Sheridan: Con-Law

SO MANY WAYS...

So many ways to view the controversy over the building of a community center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero in NYC:

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August 25, 2010

Looking at Islamic Center Debate, World Sees U.S.

By THANASSIS CAMBANIS

For more than two decades, Abdelhamid Shaari has been lobbying a succession of governments in Milan for permission to build a mosque for his congregants — any mosque at all, in any location.

For now, he leads Friday Prayer in a stadium normally used for rock concerts. When sites were proposed for mosques in Padua and Bologna, Italy, a few years ago, opponents from the anti-immigrant Northern League paraded pigs around them. The projects were canceled.

In that light, the furor over the precise location of Park51, the proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, looks to Mr. Shaari like something to aspire to. “At least in America,” Mr. Shaari said, “there’s a debate.”

Across the world, the bruising struggle over an Islamic center near ground zero has elicited some unexpected reactions.

For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.

But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.

The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.

“America hates Islam,” said Mohaimen Jabar, the owner of a clothes shop in Baghdad, Iraq.

“If America loved us, it would help the Palestinians and stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “It would stop Iran and Israel from distorting the image of Islam.”

Interestingly, leaders in Iran, Afghanistan and even occasionally prickly rivals like China and Russia — both of which have their own tensions in some of their heavily Muslim regions — have refrained from making much of the Park51 debate.

China’s state-run news media has used the story to elaborate on the need for a secular state strong enough to police extremism, a matter near and dear to its own ideology.

American diplomats are selling the controversy as Exhibit A in the case for America as a bastion of free debate and religious tolerance.

But “the harmonious image of the melting pot, of the ability to integrate all immigrant ethnicities is tottering dangerously,” Federico Rampini wrote in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

That was echoed by Pierre Rousselin, a French columnist writing in Le Figaro: “America is discovering that its Constitution and liberal principles don’t protect her from the debates that the practice of Islam stirs up in our countries.”

In Thailand, which has contended with its own Islamic insurgency, an editorial in The Nation worried aloud that America’s handling of the cultural center would affect relations worldwide between Muslims and non-Muslims. “If the era of former President George W. Bush tells us anything, it is that how the U.S. deals with the Muslim world affects us all,” the editorial said.

Far more common, however, was a sort of shrug of the shoulders from clerics and observers accustomed to far more unpleasant debates. While extremists have presented the controversy as proof of American hostility toward Islam, some religious leaders have taken quite a different stance, arguing against placing the center close to ground zero.

Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Grande Mosquée of Paris and one of the most senior Islamic clerics in France, told France-Soir: “There are symbolic places that awaken memories whether you mean to or not. And it isn’t good to awaken memories.”

A senior cleric at Egypt’s Al Azhar, the closest equivalent in the Sunni Islamic world to the Vatican, said that building at the proposed location sounded like bad judgment on the part of American Muslims.

“It will create a permanent link between Islam and 9/11,” said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of the Islamic Research Institute at Al Azhar. “Why should we put ourselves and Islam in a position of blame?”

That is not to say that the language in the United States has not agitated some observers, like Aziz Tarek, who wrote on the Saudi Web site Watan that America was in the grip of “intolerance and racism.”

He referred to Newt Gingrich’s widely reported statement that there should not be a new mosque in Lower Manhattan until Saudi Arabia allows construction of churches or synagogues.

“How can they compare building a mosque in N.Y. with building whatever in Mecca?” Mr. Tarek wrote. “I thought they viewed themselves better than that country of Saudi Arabia with its many human rights violations, as they love to put it.”

One Cambridge University researcher, writing in the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam, said Muslims could win their case for a center near ground zero in a court of law, only to end up losing in the court of public opinion.

“Provoking the other side will eventually create public opinion that will undermine the very laws that the Muslims evoke today,” wrote the researcher, Khaled al-Haroub, adding that many Muslim states do not tolerate Christian or Jewish houses of worship: “We keep increasing our religious demands vis-à-vis the West, while refusing to meet even a few of the demands made by religious minorities living among us.”

Paradoxically, the public reaction has not been heated in Lebanon, a country with 18 recognized religious sects where Muslims and Christians have a long history of occasionally violent coexistence.

