More articles on the not-a-mosque issue
Aug. 15th, 2010 01:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Now, there's something I see over and over again in the comments to these articles. Apparently, because NO Muslim countries (where Muslim = Arab and Arab = Muslim, of course) allow churches, we can't allow any mosques in NYC.
The most obvious thing wrong with this statement is that, uh, it's wrong. A quick google search found me many refuatations of this story. If you bring this up, of course, the people saying it will try to change their words, going on about how Christians are treated unfairly in these other countries (I wouldn't know, I've never been there, but then, neither have they) and this and that - but what they SAID was WRONG.
However, the more important thing that's wrong with this statement is the fact that this isn't some other country! This is the United States of America! Freedom of religion is one of our most important precepts - it's the very first amendment! Speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition! (It's a very catchy chant. Try it.) Instead of trying to tit-for-tat Saudi Arabia, shouldn't we be holding ourselves to our own high standards?
Mixed in with this are the more "humorous" suggestions that the "mosque" (it's not) should be built "with a synagogue next to it" or a church (as though Jews and Christians only exist so Muslims can be annoyed or something) or a strip club (there are plenty in that neighborhood already. Actually, there are plenty of churches too, though I don't know about synagogues).
And of course the complaint that it'd somehow be terrible or shocking or irritating to hear a call to prayer. Nobody ever complains about churchbells on the hour (half hour, quarter hour....), or at least when they do they don't say it's somehow anything other than a noise complaint.
What really bugs me about all these arguments is how incredibly, unbearably hypocritical they all are. I just can't stand it.
(Also, I loathe "I don't blame all Muslims for 9/11, but I think it's insensitive". What is this? Either you blame them, in which case you should fess up and save the rest of us the trouble of trying to have a conversation with you, or you do NOT blame them, in which case you shouldn't feel upset by this at all.)
So, on with the links!
Not really recent, but it's vaguely topical about Muslim victims of 9/11.
Also, here is Wikipedia's fascinating article on Islam in the US
For Mosque Sponsors, Early Missteps Fueled Storm
Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, remembers her first conversation with Daisy Khan around 2005, years before Ms. Khan’s idea for a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan morphed into a controversy about Sept. 11, Islam and freedom of religion.
“Strollers,” said Ms. Levitt, whom Ms. Khan had approached for advice on how to build an institution like the Jewish center — with a swimming pool, art classes and joint projects with other religious groups. Ms. Levitt, a rabbi, urged Ms. Khan to focus on practical matters like a decent wedding hall and stroller parking.
“You can use all these big words like diversity and pluralism,” Ms. Levitt recalled telling Ms. Khan, noting that with the population of toddlers booming in Manhattan, “I’m down in the lobby dealing with the 500 strollers.”
Clearly, the idea that Ms. Khan and her partners would one day be accused of building a victory monument to terrorism did not come up — an oversight with consequences. The organizers built support among some Jewish and Christian groups, and even among some families of 9/11 victims, but did little to engage with likely opponents. More strikingly, they did not seek the advice of established Muslim organizations experienced in volatile post-9/11 passions and politics.
The organizers — chiefly Ms. Khan; her husband, the imam of a mosque in the financial district; and a young real-estate investor born in New York — did not hire a public-relations firm until after the hostility exploded in May. They went ahead with their first public presentation of the project — a voluntary appearance at a community board meeting in Lower Manhattan — just after an American Muslim, Faisal Shahzad, was arrested for planting a car bomb in Times Square.
“It never occurred to us,” Ms. Khan said. “We have been bridge builders for years.”
How Ms. Khan’s early brainstorming led to today’s combustible debate, one often characterized by powerful emotions and mistaken information, is a combination of arguable naïveté, public-relations missteps and a national political climate in which perhaps no preparation could have headed off controversy.
As a result, supporters of the $100 million center, named Park51, which received its final approval from the city last week, are now beginning their fund-raising and detailed planning amid a broader battle. The future of the center — organizers say it will have a mosque, but its 15 floors will be mainly for other functions — has become grist for talk radio, cable television and election fights across the country.
Sharif el-Gamal, the developer on the project, said ironically in an interview Friday, “This might become the most famous community center in the world.”
For American Muslims, the stakes have become painfully high.
“It has repercussions for the entire community,” said Robina Niaz, who runs Turning Point, a group that fights domestic violence among Muslims. “What it has done is suddenly made it legitimate for everybody else out there to lash out at Muslims. It has brought us together. But it also shows how much work we have to do.”
In 1999, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Ms. Khan’s husband, tried to buy the former McBurney Y.M.C.A. on 23rd Street in Manhattan, telling the seller’s broker, David Lebenstein, that he planned a kind of Muslim Y.
Knowing that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing still left raw nerves in New York, the imam assured Mr. Lebenstein, “We’re not the ones doing bombs; we’re moderates and Americans.”
The sale would have gone through but for financing difficulties, said Mr. Lebenstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Imam Feisal is in Malaysia and could not be reached for comment for this article.
Imam Feisal, 62, moved to the United States as a teenager with his father, an Egyptian imam, and graduated from Columbia University. Until 2009, he was the Friday prayer leader at Masjid al Farah, a mosque in the Sufi tradition, which emphasizes mysticism and tolerance. The mosque was established two decades ago and is 12 blocks from the World Trade Center.
His sermons were infused with a “sweet spirituality,” not focused on “rules and regulations” or politics, said Adem Carroll, director of the Muslim Consultative Network, an advocacy group based in New York. Those sermons attracted his two allies in the current project, slated to be built at 45-51 Park Place.
Daisy Khan, who immigrated, also as a teenager, to Jericho, on Long Island, from Kashmir, married Imam Feisal in 1997. They founded a Sufi organization advocating melding Islamic observance with women’s rights and modernity. After 9/11 they raised their profile, renaming the group the American Society for Muslim Advancement and focusing on connecting Muslims and wider American society. They spoke out against religious violence; the imam advised the F.B.I.; his wife joined the advisory panel of the 9/11 memorial and museum.
A few years later, Sharif el-Gamal, a developer whose Egyptian father was a Chemical Bank executive, asked the imam to perform his wedding.
Mr. Gamal, who headed SoHo Properties, agreed around 2006 to join the effort. In 2009, he bought two adjacent buildings on Park Place, where the imam began holding services. Only then did the organizers start reaching out more widely about their idea.
