Hysterical Anti-Mosque Phobia is Destroying Our Chances in Afghanistan

How Fox Betrayed Petraeus - NYTimes.com


I have avoided writing about the "ground zero mosque" because

1. I am so sick of all the hysterical screaming about it

2. I don't want to contribute to the overexposure of this non-controversy.

But today I read an op-ed written logically and lucidly by Frank Rich in the NY Times about the controversy, highlighting the damage done to our national security.


"the consequences [of the controversy] will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location" he says.


The opposition to the Islamic community center "is demolishing America's already frail support for that war."


"So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus's last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?"

 

After 9/11, President Bush praised Islam as a religion of peace and asked for tolerance for Muslims not necessarily because he was a humanitarian or knew much about Islam but because national security demanded it. An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda's recruitment spiel. This month's incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden's "next video script has just written itself," as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it — but not just for that reason. America's Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven's sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?

   
Of course, it helps to point out that a front-page article by the New York times on the project December 9, 2009 was ignored by the hysterical right, and the project was even praised by Laura Ingraham on Fox news, gaving the project her blessing when interviewing Daisy Khan, the wife of the project's organizer, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf two weeks after the NY Times article came out.

For all the deficit hawks out there, just think of all the dollars flying down the drain (and even worse, lives lost!) as we send more and more forces and equipment to do a job that can't be done without the support of the people we are trying to help. Victims of the August slow news cycle.