My alarm clock was set to an all-news station and I woke to the report that an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. The story was still sketchy and sleepily I pictured a small private aircraft bouncing off of the indestructible building like a rubber ball against a brick wall. Yet, I was intrigued enough to flip on the TV in time to see the impact of plane No. 2.
A modern times Day of Infamy.
Last week I went to the U.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The starch white memorial stretches like a floating band-aid over the sunken battleship. Plans for the memorial began in 1943. Initial recognition came in 1950 when Admiral Arthur Radford, Commander in Chief, Pacific ordered that a flagpole be erected over the Arizona’s remains and on the ninth anniversary of the attack, a commemorative plaque was placed at the base of the flagpole. The memorial was finally dedicated in 1962, 21 years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Nine years after 9/11, construction of an Islamic mosque and community center two blocks from Ground Zero is making more news than the building of the memorial to the World Trade Center victims. While at Pearl Harbor, I failed to notice a Japanese garden or temple. Not even a Benihana.
Initially, I found the plans to build the mosque insensitive and inappropriate. Sure, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf is legally and religiously free to build there. Personally, I don’t want to see a mosque casting a shadow over Ground Zero. And I’m not alone. A recent New York Times poll showed that two-thirds of New Yorkers think the mosque should be built elsewhere. I think Ground Zero is hallowed territory and the 9/11 memorial to the victims needs to be completed soon. It better not take 21 years. Those people need to be honored. As September 11th approaches, I suggest you take a look at the website for the memorial … national911memorial.org … because it looks like it’ll be pretty amazing.
But, what is the radius on insensitivity? Three blocks away from Ground Zero? Four? Ten? This question alone causes me to pause and rethink the building of the mosque. Religion is a very hot topic now-a-days and the controversy of the mosque ignited Time Magazine to ask if America is Islamaphobic.
I am not Islamaphobic, but I’ll tell you what I am: terroristaphobic! I don’t believe that all Muslims are terrorists. But, there is a fanatical group of Muslims that want to see America destroyed like those ships at Pearl Harbor. There’s an email circulating these days comparing radical Islam to Nazi Germany. The email is a text from a 2007 Op-ed column from Israelnationalnews.com written by Paul Marek of Saskatoon, Canada whose grandparents fled Czechoslovakia before the Nazi invasion.
In the article, Marek explains that like most Germans in the 1930s, most Muslims today are fine peace-loving folks. He says that the German people were enjoying the return of national pride under Hitler and were too busy to care about how Germany was being restored. The majority sat back and let things just happen. Before long the people had lost the power.
Marek says the fact that most Muslims are peace-loving is irrelevant because it is the radicals who rule Islam at this moment. “It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.”
In his view, peaceful-majority equals silent-majority.
The Nazis were not history’s only fanatical killing machine. Europe and Asia certainly were not fun places to live in the years leading up to World War II. Those killed by the Russian (20 million) and Chinese (70 million) Communists dwarf the number of people Hitler murdered. And don’t leave out the Japanese who killed upwards of 12 million Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, and Indochinese civilians as they romped through Southeast Asia. If you want an exercise that’ll have you thinking about sticking your head in the oven, try spending a few minutes researching this stuff on the Internet. Marek doesn’t even mention the atrocities committed by such sweethearts as Pol Pot and Idi Amin. He does bring up Rwanda. “Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace-loving’?”
The gist of Marek’s column is that the peace-loving Muslims will one day be our enemy if they stay as silent as the peace-loving Russians, Chinese, Japanese, and Rwandans were. He ends by saying, “We must pay attention to the only group that counts – the fanatics who threaten our way of life.”
Now, if you don’t think that Radical Islam wants to destroy America, look no further than the words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has vowed to annihilate the United States. He has given speeches in which he’s asked, “Is it possible for us to witness a world without America?” He continued, “You had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.”
In his 2002 State of the Union speech, President Bush delivered his famous “Axis of Evil” line in regard to Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and their terrorist allies. In the speech he talks about the potential attacks on America or our allies if these nations put nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. “In any of these cases,” he said, “the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”
Presumably, the indifference Bush referred to was America’s response to the 9/11 attacks. But, just maybe, the indifference, nine years later, is better applied to the peaceful majority of Muslims worldwide. Is it their indifference that would be catastrophic? Would allowing the Ground Zero mosque or others like it enable Islamic-Americans to passionately plea for peace from their radical brethren?
I pray it will. If not, there are going to be a lot more Ground Zeroes in our future.
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