On top of the fear and confusion in New York about Islam after 9/11, a movement had begun to spring up against Muslims seeking a larger role in American public life. In 2007, Debbie Almontaser, a Muslim educator, had been forced to resign as the principal of an Arabic-language public school in Brooklyn after such groups helped paint her as supporting terrorism.
But the center’s organizers said they had little indication they were flying into a storm.
Ms. Khan had continued meeting with Ms. Levitt; she remembers worrying less about strollers than “the street cart problem” — where would Senegalese street vendors, a subset of Muslims working downtown, stow their wares while at the center?
Ms. Levitt remembers advising the organizers to line up potential members and financiers — for instance, Muslims throughout the region — before proposing a building. But Mr. Gamal said he wanted to first find property and make sure downtown residents and officials wanted the center.
If he promised something to Muslims and did not deliver, he explained, “I would lose face within my community.”
Ms. Khan said they were confident Muslims would back the center and thought it more important to talk to politicians and leaders of other religious groups.
Leaders of Muslim advocacy groups in New York note the imam and his wife had not often worked with grass-roots Muslim groups, and wonder if they wanted to avoid appearing “too Muslim.” The organizers say they did not.
Organizers talked with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg about the plan in September 2009, at a Gracie Mansion Ramadan fast-breaking for Muslim leaders. A New York Times article last December about the project drew little negative comment.
In February, the staff of Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, who liked the idea, suggested the organizers present it to Community Board 1, the largely advisory body that represents the neighborhood. Planners agreed to share information before the board and respond to expected questions about congestion and how the neighborhood could benefit.
Mr. Stringer said nobody warned them of “an Islamic issue,” adding with a weary chuckle, “We really give good advice.”
Preparing for a May 5 community board meeting, Ms. Khan got support from her usual allies, like the United Jewish Federation of New York; Trinity Church; and the September 11 Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow.
Some people raised concerns about the feelings of 9/11 victims, but the meeting was dominated by logistical concerns and support from those who welcomed new facilities downtown. The board gave a unanimous yes.
The next day, the uproar began. Some newspapers referred to the project as the “W.T.C. mosque.” Mr. Shahzad had been arrested late on May 3 in the attempted Times Square bombing. The community board office began receiving “hundreds and hundreds” of angry calls, and e-mails from around the world, said its chairwoman, Julie Menin, some threatening enough that she requested riot police for the next meeting.
The organizers were shocked. Many supporters say that their failure to imagine the backlash left them ill prepared to defuse it.
On May 18, the organizers held a conference call with supporters, and soon hired a crisis public-relations firm.
Ms. Menin of the community board urged Ms. Khan and the mayor’s office to hold a public forum to clear the air before the next community board meeting on May 25; they could, for instance, make clear that their congregation had worshiped in the neighborhood for years.
“It would have defused some of the problems, absolutely,” Ms. Menin said. But the public forum was not held.
Nevertheless, the project’s original backers held firm. When the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission on Aug. 3 removed the only legal hurdle, Mr. Bloomberg gave a passionate speech assailing the project’s critics as trampling religious freedom. American Muslims — including some groups not initially consulted — rallied to the project’s defense.
Mr. Gamal said that since May, he had started meeting in private with opponents to explain himself. But he bridled at constantly defending himself publicly. He said he didn’t want to tell angry opponents how he had injured his eye handing out water to emergency workers on 9/11.
He didn’t feel that he should have to, he said. He refused recently to appear on CNN to debate Rick A. Lazio, the Republican candidate for governor who has come out against the project.
“This is not a debate,” Mr. Gamal said. “I’m an American. I’m a New Yorker. I’m exercising my freedoms in this country.” There is little he would do differently, he said. “There’s no textbook that you can follow.”
Nor, it seems, a blueprint about what to do next.
On Tuesday night, organizers met with a wider range of 9/11 victim families. Ms. Menin is still calling for a town hall meeting.
“You have to deal with the uncomfortableness and controversy head-on,” Ms. Menin said.
In Lower Manhattan, Two Mosques Have Firm Roots
The Masjid Manhattan occupies a narrow basement with bare pipes snaking along the ceiling. The congregants who filled up the mosque near City Hall on Thursday night were mainly men, from South Asia, West Africa and the United States, and a few women — who prayed behind a partition. The feast provided for breaking the Ramadan fast, spicy curry over rice, came in plastic takeout containers from a nearby restaurant.
A few blocks away, at the Masjid al-Farah, the scene was somewhat different. Men and women sat together. The worshipers, devotees of the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism, came from an even wider array of countries and included a young man with multiple piercings and a shirt identifying him as an employee at Jivamukti Yoga. The mosque, in a two-story building sandwiched between two bars — the neon-lighted Tribeca Tavern and the nouvelle-brasserie-type Cercle Rouge — has a pristine, high-ceilinged, white-painted interior decorated with stained glass and Arabic calligraphy.
The fast-breaking meal, or iftar, included baby spinach and goat cheese and aloe vera water passed around by the mosque’s female leader, Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, who declared, “Good for the digestion.”
One mosque is conservative, and the other is reputed to be among the most progressive in the city — making the downtown Muslim community a quintessentially New York combination of immigrants and native New Yorkers, traditionalists and spiritual seekers.
But what the two mosques have in common — besides the sense of celebration and camaraderie that comes at the beginning of Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar, in which Muslims fast from sunup to sundown, give alms and focus on self-improvement — is that both have existed for decades, largely unnoticed, blocks from the World Trade Center site.
Masjid Manhattan, on Warren Street, four blocks from ground zero, was founded in 1970. Masjid al-Farah, formerly on Mercer Street, moved to its present location on West Broadway, about 12 blocks from ground zero, in 1985. Both mosques — essentially one-room operations — routinely turn people away for lack of space.
When Masjid al-Farah moved into the neighborhood, the local Muslim community was tiny, said Sheikha Fariha. But it has expanded exponentially, especially with Muslims who work in the area, she said. Both mosques now welcome doctors, street vendors, real estate agents and service workers. The imam of the Masjid Manhattan has a day job in a nearby post office.
Lately, some of the spillover has been absorbed by prayer services held in the vacant Burlington Coat Factory store two blocks from the trade center site, by Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf, a longtime prayer leader at Masjid al-Farah. He plans to turn the site into a Muslim community center and mosque bitterly opposed by critics, who call it a “ground zero mosque,” and which was backed by President Obama on Friday night. The uproar has perplexed, even alarmed, those who have long practiced Islam amid the neighborhood bustle of churches, government agencies, corporations, delis and sidewalk vendors.