If the mosque were built, many Lebanese commentators said, it would increase the influence of the ideal of the secular state. Many Lebanese, however, seemed more interested that Miss U.S.A., Rima Fakih, a Lebanese-American, had suggested that Park51 seek another location, than in the debate itself.

“Let’s be honest, it is kind of weird to build it there,” said Samer Ghandour, 33. “But the U.S. is also incredibly polarized and does not tolerate Islam.”

Mahmoud Haddad, a history professor at the University of Balamand in Lebanon, said that “the Muslim community should take the high moral and political ground” and agree to move the center, even though it has every right to build near ground zero.

“They should show they are more concerned about the general good of all Americans,” said Mr. Haddad, who studied and taught in the United States for two decades. “American society refuses to accept Muslims, even of the Westernized type, and consider them as a potential risk at best.”

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the project leader, has been speaking about his Cordoba Initiative on a two-week tour of the Persian Gulf sponsored by the State Department, although he has gingerly avoided discussing the Park51 location.

“What’s happening in America is very healthy,” said Muhammad Al-Zekri, a Bahraini anthropologist, after spending an evening with the imam.

The United States, he said, was still assimilating historical influences, including Islam, into its inaccurate self-image as a solely Judeo-Christian nation. The construction of Park51, Mr. Zekri believes, will help shape that.

“We pray for the people of New York, for peace,” Mr. Zekri said solemnly. “And if it matters, we apologize for what those people have done on 9/11.”

Thanassis Cambanis reported from Bahrain. Reporting was contributed by Anthony Shadid from Baghdad, Maïa de la Baume from Paris, Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, Nada Bakri from Lebanon, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Mona El-Naggar from Cairo and Thomas Fuller from Thailand. Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.

OBAMA'S FAITH: NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS

The latest controversy fomented by those politically opposed to President Obama (the first was whether he was born in the United States, a constitutional requirement (U.S. Const., Art. 2, Sec. 1 (5), is whether he's a Christian or a Muslim.  His father, out of Africa, was lord only knows, but maybe Muslim.  Obama seems to have been a regular church-goer.  That would be a Christian church.  Good for him.  I pray that he's a good Christian.  They're so hard to come by, don't you think?

Can you violate the Constitution and be a good Christian?  I suppose it depends on which provision you violate.  If you deny someone equal rights, aren't you violating the greatest Christian principle of them all, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you?  That's the equal protection principle.  I believe that "Do not do to others as you would not have them do to you," is a Mosaic principle.  So if you violate equal protection, you may be violating Jewish law as well.  I'll bet that Islam has a similar principle.  A lot of good it does if one goes around disregarding it.

It's none of your business what the president's faith is, or whether he has any faith.

We don't have any religious test for office in this country.  They're expressly forbidden, making the president's faith legally irrelevant (U.S. Const., Art. 6, Sec. 3.).  The Framers learned that from the experience of the bloody religious wars of Britain and the Continent that slaughtered tens of thousands.  Fortunately they didn't have nuclear weapons, as we do.

The president was elected commander-in-chief of the military (U.S. Const.,Art. 2, Sec. 1, Cl. 8), not priest-in-chief of the religious.

There's no percentage in arguing religion.  There isn't one of them that hasn't been sullied by adherents acting like savages, who break every decent principle in the book.

Better we get back to looking at equal protection, don't you think?

It's not that we dislike Islam.  But there are plenty of Muslims to arouse our ire.  The hijackers on 9-11, for example.  The suicide bombers in Baghdad and Kabul.  I get that.  There's a lot of bad behavior going around that we're rightly concerned about, not to say terrified.  We are definitely terrified of people who plant IEDs (improvised explosive devices) that indiscriminately kill their civilians and our soldiers.  Since the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are Muslim, fear brings hatred and we don't stop to make fine distinctions.  This is our problem.  We don't think as we should.  We did this to the Japanese on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor.  Intelligent distinctions went by the wayside there, as well, so now it's business as usual.

We've got to start acting smarter, not hotter.

What do you think about this?

LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE?

Since I try to resist political categorization for myself, I find it interesting to see the labels we use to try to put each other into neat political boxes, such as liberal and conservative.  It can be hard to tell, sometimes, who is what.

When I was a youngster growing up during the beginning of the Cold War, the worst thing one could be was a Communist. So anyone who advocated in favor of a national health plan, for example, was called a 'socialist,' which is another word for communist in the American political lexicon. 

