The “Ground Zero Mosque” That’s Already There

With all the outrage surrounding Cordoba House, a planned Islamic community center that will be built a couple blocks from the site of the Twin Towers, you might think that the nearby area is completely lacking in any Muslim structures. After all, why would people make such a hubbub about a building that will provide a swimming pool, restaurant, bookstores, and meeting spaces in addition to a mosque — with right-wingers dubbing the structure the "Ground Zero Mosque" to fan the flames — if there's already a mosque in the area?

Well, four blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks, there's already a mosque. And the Masjid Manhattan has existed there for decades without being the subject of this level of media frenzy.

As the New York Times points out, the planned site of the Cordoba House, a former Burlington Coat Factory, is already serving as a spillover space for Muslim practitioners from this mosque and another 12 blocks from the World Trade Center, small locations that "routinely turn people away for lack of space."

Now, people might try to argue this fine point, but I don't think two blocks away and around the corner versus four blocks away makes a significant difference when you're talking geography. In Manhattan, two blocks can lead to a complete neighborhood change — we pack a lot of diversity close together here in the Big Apple. Cordoba House is no more on the site of the 9/11 attacks than the Masjid Manhattan is. But if anything should be called a "Ground Zero Mosque," then we already have one or two. Is the problem, then, not with the mosque in Cordoba House, but the bookstores? Auditorium? Community swimming pool?

The extreme attacks on Cordoba House have been traced back to misused blogger power, when Pat Geller and the New York Post launched a "crusade" against what they deemed a "terrorist trophy." (I like this visual representation of reality versus what right-wing attacks dogs are making this out to be.) Before that, Talking Points Memo reports, even conservative like Laura Ingraham said of it, "I like what you're trying to do," and admitted that she couldn't find many people who opposed the project. The sudden concerted attacks on religious freedom smack more of conservative Christian nationalism and an attempt to win midterm votes through Islamphobia, a campaign that has caused dangerous hatred and division, while causing unnecessary pain to 9/11 victims families.

President Barack Obama ended up weighing in on this issue last Friday, reminding everybody that religious freedom is a fundamental building block of our nation, enshrined in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. As a political calculation, he shied away from talking about whether he supported Cordoba House itself, sticking firmly to a declaration of the "right" of all people to practice their religion in America.

Photo credit: Paul Lowry