Mariama Diallo, originally from Guinea, hurried down the stairs into Masjid Manhattan after finishing work at a nearby computer shop, knowing that if she tried to make it home to Queens before praying, she would miss the Maghrib, or evening prayer, and the breaking of the fast.
She spread out her prayer rug and was still praying when the imam’s call signaled the end of the fast. Just then, Shari Kareem, a student studying early childhood development at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and her mother, Seema, arrived. They took swigs straight from a gallon of Poland Spring water, helped themselves to dried dates and offered some to Ms. Diallo.
On the men’s side of the mosque, there was a minor moment of added excitement: a couple of arrivals, looking for free food and acting erratically, stepped clumsily across the mats on the floor where the food was laid out. The men deemed them to be high on drugs and firmly escorted them out.
Ms. Diallo said she came to the United States wanting “honest work — anything where I don’t have to cheat.” Not having had much time to immerse herself in the politics of her new country, she pronounced herself deeply puzzled as to why anyone would feel threatened by what goes on in a mosque.
“We have to pray to God. You’re following the religion,” she said. “You want to pray because it is in the book that you have to pray, and someday you will die.”
Referring to 9/11, she said that she, too, had “bad souvenirs.” (A native French speaker, she meant memories.) She remembered with awe a visit to the twin towers, lamented the deaths there, and said: “Killing people is a sin. Building the mosque over here, I don’t think that has to do with killing people.”
At Masjid al-Farah, Ali Mansour told of how he had drifted away from Islam as a young man in Egypt, but found it again through Sufism when the mosque started ordering from his deli down the block. He liked its “progressivism,” he said, adding that friends in Egypt sometimes tease him that American Muslims are “out of your mind” because of their nontraditional approach.
“Because this is a new country, it rejuvenates and revolutionizes everything,” he said. “Food, industry, philosophy and even religion.”
Soon, Sheikha Fariha started the zikr, the Sufi ritual of chanting and prayer, inviting the congregants to still their minds and drop “into the vastness of the heart that has no boundaries.”
“La illaha illa Allah,” they chanted again and again, turning from side to side in unison. “There is no god but God.”
Obama Strongly Backs Islam Center Near 9/11 Site
President Obama delivered a strong defense on Friday night of a proposed Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, using a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to proclaim that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”
After weeks of avoiding the high-profile battle over the center — his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said last week that the president did not want to “get involved in local decision-making” — Mr. Obama stepped squarely into the thorny debate.
“I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground,” the president said in remarks prepared for the annual White House iftar, the sunset meal breaking the day’s fast.
But, he continued: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.”
In hosting the iftar, Mr. Obama was following a White House tradition that, while sporadic, dates to Thomas Jefferson, who held a sunset dinner for the first Muslim ambassador to the United States. President George W. Bush hosted iftars annually.
Aides to Mr. Obama say privately that he has always felt strongly about the proposed community center and mosque, but the White House did not want to weigh in until local authorities made a decision on the proposal, planned for two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Last week, New York City removed the final construction hurdle for the project, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke forcefully in favor of it.
The community center proposal has led to a national uproar over Islam, 9/11 and freedom of religion during a hotly contested midterm election season.
In New York, Rick A. Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor and a former member of the House of Representatives, issued a statement responding to Mr. Obama’s remarks, saying that the president was still “not listening to New Yorkers.”
“With over 100 mosques in New York City, this is not an issue of religion, but one of safety and security,” he said.
Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, has called the project “an unnecessary provocation” and urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject it.
The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization, has also opposed the center.
In his remarks, Mr. Obama distinguished between the terrorists who plotted the 9/11 attacks and Islam. “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam — it is a gross distortion of Islam,” the president said, adding, “In fact, Al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion, and that list includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.”
Noting that “Muslim Americans serve with honor in our military,” Mr. Obama said that at next week’s iftar at the Pentagon, “tribute will be paid to three soldiers who gave their lives in Iraq and now rest among the heroes of Arlington National Cemetery.”
Mr. Obama ran for office promising to improve relations with the Muslim world, by taking steps like closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and more generally reaching out. In a speech in Cairo last year, he vowed “a new beginning.”
But Ali Abunimah, an Arab-American journalist and author, said the president has since left many Muslims disappointed.
“There has been no follow-through; Guantánamo is still open and so forth, so all you have left for him to show is in the symbolic field,” Mr. Abunimah said, adding that it was imperative for Mr. Obama to “stand up to Islamophobia.”
Once Mr. Bloomberg spoke out, the president’s course seemed clear, said Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution here.
“Bloomberg’s speech was, I think, the pivotal one, and set the standard for leadership on this issue,” Mr. Clemons said.
Mr. Bloomberg, in a statement, said: “This proposed mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan is as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime, and I applaud President Obama’s clarion defense of the freedom of religion tonight.”
Sharif el-Gamal, the developer on the project, said, “We are deeply moved and tremendously grateful for our president’s words.”
A building on the site of the proposed center is already used for prayers, and some worshipers there on Friday night discussed the president’s remarks.
Mohamed Haroun, an intern at a mechanical engineering firm, said, “What he should have said was: ‘This is a community decision. Constitutionally, they have the right to do it, but it’s a community decision and we should see what the local community wants to do.’ ”
Mayor’s Stance on Muslim Center Has Deep Roots
Michael R. Bloomberg is a former Wall Street mogul with a passion for the rights of a private property owner. He is a Jew whose parents asked their Christian lawyer to buy a house and then sell it back to them to hide their identity in an unwelcoming Massachusetts suburb. And he is a politician who regards his independence as his greatest virtue.
That potent combination of beliefs and history, those closest to Mayor Bloomberg say, has fueled his defense of the proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan — a defense he has mounted with emotion, with strikingly strong language and in the face of polls suggesting that most New Yorkers disagree with him.
“Something about this issue just really hooked into him,” said Howard J. Rubenstein, the powerful public relations executive, who is a friend of Mr. Bloomberg. “It deeply upset him.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s forcefulness has won him new admirers, but also a chorus of both familiar and fresh detractors. Reliable newspaper editorial allies have turned against him. Conservative pundits have mocked him (one called him “self-deluding”). Even some of his closest friends have angrily differed with him.