"Well, he might not be a card-carrying member of CPUSA," the argument went, "but he's a fellow-traveler, a pinko, a Commie."  That's how Richard M. Nixon beat out Helen Gahagan Douglas for a California U.S. Senate seat, launching his career toward the presidency and disgrace for his unprincipled, criminal conduct. but I digress.  That would be the Communist Party of the U.S.A.

The American Medical Association constantly fought back reforms of the health-care delivery system on the ground that it was a form of communism for government to help poor people obtain healthcare.  The conservative position was that poor people were on their own, and if they made poor choices in their youth, well, then they deserved what they got.  If they died, they died.  That's life.  It's a dog-eat-dog world.

Liberals argued that as a country, we have a vested interest in the health of our population, and if we could take steps to vaccinate children, say with the anti-polio vaccine, this made the nation stronger.  After all, we drafted poor children as well as rich, and we needed a healthy population to fight our wars.  Therefore this wasn't socialistic but nationalistic.

Conservatives and the AMA disliked this argument terribly, because it seemed unlimited in scope, allowing government to grow large with bureaucrats in Washington who passed innumerable laws and regulations that made it harder and more costly to do business what with reporting requirements and the inevitable accusations of wrongdoing, hearings, expensive lawyers, etc.  Tax and spend Liberals became the new boogieman to the conservative way of thinking.  Let's roll the clock back to 1910 when workers were not allowed to organize, children and women were forced to work all hours under improper nutrition and little education to keep the mills turning and the owners rich.  It's taken over a century to correct this and it's a never ending job.

So I thought I'd ask what was a Liberal, and what was a Conservative.  I don't ask what is a Communist because, after the government bailout of Wall Street in 2008, and General Motors, I figure that the nation went communist then.  Communists believed (there are no true communists any more, not even in North Korea.  China went capitalist over 30 years ago.  The Soviet Union collapsed in 1989.) that the government should own the means of production in common (hence the name).  So when Britain nationalized the coal mines and steel mills (and introduced a national health service), these were all seen in America as socialistic, meaning communist, a big political no-no, then, after the war when Britain was deeply in debt and broke), and now.

But when our economy was falling off the cliff in 2008, what did we do?  George W. Bush was president and no more conservative person could you find in high public office.  He and his Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, recommended bailing out the very greedy banks and bankers who were driving the economy into our Great New Depression.  This was no different than nationalizing the financial industry epitomized as Wall Street.

In a profile of US Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) in the August 2, 2010, New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin quotes Edward F. Cox, Nixon's son-in-law, and chairman of the N.Y. Republican State Committee, as saying:

"The state needs people who are fiscally conservative, and Schumer is at the other end of the spectrum.  He is a big-government liberal.  He's about having more and bigger governmental direction and takeovers of different sectors of the economy, and more government programs that don't deliver what they promise and have adverse impacts on the national economy."

On the subject of health care, Pres. Obama succeeded in having Congress pass a complex and expensive new health bill that will extend healthcare to many who cannot afford it, or the insurance by which we obtain it these days.  Toobin writes:

"Traditionally, of course, it is support for such needy outsiders that defines what it means to be a liberal."

So there you have two current views on what it means to be either conservative (Cox) or liberal (Toobin).

Here's another.

Virtually every major case that comes before the U.S. Supreme Court is a litmus test for conservative vs. liberal.  Some examples:

The reduction or elimination of white supremacy in the form of racial integration or public school desegregation, and other forms of desegregation in the workplace, in public accommodations, parks, police departments, etc.  If you resisted, you were conservative; if you favored, you were liberal.  Bleeding heart liberal was a term I heard applied to me more than once, by police, when as a law student at NYULS, I worked in the courts with the Vera Foundation (now Vera Institute of Justice) on the Bail/O.R. project where we sought to show that people could be released on their own recognizance and still return to court as required.  Now release on O.R. occurs nationwide and is part of the legal lexicon, criminal law division.  Likewise as to the Citation-in-lieu-of-arrest, on which I was also a foot soldier, which allows police to issue a citation for many misdemeanors and some felonies.  This kept the cops from having to wait all night at the Tombs (the NYC word for the Manhattan jail) in order to see whether the DA would file charges on the new arrest.  Cops could go home and get some sleep.  The city could avoid overtime pay.  The defendant could make it back to the street before the cop.  Hence, "bleeding heart liberal" interested in releasing criminals to the street.  The cops thought it a little crazy, except for the part about not having to wait around all night for the DA office to open in the morning.  They liked going home.

