Zero.The principal goals of the 9/11 attacks were to ignite a civilizational war between Islam and the West, especially America; to marginalize moderate Muslims and strengthen violent Islamists; to expose American religious tolerance and pluralism as a sham; and to recruit young Muslims to the most brutal, retrograde, reactionary form of jihad......It would be hard to imagine a more powerful, pointed, passionate rebuke to Al Qaeda’s brand of twisted Islamism than for an open-hearted cultural and religious institution representing the tolerant, democratic Muslims of New York to be part of the risen World Trade Center."