City Hall officials, who said the mayor had been swamped with angry correspondence, made some of it public.
“You are going to allow the Muslims build a trophy building there on HOLY GROUND,” one e-mail read. It concluded: “You need to be impeached.”
But none of the anger — hard to measure precisely, and amplified by talk radio and cable television — has moved the mayor. Indeed, interviews with his aides, advisers and associates suggest that it has only strengthened his resolve.
And they say the reasons are civic and personal. Mr. Bloomberg, for instance, has come to know the husband and wife who are among the principals behind the proposed center — a multipurpose religious and cultural institution that would be built two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.
And for years he has, with a mix of care and impatience, been encouraging New Yorkers, including the families of 9/11 victims, to emotionally move beyond the tragedy of nine years ago.
Some of those impressed by the depth of Mr. Bloomberg’s feelings have been struck in part because he had disappointed many when, by their lights, he failed to stand behind the principal of the city’s first Arabic-language public school.
The case of the principal, Debbie Almontaser, began, much as the community center did, with a seemingly uncontroversial plan — a school that would teach Arabic. Soon enough, though, conservative advocates, inflamed by the proposal, branded Ms. Almontaser a “radical” and “jihadist.”
After opponents sought to link her to T-shirts that said “Intifada NYC” and a newspaper suggested she had defended the slogan, the Bloomberg administration forced her to resign in 2007, she said.
A federal employment commission determined that Ms. Almontaser had not been connected to the T-shirts, that the newspaper had misconstrued her words and that the Bloomberg administration “had succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel.” (The school has survived and is run by a new principal.)
Now, some Muslim leaders in New York express pleasant surprise at his position on the downtown center.
Robina Niaz, executive director of the Muslim social service group Turning Point for Women and Families, said his position in the Almontaser case “was totally the opposite, completely the reverse of this.”
Her sense, she added, was that Mr. Bloomberg “may have gone back and looked at how that was not helpful as a mayor, as a leader — that this was an opportunity to undo some of that.”
On the community center, Mr. Bloomberg’s thinking from the start was informed by what he describes as the basic rights of the people behind it.
“If somebody wants to build a mosque in a place where it’s zoned for it and they can raise the money, then they can do that,” he said. “And it’s not the government’s business.”
Mr. Bloomberg, it turned out, had met with the couple seeking to build the center. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who would run the center, led a prayer service at Gracie Mansion in 2009 and exchanged warm words with Mr. Bloomberg; his wife, Daisy Khan, had sat next to Mr. Bloomberg’s girlfriend, Diana L. Taylor, during a dinner that followed.
In early summer, as controversy started to swirl around the project, opponents began to raise questions about Islam itself, suggesting that it has tolerated radical elements, and hinted that the planned center could inspire acts of terror in the United States.
Those claims infuriated Mr. Bloomberg, in no small part, those close to him say, because of his own family’s brush with prejudice when his parents shielded their identity from the seller of their house in Medford, Mass., a town where entire neighborhoods were still off limits to Jews.
Mr. Bloomberg’s instinctive discomfort with the nature and tenor of the growing debate about the center moved him to seek the counsel of others he trusted.
A few weeks ago, he approached an adviser on Muslim issues, Fatima A. Shama, a Palestinian-American who is his commissioner of immigrant affairs. He asked what she thought of the project.
Ms. Shama framed the issue in personal terms: she has three sons, she told the mayor, but there is no place in the city for them to share their Muslim faith with their Jewish and Christian friends.
“This could be that place,” Ms. Shama told Mr. Bloomberg.
The future of the center at that moment hinged on a decision by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
If it voted to prohibit alterations to the building on the site on Park Place, the developer’s plan would come apart.
In mid-July, Mr. Bloomberg made a quiet trip to the site, a forlorn former clothing store two blocks from City Hall. He saw no features that he considered worthy of landmark designation .
“It’s pretty hard to argue it should be preserved the way it is,” he said.
With a decision looming, state and national politicians began to weigh in, attacking the center as an act of aggression against American values.
In a widely watched address, Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has worked with the mayor on education reform, criticized the planned center and encouraged Mr. Bloomberg to change his mind.
But Mr. Bloomberg was heartened to hear that some of the families of 9/11 victims supported his position; they told him so a few weeks ago at a fund-raiser for the memorial at the site.
“One hundred percent of them in the room kept saying, ‘Please keep it up, keep it up,’ ” he recounted. “ ‘Our relatives would have wanted this country and this city to follow and actually practice what we preach and what we believe in.’ ”
Mr. Bloomberg became even more determined to speak out after he learned that the Anti-Defamation League, which for weeks has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on the Muslim center, abruptly announced its opposition. He was surprised and disappointed.
When asked about the group’s position, the mayor called it “totally out of character with its stated mission.”
In a pointed jab, he added, “I have no idea what possessed them to reach that conclusion.”
He asked his aides to draft a speech that would not only explain his position, but would also forcefully rebut the project’s critics and reframe the debate.
On Aug. 3, a few hours before the speech was to be delivered, his top speechwriter, Francis Barry, showed the mayor the text.
“It’s not nearly strong enough,” Mr. Bloomberg said, Mr. Barry recalled.
The mayor inserted his own language, citing the firefighters and police officers who marched into the trade center on Sept. 11: “In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ ‘What beliefs do you hold?’ ”
And he proposed what would become the speech’s defining lines: “We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights — and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.”
His steadfast support for the center, and his denunciation of its outspoken opponents, have put him at odds with some longtime friends, like Michael H. Steinhardt, a financier and philanthropist for Jewish causes.
“I disagree with him, respectfully,” Mr. Steinhardt said. He found the tone of some of the mayor’s remarks, especially the statement that opponents of the project “should be ashamed of themselves,” to be “somewhat puzzling,” Mr. Steinhardt said in an interview.
Nor has it endeared the mayor to a certain number of New Yorkers who have made their disappointment clear in letters and e-mails to City Hall.
One writer said she had been prepared to support a potential Bloomberg presidential campaign. “But not now,” she wrote. “This has totally changed my opinion of the mayor.”
There were also letters of praise. A woman who fled Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 thanked the mayor for his courage. Another letter-writer called it “his finest moment as mayor.”
Faced with the response, the mayor told aides he would not change his mind, but the aides say he has seemed sensitive to the raw emotions that the issue has aroused — especially toward him.