Roe v. Wade, and abortion on demand, is the epitome of the liberal vs. conservative divide, and has been since 1973.  As originally written by Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe was a defense of the doctor's right to counsel and treat his pregnant patient.  Only accidentally, it seems, did the case become focused on the woman's right to choose whether to abort or to become a mother, perhaps not for the first time.  Now the focus is on the woman's right, not the doctor.  Blackmun admired doctors. 

Conservatives instinctively protect the value of their property against legislative encroachments in the form of zoning regulations which they regard as an unconstitutional taking in violation of due process, without reasonable compensation in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.  See Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut.

Recently some Muslims in New York have made an effort to build a community center and mosque two blocks from the site where the World Trade Center collapsed as the result of a terrorist attack using hijacked jetliners, killing close to three thousand innocent civilians.  The 9-11 attack has served as a rallying point for America, much as the Alamo had for Texans, and Pearl Harbor for later generations.

However, some folks have taken it upon themselves to protest the mosque, slated to be built in a commercial building that has been standing for years, claiming that Ground Zero is hallowed ground, despite the other businesses including bars and strip clubs nearby,   If the Hallowed Ground Doctrine is given force legally, it deprives property owners of the value of there property, both Larry Silverstein, the owner of the Trade Center site, and whoever owns the building where the mosque is to be built.  Now if the protesters want to buy Ground Zero, or the building where the mosque is to be built, to prevent a mosque from being built on Ground Zero (which no one has suggested, as far as I know), then they would have the rights of property owners.  But that's not what the protesters are doing.  They're simply claiming that the site where 2,700 people died is theirs, the protesters, to control.  This flies in the face of my conservative aspect.

I believe that we're all a mix of values that we'd like to preserve, let's call this conservative, and liberals, conservative views that we'd like to see extended.  Yes, there are extremists on both ends of this spectrum, but it seems to me that there's plenty of room in the central portion to accommodate one side or another fairly for long periods of time.  When the unfairness becomes apparent, or more apparent, we make another correction.  This enables us to sail forward on the great ship of state, to borrow an old-fashioned metaphor which seems to work.

Any idea in which direction we're sailing, these days?

Don't ask me.  I'm thankful if we can remain afloat.

Normally we like our presidents to set our course.  Think Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.  In recent times it seems unusually difficult for our presidents to give us our sailing orders.  Bush seemed likely to turn us around, while Obama seems likely to turn us around once again, in advocating for a fact-based, science-respecting government, as opposed to GWB's religious, creationist, view of life and government.

What would you like to see the country become?

ALL AROUND US

In a discussion on NPR yesterday concerning the controversy over the community center and mosque sought to be built into an existing commercial building located two blocks from the site of the late World Trade Center, in Manhattan, destroyed by Saudis acting on behalf of Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist organization, which claimed to be acting on behalf of Islam, killing over 2,700 people of all walks and faiths, one of the two panelists, Ross Douthat, a columnist for the N.Y. Times, said that we have two Americas, one being "cultural" and the other being "constitutional." 

The Americans opposed to building the mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, as the site is called, are said to be 'cultural' Americans, while people such as Mike Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, who maintain that no one has a right to object to a mosque, simply because it is an Islamic center for worship, education, meetings, etc., where it is otherwise allowed to exist, are called "constitutional" Americans under this analysis.

This seems to miss a very big point.

The Constitution is all around us.  As you walk down the street or along the beach, or San Francisco Bay, as I do, you can see evidence of the Constitution all around you.  You see political signs on billboards, bumper-stickers and T-shirts.  You see churches, synagogues, and mosques.  At least I do.  I see navigable waterways, pilot boats, migrating birds protected by international treaty, all grist for the Conlaw mill.

