Sunday, September 12, 2010

Hendrik Hertzberg on "The Mosque"

Hendrik Hertzberg, "Move the Mosque," The New Yorker online, 11 September 2010.

Feisal Abdul Rauf, back from his State Department-sponsored trip overseas in time for the 9/11 anniversary, said his piece this week on the Op-Ed page of the Times. If you haven’t yet read his Op-Ed, please hasten to do so. What he writes is so generous, so unself-pitying, so utterly reasonable, and, in Andrew Sullivan’s words, “so transparently constructive, so evidently in the interests not only of domestic peace but of strategic victory against Jihadist terror” that one is “at a loss to understand why so many have reacted so ferociously to this project.” (I’m pleased to note that the imam is again calling the project Cordoba House—a much better name than Park51, which sounds like a Korean teenager’s internet handle). . . .

Hendrik Hertzberg recommends moving the mosque -- to Ground Zero, where it would be a beacon of freedom and reconciliation. Hertzberg points out that there has been a mosque at the Pentagon, since October 2002.

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