“I have said it so many times I’m getting tired of it,” Mr. Bloomberg said recently of his support for the center. Then he continued, in something of a lament: “I’m not winning a lot of friends doing so.”
The most obvious thing wrong with this statement is that, uh, it's wrong. A quick google search found me many refuatations of this story. If you bring this up, of course, the people saying it will try to change their words, going on about how Christians are treated unfairly in these other countries (I wouldn't know, I've never been there, but then, neither have they) and this and that - but what they SAID was WRONG.
However, the more important thing that's wrong with this statement is the fact that this isn't some other country! This is the United States of America! Freedom of religion is one of our most important precepts - it's the very first amendment! Speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition! (It's a very catchy chant. Try it.) Instead of trying to tit-for-tat Saudi Arabia, shouldn't we be holding ourselves to our own high standards?
Mixed in with this are the more "humorous" suggestions that the "mosque" (it's not) should be built "with a synagogue next to it" or a church (as though Jews and Christians only exist so Muslims can be annoyed or something) or a strip club (there are plenty in that neighborhood already. Actually, there are plenty of churches too, though I don't know about synagogues).
And of course the complaint that it'd somehow be terrible or shocking or irritating to hear a call to prayer. Nobody ever complains about churchbells on the hour (half hour, quarter hour....), or at least when they do they don't say it's somehow anything other than a noise complaint.
What really bugs me about all these arguments is how incredibly, unbearably hypocritical they all are. I just can't stand it.
(Also, I loathe "I don't blame all Muslims for 9/11, but I think it's insensitive". What is this? Either you blame them, in which case you should fess up and save the rest of us the trouble of trying to have a conversation with you, or you do NOT blame them, in which case you shouldn't feel upset by this at all.)
So, on with the links!
Not really recent, but it's vaguely topical about Muslim victims of 9/11.
Also, here is Wikipedia's fascinating article on Islam in the US
For Mosque Sponsors, Early Missteps Fueled Storm
Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, remembers her first conversation with Daisy Khan around 2005, years before Ms. Khan’s idea for a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan morphed into a controversy about Sept. 11, Islam and freedom of religion.
“Strollers,” said Ms. Levitt, whom Ms. Khan had approached for advice on how to build an institution like the Jewish center — with a swimming pool, art classes and joint projects with other religious groups. Ms. Levitt, a rabbi, urged Ms. Khan to focus on practical matters like a decent wedding hall and stroller parking.
“You can use all these big words like diversity and pluralism,” Ms. Levitt recalled telling Ms. Khan, noting that with the population of toddlers booming in Manhattan, “I’m down in the lobby dealing with the 500 strollers.”
Clearly, the idea that Ms. Khan and her partners would one day be accused of building a victory monument to terrorism did not come up — an oversight with consequences. The organizers built support among some Jewish and Christian groups, and even among some families of 9/11 victims, but did little to engage with likely opponents. More strikingly, they did not seek the advice of established Muslim organizations experienced in volatile post-9/11 passions and politics.
The organizers — chiefly Ms. Khan; her husband, the imam of a mosque in the financial district; and a young real-estate investor born in New York — did not hire a public-relations firm until after the hostility exploded in May. They went ahead with their first public presentation of the project — a voluntary appearance at a community board meeting in Lower Manhattan — just after an American Muslim, Faisal Shahzad, was arrested for planting a car bomb in Times Square.
“It never occurred to us,” Ms. Khan said. “We have been bridge builders for years.”
How Ms. Khan’s early brainstorming led to today’s combustible debate, one often characterized by powerful emotions and mistaken information, is a combination of arguable naïveté, public-relations missteps and a national political climate in which perhaps no preparation could have headed off controversy.
As a result, supporters of the $100 million center, named Park51, which received its final approval from the city last week, are now beginning their fund-raising and detailed planning amid a broader battle. The future of the center — organizers say it will have a mosque, but its 15 floors will be mainly for other functions — has become grist for talk radio, cable television and election fights across the country.
Sharif el-Gamal, the developer on the project, said ironically in an interview Friday, “This might become the most famous community center in the world.”
For American Muslims, the stakes have become painfully high.
“It has repercussions for the entire community,” said Robina Niaz, who runs Turning Point, a group that fights domestic violence among Muslims. “What it has done is suddenly made it legitimate for everybody else out there to lash out at Muslims. It has brought us together. But it also shows how much work we have to do.”
In 1999, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Ms. Khan’s husband, tried to buy the former McBurney Y.M.C.A. on 23rd Street in Manhattan, telling the seller’s broker, David Lebenstein, that he planned a kind of Muslim Y.
Knowing that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing still left raw nerves in New York, the imam assured Mr. Lebenstein, “We’re not the ones doing bombs; we’re moderates and Americans.”
The sale would have gone through but for financing difficulties, said Mr. Lebenstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Imam Feisal is in Malaysia and could not be reached for comment for this article.
Imam Feisal, 62, moved to the United States as a teenager with his father, an Egyptian imam, and graduated from Columbia University. Until 2009, he was the Friday prayer leader at Masjid al Farah, a mosque in the Sufi tradition, which emphasizes mysticism and tolerance. The mosque was established two decades ago and is 12 blocks from the World Trade Center.
His sermons were infused with a “sweet spirituality,” not focused on “rules and regulations” or politics, said Adem Carroll, director of the Muslim Consultative Network, an advocacy group based in New York. Those sermons attracted his two allies in the current project, slated to be built at 45-51 Park Place.
Daisy Khan, who immigrated, also as a teenager, to Jericho, on Long Island, from Kashmir, married Imam Feisal in 1997. They founded a Sufi organization advocating melding Islamic observance with women’s rights and modernity. After 9/11 they raised their profile, renaming the group the American Society for Muslim Advancement and focusing on connecting Muslims and wider American society. They spoke out against religious violence; the imam advised the F.B.I.; his wife joined the advisory panel of the 9/11 memorial and museum.
A few years later, Sharif el-Gamal, a developer whose Egyptian father was a Chemical Bank executive, asked the imam to perform his wedding.
Mr. Gamal, who headed SoHo Properties, agreed around 2006 to join the effort. In 2009, he bought two adjacent buildings on Park Place, where the imam began holding services. Only then did the organizers start reaching out more widely about their idea.
On top of the fear and confusion in New York about Islam after 9/11, a movement had begun to spring up against Muslims seeking a larger role in American public life. In 2007, Debbie Almontaser, a Muslim educator, had been forced to resign as the principal of an Arabic-language public school in Brooklyn after such groups helped paint her as supporting terrorism.