There may be Americans who prefer to ignore the Constitution.  The South did this after the Civil War when Amendments 13, 14, and 15 freed the slaves, guaranteed equal protection and due process of law, and supposedly guaranteed them voting rights.  The South organized local groups of the Ku Klux Klan to make sure that there was no chance of any of these actually occurring, even the non-slavery part.  Laws were quickly passed making it a crime for blacks to sell their labor to the highest bidder; they had to remain working for their former plantation owner.  To violate these Jim Crow laws was to court torture and lynching.  This is the way matters remained for the next century.

Those were "cultural" Americans, people who preferred the old way to the Constitutional way.  The Constitution is a tool for managing change, among other things.  Some people are more comfortable not changing with the times.  These would seem to be 'unconstitutional' Americans, as I read the Douthat analysis.

The Constitution is all around us.  It doesn't just exist in a booklet on a shelf.   It's in our head and heart.  It's how we behave, how we live.  Once it stops existing there, it doesn't exist at all. 

One of the great things about the Two-Blocks-From-Ground-Zero-Mosque controversy is how well it defines us as Americans, according to the position we take on it.

On the one side are the protesters who don't own the property on which the Trade Center stood.  This is our hallowed ground, they say.  It's not their hallowed ground.  It's Larry Silverstein's.  He owns it.  He's a businessman.  He's going to put up another high-rise so he can rent out offices.  That's the business he's in.  This is terrific.  It's exactly what he should be doing.  New York and America don't need a smoking ruin in the midst of the high-rent district of the Wall Street area of Lower Manhattan.  A memorial, yes, that would be excellent, but a ban on building?  Hardly.

Yet these people who don't own the land are telling a group of people who want to build a mosque and community center two blocks away that they shouldn't do so because Ground Zero, in the minds of the beholders, has become, somehow, hallowed and sacred, two religious terms.  So for religious and cultural reasons, the Muslims shouldn't seek to build two blocks away, because this will somehow taint the memory of the fallen.  I don't geddit.  We should encourage the building of twenty mosques and community centers in Lower Manhattan.  The public should be invited to attend seminars in them on the rule of law, individual freedom, the rights of women, religious understanding, the same as is done at universities and community centers all over, not uniformly, perhaps, but all over nevertheless, as the light goes on in peoples' minds.

We have no Constitution-free zones, thank you.  It may seem that way, sometimes, but the writ of the Constitution runs to every corner of the country, to Guantanamo, to the CIA, to prisons in Baghdad, and Baghram.  There are no Constitutional Black Holes.  Oh, they may very well exist, but not after being brought to light and into court. That's the lesson of Padilla, etc., the Guantanamo cases.  Even a prisoner held by the U.S. military in Guantanamo, Cuba, an American base in that foreign country that we almost colonized, and some might say we did, can apply to federal court to protest his being held in custody.

Explain to me again how it is that people having an emotional attachment to Ground Zero but do not own it have the right to prevent someone else from building a mosque two blocks away.  I don't get that, do you?

I can decide that your property is holy to me, therefore you cannot build on it nor can the next guy build two blocks down the street because he's a Muslim.  That makes a lot of sense, right?  How about three blocks? Four?  Ten?  How about in all of Manhattan, not previously known for being all that sacred, hallowed, or holy. 

How far does this new Hallowed-Ground Doctrine run?  Why not just ban Muslims from entering the country?  I'm sure that there are some people who describe themselves as American who would welcome this, but then we wouldn't be living in America, would we? 

More like Nazi Germany where they developed the idea of wiping out people who they couldn't tolerate to a high industrial art.  Is this who we want to emulate? 

It's bad enough that Hitler was inspired by us, I've heard tell, to develop his genocidal ideas from the notion of eugenics, the idea that some genes were preferable to others, therefore let's wipe out the bad genes.  Jewish people, for example.

We've got to work to keep our hands clean after our own genocidal activities, the enslavement of a whole population and then keeping them down for a century after achieving freedom on paper, by law and in practice.

Have I mentioned the internment of the Japanese on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor?  In other posts, perhaps.  Learning from our mistakes is its own reward.

We have a bad habit of thinking of ourselves as being above the law, above the Constitution, when the Constitution is what keeps us out of the rest of the animal kingdom.

Give in to the anti-mosque people and the terrorists will have really won, in that they scared us into giving up our liberty in favor of fascist-style intolerance to people perceived, wrongly, as being somehow different because their religion seems new to the area. 

