ADL Comes Out Against Ground Zero Center
Anti-bigotry group sides with people it calls bigots
The ADL’s new bed-fellows.
Chris Hondros/Getty Images
The Anti-Defamation League has issued a statement opposing the construction of the Islamic community center a couple blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. (Earlier this week, a community board recommended that the Landmarks Preservation Commission allow the project to go through.) The release goes out of its way to grant Cordoba House’s organizers good intentions and to condemn the bigotry of some who oppose it. So what is the problem? “The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location,” the ADL argues, “is counterproductive to the healing process.”
It adds:
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.
Founded in 1913, the ADL, in its words, “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all.” Except when it does the precise opposite.
Statement on Islamic Community Center Near Ground Zero [ADL]
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As an observer, I am delighted to read all of the commentary here. We are so fortunate to have the rights of public debate. There is no right or wrong in this situation but certainly a great deal of emotion. If there is a solution, perhaps it is to build an Interfaith Chapel where the three great religions of Abraham can celebrate together and learn how to heal their rifts?
Can someone explain this to me, please: What does the ADL have to do with this issue at all?
I actually agree with Fnord that this is a disturbing development because of the sponsors of the campaign against the community center (not mosque) in downtown NY (not Ground Zero). Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer made this campaign from the bottom up, and those guys are pure haters. A paralel is a group of skinheads opposing a synagogue getting full on support from the Democrats. ADL has by this chosen a far far right position, wich plays into the Al Quaeda/Hagee scenario of a war between Islkam and the West. Onbe would think that the ADL of all organizations would see that their endorsment of the position of these haters gives them a huge credibility. Now we have Palin, Gingrich and the ADL officially opposing freedom of worship and mobrule over rule of law. We have a situation where “peoples feelings” are to be given supremacy over the constitution. Its insane, I dont understand it. (But according to Lee Smith, I guess that makes me a Jew-baiter?)
@HWB
Funny you should mention the ADL’s position on the Armenian genocide. I wonder if anyone has noticed how cynically placating Turkey for the sake of Israel’s security, and at the expense of victims of genocide didn’t work. I wonder if anyone will notice when cynically placating a bunch right-wing xenophobes, including a few Jews but mostly non-Jews with anti-semitic tendencies like Sarah Palin, ends up backfiring.
Foxman, Podhoretz, and their ilk are paradoxically attempting to sell Jews into bondage for the sake of Isarel.
ADL has outlived its usefullness. It should have been out front condeming this Muslim strategy of Hajira, and Oliver Stone’s “apology should have been spurned with contempt. Resign and Disband!
david d writes: “Foxman, Podhoretz, and their ilk are paradoxically attempting to sell Jews into bondage for the sake of Israel.” Yes, of course. If one thinks that an Islamic Center should be a built a bit further away from Ground Zero than where Cordoba House is planned to be built, that’s “selling Jews into bondage for the sake of Israel.” I’m sorry – the logic there’s opaque to me.
The ADL took the wrong position on the Armenian genocide, that’s true enough. But it’s not clear what’s meant by saying that its doing so, beyond being wrong, “didn’t work.” If Erdogan hadn’t come to power in Turkey and relations with Israel were still good, would the ADL’s position on the Armenian genocide have been right? I don’t think _that’s_ what you mean to suggest. Maybe you mean to say that because it made (not only a moral but also, at least in hindsight,) a strategic blunder then, the ADL should be careful not to make a strategic blunder now. That’s sound advice, but I don’t see how what it’s doing now is a strategic blunder, or how the most plausible interpretation of what it’s doing is “cynically placating a bunch of right-wing xenophobes.” Anyway, two can play at that sort of speculative game: given some of Cordoba House’s imam’s utterances, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that _support_ for Cordoba House will turn out to have been a strategic blunder. That there’s a morally problematic aspect to it is clear enough already.
Funny. The Iraqi people don’t seem to have time for these learned debates about what sort of monuments ought to be built where, and what might offend someone’s sensitive feelings.
They are too busy dealing with the results of the US-Israel war of aggression against their country that left not 3000 but over one MILLION of their countrymen dead, along with incalculable human suffering and horror and their homeland torn to pieces.
And still you whine about “Islamic terrorism” and 9/11!
It’s really quite nauseating.
When a group of nuns opened a convent next to the site of Auschwitz, the Jewish community condemed it and the Pope ordered it removed, correctly intuiting that was insenstive to place a convent there against the wishes of the survivors whose friends and relatives had been murdered there. To build a Mosque so close to Ground Zero is similarly insensitive. To me, it feels like they are giving the finger to NYC and the USA. There are many other sites in Manhattan to build a mosque if you have the funds that this mosque has available to it.
Please consider signing our open letter to the organizers of Park51:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-fellowship