But the center’s organizers said they had little indication they were flying into a storm.
Ms. Khan had continued meeting with Ms. Levitt; she remembers worrying less about strollers than “the street cart problem” — where would Senegalese street vendors, a subset of Muslims working downtown, stow their wares while at the center?
Ms. Levitt remembers advising the organizers to line up potential members and financiers — for instance, Muslims throughout the region — before proposing a building. But Mr. Gamal said he wanted to first find property and make sure downtown residents and officials wanted the center.
If he promised something to Muslims and did not deliver, he explained, “I would lose face within my community.”
Ms. Khan said they were confident Muslims would back the center and thought it more important to talk to politicians and leaders of other religious groups.
Leaders of Muslim advocacy groups in New York note the imam and his wife had not often worked with grass-roots Muslim groups, and wonder if they wanted to avoid appearing “too Muslim.” The organizers say they did not.
Organizers talked with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg about the plan in September 2009, at a Gracie Mansion Ramadan fast-breaking for Muslim leaders. A New York Times article last December about the project drew little negative comment.
In February, the staff of Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, who liked the idea, suggested the organizers present it to Community Board 1, the largely advisory body that represents the neighborhood. Planners agreed to share information before the board and respond to expected questions about congestion and how the neighborhood could benefit.
Mr. Stringer said nobody warned them of “an Islamic issue,” adding with a weary chuckle, “We really give good advice.”
Preparing for a May 5 community board meeting, Ms. Khan got support from her usual allies, like the United Jewish Federation of New York; Trinity Church; and the September 11 Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow.
Some people raised concerns about the feelings of 9/11 victims, but the meeting was dominated by logistical concerns and support from those who welcomed new facilities downtown. The board gave a unanimous yes.
The next day, the uproar began. Some newspapers referred to the project as the “W.T.C. mosque.” Mr. Shahzad had been arrested late on May 3 in the attempted Times Square bombing. The community board office began receiving “hundreds and hundreds” of angry calls, and e-mails from around the world, said its chairwoman, Julie Menin, some threatening enough that she requested riot police for the next meeting.
The organizers were shocked. Many supporters say that their failure to imagine the backlash left them ill prepared to defuse it.
On May 18, the organizers held a conference call with supporters, and soon hired a crisis public-relations firm.
Ms. Menin of the community board urged Ms. Khan and the mayor’s office to hold a public forum to clear the air before the next community board meeting on May 25; they could, for instance, make clear that their congregation had worshiped in the neighborhood for years.
“It would have defused some of the problems, absolutely,” Ms. Menin said. But the public forum was not held.
Nevertheless, the project’s original backers held firm. When the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission on Aug. 3 removed the only legal hurdle, Mr. Bloomberg gave a passionate speech assailing the project’s critics as trampling religious freedom. American Muslims — including some groups not initially consulted — rallied to the project’s defense.
Mr. Gamal said that since May, he had started meeting in private with opponents to explain himself. But he bridled at constantly defending himself publicly. He said he didn’t want to tell angry opponents how he had injured his eye handing out water to emergency workers on 9/11.
He didn’t feel that he should have to, he said. He refused recently to appear on CNN to debate Rick A. Lazio, the Republican candidate for governor who has come out against the project.
“This is not a debate,” Mr. Gamal said. “I’m an American. I’m a New Yorker. I’m exercising my freedoms in this country.” There is little he would do differently, he said. “There’s no textbook that you can follow.”
Nor, it seems, a blueprint about what to do next.
On Tuesday night, organizers met with a wider range of 9/11 victim families. Ms. Menin is still calling for a town hall meeting.
“You have to deal with the uncomfortableness and controversy head-on,” Ms. Menin said.
In Lower Manhattan, Two Mosques Have Firm Roots
The Masjid Manhattan occupies a narrow basement with bare pipes snaking along the ceiling. The congregants who filled up the mosque near City Hall on Thursday night were mainly men, from South Asia, West Africa and the United States, and a few women — who prayed behind a partition. The feast provided for breaking the Ramadan fast, spicy curry over rice, came in plastic takeout containers from a nearby restaurant.
A few blocks away, at the Masjid al-Farah, the scene was somewhat different. Men and women sat together. The worshipers, devotees of the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism, came from an even wider array of countries and included a young man with multiple piercings and a shirt identifying him as an employee at Jivamukti Yoga. The mosque, in a two-story building sandwiched between two bars — the neon-lighted Tribeca Tavern and the nouvelle-brasserie-type Cercle Rouge — has a pristine, high-ceilinged, white-painted interior decorated with stained glass and Arabic calligraphy.
The fast-breaking meal, or iftar, included baby spinach and goat cheese and aloe vera water passed around by the mosque’s female leader, Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, who declared, “Good for the digestion.”
One mosque is conservative, and the other is reputed to be among the most progressive in the city — making the downtown Muslim community a quintessentially New York combination of immigrants and native New Yorkers, traditionalists and spiritual seekers.
But what the two mosques have in common — besides the sense of celebration and camaraderie that comes at the beginning of Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar, in which Muslims fast from sunup to sundown, give alms and focus on self-improvement — is that both have existed for decades, largely unnoticed, blocks from the World Trade Center site.
Masjid Manhattan, on Warren Street, four blocks from ground zero, was founded in 1970. Masjid al-Farah, formerly on Mercer Street, moved to its present location on West Broadway, about 12 blocks from ground zero, in 1985. Both mosques — essentially one-room operations — routinely turn people away for lack of space.
When Masjid al-Farah moved into the neighborhood, the local Muslim community was tiny, said Sheikha Fariha. But it has expanded exponentially, especially with Muslims who work in the area, she said. Both mosques now welcome doctors, street vendors, real estate agents and service workers. The imam of the Masjid Manhattan has a day job in a nearby post office.
Lately, some of the spillover has been absorbed by prayer services held in the vacant Burlington Coat Factory store two blocks from the trade center site, by Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf, a longtime prayer leader at Masjid al-Farah. He plans to turn the site into a Muslim community center and mosque bitterly opposed by critics, who call it a “ground zero mosque,” and which was backed by President Obama on Friday night. The uproar has perplexed, even alarmed, those who have long practiced Islam amid the neighborhood bustle of churches, government agencies, corporations, delis and sidewalk vendors.
