See how many levels of irony you can find in this story:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the organizer of the planned Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, arrived in Bahrain on Thursday to begin a three-country tour of the Persian Gulf sponsored by the United States State Department.  But the United States government refused to divulge details of his schedule of speeches and meetings, which are part of a program to promote interfaith tolerance.

All I can really say is that Imam Abdul Rauf has a level of fortitude and integrity that I can only admire and envy:  a testament to his Sufi message of peace and tolerance.

The story is in today’s New York Times, which also has an excellent piece on New York Muslims talking about the controversy over the proposed Islamic cultural center at 51 Park Place in downtown Manhattan.  A few quotes:

For many Muslims, nothing since the 2001 attacks has crystallized the difficulties of being both American and Muslim like the fight over the nine-story center on Park Place, which is to be called Park51. Several compared the experience to the years just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Japanese-Americans were presumed by many to be disloyal.

“It’s been nine years, but it feels like we haven’t moved an inch since then to come to terms with the issues,” said Muntasir Sattar, 30, an anthropology student at Columbia University. “And now it is all coming back,” almost like a symptom of post-traumatic stress, he said.

and:

At the Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens, Imam Shamsi Ali, the director, said the debate over Park51 was almost a distraction from what he believed was the real concern: “the Islamophobia that is causing the same resistance to the building of mosques in Staten Island and Tennessee and California.”

He added, “I am more worried about the larger issue than about whether this project succeeds or not.”

and:

Moinul Haque, 25, a soft-spoken graduate student in mathematics at the University of Texas, home for the summer in Jackson Heights, winced when asked about the hubbub over the Manhattan center. As a person who guards his privacy, he said, he was a little resentful at having to defend Muslims’ citizenship rights in what he called “a wholly artificial controversy.”

But he felt that the center’s developers should not unilaterally withdraw from the downtown site. “It will solve nothing if the organizers back down now,” he said. “It has to be worked out. There has to be dialogue.”

Misunderstandings only compound themselves unless confronted, he said.

Talking of misunderstandings, it’s good to see that the NYT has finally stopped referring to the Park 51 cultural center as a mosque.  Perhaps someone there finally checked a dictionary.  A mosque is a building dedicated to Islamic worship.  Park 51 is a cultural center, like the YMCA or Manhattan’s YMHA (the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, aka the 92nd Sreet Y), which includes a prayer space.   Only question:  how come it took the ‘newspaper of record’ so long?

Why the ugly ‘debate‘ over Islamic centers and mosques may not be so bad in the long run (stress on ‘may’):

On another issue that has elicited deeply bigoted responses for years, here’s a graph from Slog, the blog of The Stranger:

In other words, the more it’s discussed, the more homophobic attitudes change.

Could the same hold true for Islamophobia?  The bigots force us to organize and speak out.  They force us to pay attention, and to counter their extremist distortion of Islam, on which I will post at greater length tomorrow…

What a bunch of hypocrites they are at the Anti-Defamation League.   The up-front bigotry of the Dove World Church in Florida, whose redneck pastor has declared September 11 “Burn a Quran Day,” is almost refreshing by comparison.  At least he’s not trying to hide beneath a  veil of sensitivity, and he sure as hell isn’t trying to kid anyone that he’s into anything like civil rights.

The ADL has the astounding chutzpah to describe itself as “the nation’s premier civil rights agency,” declaring that it “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals, and protects civil rights for us all.”

So yesterday it issued a statement against Cordoba House, the proposed Muslim community center whose opponents have deliberately and misleadingly dubbed it “the mosque at Ground Zero.”   (It’s not a mosque, and it’s not “at Ground Zero,” but two blocks away.)   In fact check out the Cordoba House website and you’ll see that it’s a perfect example of what Jewish tradition calls tikkun olam, repairing the world –- dedicated to interfaith communicaton in the spirit of the convivencia, the “Golden Age” of Muslim and Jewish intellectual achievement in Spain that came to a crashing end with the Catholic Inquisition and the expulsion of both Muslims and Jews.

Of course the ADL has no objection to the idea of a such a center.  My God, no.  That would be so intolerant.  Instead, yesterday’s statement concluded with this:

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

You see?  Others are bigots, but the ADL is not.  It’s demonstrating its exquisite sensitivity to pain – not its own, of course, but that of the families of those who died on 9/11,  some of whom (presumably not the Muslims among them) find the idea of Cordoba House “offensive” and are,  per ADL director Abe Foxman, entitled to their bigotry because – I wish I was making this up – 9/11 is the equivalent of the Holocaust.

Asked why the opposition of the families was so pivotal in the decision, Mr. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, said they were entitled to their emotions.

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” he said. Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, he said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

Wow.  So the Holocaust is now a defense for bigotry?  Howzat for new-speak?  George Orwell, kindly rise up from your grave.

Not that this is the first time the ADL has used the Holocaust in such a way.  Witness its support of the so-called Museum of Tolerance  to be built on top of a thousand-year-old Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem as a wing of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  The Wiesenthal Center is headed by  the oleaginous right-wing rabbi Marvin Hier, who pooh-poohed the idea first that Muslims care about their dead and then that there were even any bodies buried there.  There certainly aren’t any more:  as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz discovered, Hier hired a contractor to swiftly and clandestinely “remove nuisances in the area of the project” – the “nuisances” being hundreds of skeletons, bones, and skulls.

So in ADL-think, the Jerusalem project is just fine – they’re Muslim bones, not Jewish ones, and besides, it’s all about “tolerance.”   But when someone else proposes a far more meaningful project and that someone else is – gevalt! – Muslim, that’s going beyond the pale .

Listen, Abe Foxman:   if you want to lead an organization of bigots, at least have the intellectual honesty of that dumb-ass pastor in Florida.

Meanwhile, the least you can do is this:  DELETE ALL REFERENCE ON YOUR WEBSITE TO THE ADL AS A CIVIL-RIGHTS ORGANIZATION.  IMMEDIATELY.  Just who do you think you’re kidding?