What arrant nonsense; don't you expect better of us?

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A day later.

It seems there are strippers on 'hallowed ground.'

CHINA LIKE US?

According to this report, China, with its 1.3 billion people, has surpassed Japan to become the world's second largest economy.  Over the next seventeen years, according to someone who's supposed to know about these things over at Goldman-Sachs, China can be expected to achieve Number One status among the world economies.

This have you worried?  Is China going to take over the world?  Traditionally China hasn't sought to take over the world, only the territory neighboring it, such as Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjaing, and Vietnam, so nothing to worry about there.  Forget about the nuclear aircraft carriers China is building.  Maybe those are just for defense, like ours. If we don't fight in Iraq, according to one relative who claims to be expert in such things, we'll be fighting those fundamentalist-Islamic terrorists on the streets of Kansas City. Feel better?

Suppose, however, that China looks to the U.S. for guidance on how to act as a world power.  Can we expect a breakout of world peace?

How have we use our own power?

We fought Britain, the mother country, to free ourselves as colonies, so that we could form an independent union of states.  That was good.

We screwed up the first Constitution such that it continued to allow slavery to exist throughout the new country.  This took a second war to eradicate.  That was good.

In 1802, we purchased a huge territory called Louisiana, much larger than the one state of that name carved from it, for a few pennies an acre, from France, which sold it because its emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, needed the money, $15 million, to fund his wars on the Continent and against the British blockade.

In 1812 we fought the British again, hoping to stop the British navy from boarding our ships, confiscating our sailors, and taking possession of ship and cargo for alleged violation of neutrality during the war between Britain and France. 

In 1847, we fought Mexico because Texas seemed so worth having for ourselves, as did the Anglo settlers from the states, mainly the Southern states, who had migrated there.  Some of them brought their slaves with them, so when Texas sought admission to the U.S. as a slave state, the North opposed changing the even balance of free and slave states that had existed in an uneasy and precarious state of equilibrium for years. 

When gold was discovered in California the next year, in 1848, the Gold Rush of 1849 set off a stampede of would-be gold miners and blue jeans manufacturers needed to keep them in tough work pants while panning for gold in the rivers and sitting around on rocks and in saloons.

In 1898, we went to war against Spain to free Cuba, picking up along the way, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico as various forms of colony.  We'd gone full-circle, from being a group of colonies to unifying, achieving independence, and then becoming the owner of colonies.  Some thought this strange.  The war against Spain was one that we were spoiling for.

We fought in WWI, after German submarines sank our ships, the Lusitania being the most infamous incident.  Again, the cause was trading with the enemy, Britain.  When you're a big nation having trading incidents around the world, and you see bad things happening in other countries, you can't just sit idly by, you're involved, and this can mean, in many cases, war.  Large and powerful nations find themselves frequently at war.  The British Empire, very large, required a huge navy to keep its trade and communications lines open and a large army to keep control of the natives in India, Burma, Malaya, China, South Africa, America, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, not necessarily all at the same time. When you spread your influence abroad, you can expect a certain amount of trouble.

During the early 20th century, we saw Japan as the rising power in the Far East and undertook a great competition to keep Japan restrained, unsuccessfully.  Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, bringing us into WWII against its ally, Germany, under Hitler, which declared war on us a week later.

Since the end of WWII in 1945, we've fought the Cold War, which lasted from then until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc in 1989.  We've also fought the Communists in Korea and Vietnam.

Then the oil wars of the Persian Gulf, in 1991 when Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait for its oil, threatening Saudi Arabia and our oil supply.  We, as leader of the West, could not allow this to stand.

In 2001 there was the attack on America in the form of the Trade Center attacks on 9-11 and the Pentagon and a suspected third attack on either the White House or Congress by a plane brought down by passengers in a field in Pennsylvania.  We followed by invading Iraq and Afghanistan, producing two more wars, one of which is winding down and the other still gearing up.

And we are said to be a peace-loving nation imbued with the democratic spirit.

I'd be worried about China, not known for seeing itself as a peace-loving nation imbued with the democratic spirit.  China may turn out to be a lot rougher than we were, or are.