Mariama Diallo, originally from Guinea, hurried down the stairs into Masjid Manhattan after finishing work at a nearby computer shop, knowing that if she tried to make it home to Queens before praying, she would miss the Maghrib, or evening prayer, and the breaking of the fast.
She spread out her prayer rug and was still praying when the imam’s call signaled the end of the fast. Just then, Shari Kareem, a student studying early childhood development at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and her mother, Seema, arrived. They took swigs straight from a gallon of Poland Spring water, helped themselves to dried dates and offered some to Ms. Diallo.
On the men’s side of the mosque, there was a minor moment of added excitement: a couple of arrivals, looking for free food and acting erratically, stepped clumsily across the mats on the floor where the food was laid out. The men deemed them to be high on drugs and firmly escorted them out.
Ms. Diallo said she came to the United States wanting “honest work — anything where I don’t have to cheat.” Not having had much time to immerse herself in the politics of her new country, she pronounced herself deeply puzzled as to why anyone would feel threatened by what goes on in a mosque.
“We have to pray to God. You’re following the religion,” she said. “You want to pray because it is in the book that you have to pray, and someday you will die.”
Referring to 9/11, she said that she, too, had “bad souvenirs.” (A native French speaker, she meant memories.) She remembered with awe a visit to the twin towers, lamented the deaths there, and said: “Killing people is a sin. Building the mosque over here, I don’t think that has to do with killing people.”
At Masjid al-Farah, Ali Mansour told of how he had drifted away from Islam as a young man in Egypt, but found it again through Sufism when the mosque started ordering from his deli down the block. He liked its “progressivism,” he said, adding that friends in Egypt sometimes tease him that American Muslims are “out of your mind” because of their nontraditional approach.
“Because this is a new country, it rejuvenates and revolutionizes everything,” he said. “Food, industry, philosophy and even religion.”
Soon, Sheikha Fariha started the zikr, the Sufi ritual of chanting and prayer, inviting the congregants to still their minds and drop “into the vastness of the heart that has no boundaries.”
“La illaha illa Allah,” they chanted again and again, turning from side to side in unison. “There is no god but God.”
Obama Strongly Backs Islam Center Near 9/11 Site
President Obama delivered a strong defense on Friday night of a proposed Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, using a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to proclaim that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”
After weeks of avoiding the high-profile battle over the center — his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said last week that the president did not want to “get involved in local decision-making” — Mr. Obama stepped squarely into the thorny debate.
“I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground,” the president said in remarks prepared for the annual White House iftar, the sunset meal breaking the day’s fast.
But, he continued: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.”
In hosting the iftar, Mr. Obama was following a White House tradition that, while sporadic, dates to Thomas Jefferson, who held a sunset dinner for the first Muslim ambassador to the United States. President George W. Bush hosted iftars annually.
Aides to Mr. Obama say privately that he has always felt strongly about the proposed community center and mosque, but the White House did not want to weigh in until local authorities made a decision on the proposal, planned for two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Last week, New York City removed the final construction hurdle for the project, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke forcefully in favor of it.
The community center proposal has led to a national uproar over Islam, 9/11 and freedom of religion during a hotly contested midterm election season.
In New York, Rick A. Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor and a former member of the House of Representatives, issued a statement responding to Mr. Obama’s remarks, saying that the president was still “not listening to New Yorkers.”
“With over 100 mosques in New York City, this is not an issue of religion, but one of safety and security,” he said.
Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, has called the project “an unnecessary provocation” and urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject it.
The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization, has also opposed the center.
In his remarks, Mr. Obama distinguished between the terrorists who plotted the 9/11 attacks and Islam. “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam — it is a gross distortion of Islam,” the president said, adding, “In fact, Al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion, and that list includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.”
Noting that “Muslim Americans serve with honor in our military,” Mr. Obama said that at next week’s iftar at the Pentagon, “tribute will be paid to three soldiers who gave their lives in Iraq and now rest among the heroes of Arlington National Cemetery.”
Mr. Obama ran for office promising to improve relations with the Muslim world, by taking steps like closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and more generally reaching out. In a speech in Cairo last year, he vowed “a new beginning.”
But Ali Abunimah, an Arab-American journalist and author, said the president has since left many Muslims disappointed.
“There has been no follow-through; Guantánamo is still open and so forth, so all you have left for him to show is in the symbolic field,” Mr. Abunimah said, adding that it was imperative for Mr. Obama to “stand up to Islamophobia.”
Once Mr. Bloomberg spoke out, the president’s course seemed clear, said Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution here.
“Bloomberg’s speech was, I think, the pivotal one, and set the standard for leadership on this issue,” Mr. Clemons said.
Mr. Bloomberg, in a statement, said: “This proposed mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan is as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime, and I applaud President Obama’s clarion defense of the freedom of religion tonight.”
Sharif el-Gamal, the developer on the project, said, “We are deeply moved and tremendously grateful for our president’s words.”
A building on the site of the proposed center is already used for prayers, and some worshipers there on Friday night discussed the president’s remarks.
Mohamed Haroun, an intern at a mechanical engineering firm, said, “What he should have said was: ‘This is a community decision. Constitutionally, they have the right to do it, but it’s a community decision and we should see what the local community wants to do.’ ”
Mayor’s Stance on Muslim Center Has Deep Roots
Michael R. Bloomberg is a former Wall Street mogul with a passion for the rights of a private property owner. He is a Jew whose parents asked their Christian lawyer to buy a house and then sell it back to them to hide their identity in an unwelcoming Massachusetts suburb. And he is a politician who regards his independence as his greatest virtue.
That potent combination of beliefs and history, those closest to Mayor Bloomberg say, has fueled his defense of the proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan — a defense he has mounted with emotion, with strikingly strong language and in the face of polls suggesting that most New Yorkers disagree with him.
“Something about this issue just really hooked into him,” said Howard J. Rubenstein, the powerful public relations executive, who is a friend of Mr. Bloomberg. “It deeply upset him.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s forcefulness has won him new admirers, but also a chorus of both familiar and fresh detractors. Reliable newspaper editorial allies have turned against him. Conservative pundits have mocked him (one called him “self-deluding”). Even some of his closest friends have angrily differed with him.
City Hall officials, who said the mayor had been swamped with angry correspondence, made some of it public.
“You are going to allow the Muslims build a trophy building there on HOLY GROUND,” one e-mail read. It concluded: “You need to be impeached.”