TRADE CENTER MOSQUE

Pres. Barack Hussein Obama has waded into the Trade Center Mosque fight, coming down on the side of religious freedom in America:

August 13, 2010

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Obama Backs Rights of Muslims on Center Near Ground Zero

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama delivered a strong defense on Friday night of a proposed 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 a Muslim community center and mosque — 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, leaving little doubt about how he feels.

“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.”

Aides to Mr. Obama say privately that he has always felt strongly about the issue. But the White House did not want to weigh in until local authorities made a decision on the proposed community center and mosque, planned for two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Last week, New York City removed the final construction hurdle for the project, which is called Park51, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg weighed in forcefully in favor of it. In the interim, Mr. Obama’s silence had infuriated many Muslim Americans, who believed the president had abandoned them, though he had said since the outset of his administration that he wanted to reach out to the Muslim world.

The community center proposal has led to a national uproar over Islam, 9/11 and freedom of religion that has been fueled in part by Republican and conservative leaders during a hotly contested midterm election season.

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, called the project “an unnecessary provocation” and urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject it. The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization, also announced it opposed the center, which added to the furor. Around the nation, other mosques began meeting opposition.

In his White House remarks, Mr. Obama took care to distinguish 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,” the president also 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 the United States’ relations with the Muslim world, by taking steps like closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and more generally reaching out. During a much-publicized speech in Cairo last year, Mr. Obama 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 on Friday night, 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.”

***

Here are letters published in NYT on the controversy.  One asks why the Muslim group chose as its community center site a location so close to Ground Zero.

Suppose that they did.  What of it?  Let's say that they got a deal on a building two blocks away and they liked the downtown site, with its closeness to Ground Zero.  Is this a problem?  Some in the Islamic community might want to show their kids the place where something happened.  This is a problem?  A thousand people looking at Ground Zero might think a thousand different things, some that you might like and some that you might not.  So?  What of it?

The whole point of America is that someone else cannot dictate what goes on in your mind, or what may not.

We call it freedom of expression.  I call it freedom of mind.  Freedom of conscience comes under this umbrella.  Does the umbrella have a name?

It does.

It's called "The First Amendment."

Amen.

 

PREJUDICE: 442, BLOOMBERG

Two items from today's newspapers, placed side-by-side, illustrate a point about American prejudice.

The first is a review of a new film about the Japanese-American experience after Pearl Harbor, during WWII.  That's where I came in.  I was a little kid who grew up hating the Japanese.  A friend and I traded nightmares about the Japanese.  We didn't know any Japanese, but saw a lot of war movies after the war, and heard bad stories.  After the Korean war ended in 1953, a neighbor's home on Staten Island was visited by two service buddies of the son of Mrs. Conaty.  She turned them away, calling them "niggers."  They were Japanese-American.  The fear and hatred of white America for Japanese didn't allow for distinctions between Imperial troops and Japanese-Americans.  That must be the thing about fear and hatred; they don't allow for rational distinction.  It's hard to feel hatred for this but not this, I suppose, which is a good reason to try to avoid getting mixed up in hatred, even if it makes you feel better.

So there is this movie review about an outfit of American soldiers that won great distinction fighting for America against Hitler in Europe during WWII.  The U.S. Army Infantry Regiment was numbered "442"  It was sent to fight in Europe.  We fought in Italy and Germany.  Italy, under Mussolini, was allied to Germany under Hitler.  Big mistake, Italy.  See the film "Madalena" by the director "Giuseppe Tornatore," for a great allegorical treatment of this mistake, and don't forget I tipped you off that it is an allegory.  The only reason I mention this is because I had to see the film twice to get it, as I hadn't been clever enough to recognize an allegory when I tripped over it.

Here's the review of "442 -- Live With Honor, Die With Dignity."

Article:'442' tells of Japanese American WWII soldiers:/c/a/2010/08/12/DD2C1ERGJC.DTL

Article:'442' tells of Japanese American WWII soldiers:/c/a/2010/08/12/DD2C1ERGJC.DTL

'442' tells of Japanese American WWII soldiers

G. Allen Johnson, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, August 13, 2010

Lawson Sakai has been an American since his birth in the United States 86 years ago. His parents immigrated from Japan, but he never learned to speak Japanese fluently and he has never met his relatives in Japan.

And yet, after Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 hastened the United States' entry into World War II, Sakai was effectively no longer a U.S. citizen.