But none of the anger — hard to measure precisely, and amplified by talk radio and cable television — has moved the mayor. Indeed, interviews with his aides, advisers and associates suggest that it has only strengthened his resolve.
And they say the reasons are civic and personal. Mr. Bloomberg, for instance, has come to know the husband and wife who are among the principals behind the proposed center — a multipurpose religious and cultural institution that would be built two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.
And for years he has, with a mix of care and impatience, been encouraging New Yorkers, including the families of 9/11 victims, to emotionally move beyond the tragedy of nine years ago.
Some of those impressed by the depth of Mr. Bloomberg’s feelings have been struck in part because he had disappointed many when, by their lights, he failed to stand behind the principal of the city’s first Arabic-language public school.
The case of the principal, Debbie Almontaser, began, much as the community center did, with a seemingly uncontroversial plan — a school that would teach Arabic. Soon enough, though, conservative advocates, inflamed by the proposal, branded Ms. Almontaser a “radical” and “jihadist.”
After opponents sought to link her to T-shirts that said “Intifada NYC” and a newspaper suggested she had defended the slogan, the Bloomberg administration forced her to resign in 2007, she said.
A federal employment commission determined that Ms. Almontaser had not been connected to the T-shirts, that the newspaper had misconstrued her words and that the Bloomberg administration “had succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel.” (The school has survived and is run by a new principal.)
Now, some Muslim leaders in New York express pleasant surprise at his position on the downtown center.
Robina Niaz, executive director of the Muslim social service group Turning Point for Women and Families, said his position in the Almontaser case “was totally the opposite, completely the reverse of this.”
Her sense, she added, was that Mr. Bloomberg “may have gone back and looked at how that was not helpful as a mayor, as a leader — that this was an opportunity to undo some of that.”
On the community center, Mr. Bloomberg’s thinking from the start was informed by what he describes as the basic rights of the people behind it.
“If somebody wants to build a mosque in a place where it’s zoned for it and they can raise the money, then they can do that,” he said. “And it’s not the government’s business.”
Mr. Bloomberg, it turned out, had met with the couple seeking to build the center. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who would run the center, led a prayer service at Gracie Mansion in 2009 and exchanged warm words with Mr. Bloomberg; his wife, Daisy Khan, had sat next to Mr. Bloomberg’s girlfriend, Diana L. Taylor, during a dinner that followed.
In early summer, as controversy started to swirl around the project, opponents began to raise questions about Islam itself, suggesting that it has tolerated radical elements, and hinted that the planned center could inspire acts of terror in the United States.
Those claims infuriated Mr. Bloomberg, in no small part, those close to him say, because of his own family’s brush with prejudice when his parents shielded their identity from the seller of their house in Medford, Mass., a town where entire neighborhoods were still off limits to Jews.
Mr. Bloomberg’s instinctive discomfort with the nature and tenor of the growing debate about the center moved him to seek the counsel of others he trusted.
A few weeks ago, he approached an adviser on Muslim issues, Fatima A. Shama, a Palestinian-American who is his commissioner of immigrant affairs. He asked what she thought of the project.
Ms. Shama framed the issue in personal terms: she has three sons, she told the mayor, but there is no place in the city for them to share their Muslim faith with their Jewish and Christian friends.
“This could be that place,” Ms. Shama told Mr. Bloomberg.
The future of the center at that moment hinged on a decision by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
If it voted to prohibit alterations to the building on the site on Park Place, the developer’s plan would come apart.
In mid-July, Mr. Bloomberg made a quiet trip to the site, a forlorn former clothing store two blocks from City Hall. He saw no features that he considered worthy of landmark designation .
“It’s pretty hard to argue it should be preserved the way it is,” he said.
With a decision looming, state and national politicians began to weigh in, attacking the center as an act of aggression against American values.
In a widely watched address, Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has worked with the mayor on education reform, criticized the planned center and encouraged Mr. Bloomberg to change his mind.
But Mr. Bloomberg was heartened to hear that some of the families of 9/11 victims supported his position; they told him so a few weeks ago at a fund-raiser for the memorial at the site.
“One hundred percent of them in the room kept saying, ‘Please keep it up, keep it up,’ ” he recounted. “ ‘Our relatives would have wanted this country and this city to follow and actually practice what we preach and what we believe in.’ ”
Mr. Bloomberg became even more determined to speak out after he learned that the Anti-Defamation League, which for weeks has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on the Muslim center, abruptly announced its opposition. He was surprised and disappointed.
When asked about the group’s position, the mayor called it “totally out of character with its stated mission.”
In a pointed jab, he added, “I have no idea what possessed them to reach that conclusion.”
He asked his aides to draft a speech that would not only explain his position, but would also forcefully rebut the project’s critics and reframe the debate.
On Aug. 3, a few hours before the speech was to be delivered, his top speechwriter, Francis Barry, showed the mayor the text.
“It’s not nearly strong enough,” Mr. Bloomberg said, Mr. Barry recalled.
The mayor inserted his own language, citing the firefighters and police officers who marched into the trade center on Sept. 11: “In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, ‘What God do you pray to?’ ‘What beliefs do you hold?’ ”
And he proposed what would become the speech’s defining lines: “We do not honor their lives by denying the very Constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights — and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.”
His steadfast support for the center, and his denunciation of its outspoken opponents, have put him at odds with some longtime friends, like Michael H. Steinhardt, a financier and philanthropist for Jewish causes.
“I disagree with him, respectfully,” Mr. Steinhardt said. He found the tone of some of the mayor’s remarks, especially the statement that opponents of the project “should be ashamed of themselves,” to be “somewhat puzzling,” Mr. Steinhardt said in an interview.
Nor has it endeared the mayor to a certain number of New Yorkers who have made their disappointment clear in letters and e-mails to City Hall.
One writer said she had been prepared to support a potential Bloomberg presidential campaign. “But not now,” she wrote. “This has totally changed my opinion of the mayor.”
There were also letters of praise. A woman who fled Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 thanked the mayor for his courage. Another letter-writer called it “his finest moment as mayor.”
Faced with the response, the mayor told aides he would not change his mind, but the aides say he has seemed sensitive to the raw emotions that the issue has aroused — especially toward him.
“I have said it so many times I’m getting tired of it,” Mr. Bloomberg said recently of his support for the center. Then he continued, in something of a lament: “I’m not winning a lot of friends doing so.”