"In 1941, I was 18 years old," said Sakai, who lives in Morgan Hill. "I was American. I wanted to join the military. I was told I could not because they had reclassified my draft status from 1A to 4C - which meant I became an enemy alien overnight.

"They took away all my civil liberties, I could not join any branch of the military until February of 1943 when they formed the 442nd, and the only military unit we could join was the 442nd."

That thousands of Japanese Americans, many of whom were imprisoned along with their families in internment camps, voluntarily joined the U.S. Army and fought for the Allies in World War II is astounding to many. And fight they did. The 442nd Infantry Regiment - along with an offshoot, the 100th Infantry Battalion - holds the distinction of being the most decorated unit of its size and service in U.S. military history. The 442nd and 100th were known as the "Go For Broke" regiments.

Opening today

It puzzles Japanese people as well, and that's why a Japanese director, Junichi Suzuki, has made a documentary, "442 - Live With Honor, Die With Dignity." The film opens in San Francisco today as part of a slate of films and events that commemorates the end of World War II 65 years ago this month.

Suzuki's movie prominently features Sakai, who fought in France and Italy, several other 442 veterans, including Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, and others knowledgeable about Japanese American issues, such as actor George Takei. In the film, Suzuki's crew joins a group led by Sakai in a visit to the French town of Bruyères, which the 442nd liberated. The town holds remembrances each year and erected a statue of a Japanese American soldier.

Suzuki also uses combat and newsreel footage, old photographs, and interviews with survivors and their families in attempting to put the legacy of the 442nd into a modern context.

"In Japan, we don't know about the Japanese immigrant history during World War II," said Suzuki, 58, during a recent screening with Sakai in Japantown.

Sakai said he is pleased with the film, and said it could be illuminating for its Japanese audiences.

"Many of the people in Japan don't understand what the Nisei (the second generation of Japanese immigrants) did," said Sakai, who serves as president of the Friends and Family of Nisei Veterans. "Since the Nisei were very obedient to the Issei parents, who immigrated from Japan, we carried over many of the traditions and very personal feelings.

"You might say we were very 'Japanese-y,' but we were very American. So there was no question that the Nisei would fight for the United States, and I think it's very difficult for the Japanese to understand why the same group of people could be so different."

Difficult for Americans, too. Despite the Van Johnson film "Go For Broke!" in 1951, which starred many of the 442 veterans, the Japanese American contributions to the war effort went largely unnoticed. It took until Aug. 2 of this year for the U.S. Senate to approve a bill to award a Congressional Gold Medal to Japanese American soldiers. It is expected to pass in the House in September.

After the war

The postwar years were difficult for Sakai, as they were was for many Japanese Americans - heck, many Americans in general - as decommissioned troops began to reintegrate into the workforce.

Sakai met his wife, Minako, in 1946. He worked with farming organizations, mainly at a strawberry processing plant in California, quit and started a travel agency in San Jose and has been retired since 1990. Along the way, he and Minako, who was also at the screening, raised four children and have seven grandchildren.

"For about four or five years, the press was anti-Japanese, radio - everything you read or heard," Sakai said. "It was like, 'You got rid of 'em, don't let 'em come back.' When we started to filter back in 1945, there was a lot of opposition. One of my platoon sergeants, his home in Auburn (Placer County) was burned down while he was still overseas. Things like that happened. It was tough to get over that. It was really tough, the prejudice."

'442 - Live With Honor, Die With Dignity':

A documentary by Junichi Suzuki about the 442nd Infantry Regiment, a company of Japanese American soldiers who fought for the United States in Europe during World War II. Included among the subjects interviewed is 442 veteran Lawson Sakai of Morgan Hill.

Today through Thursday at Viz Cinema, 1746 Post St., S.F. (415) 525-8600. www.vizcinema.com. Also playing is "Toyo's Camera," Suzuki's 2007 documentary about World War II internment camp photographer Toyo Miyatake.

E-mail G. Allen Johnson at ajohnson@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/13/DD2C1ERGJC.DTL

This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

© 2010 Hearst Communications Inc.

***

Here comes the next newspaper item of today, about Mike Bloomberg, the mayor of New York.  It concerns the mosque planned near the Trade Center, destroyed in the 9-11 attack in 2001.

Bloomberg has come down foursquare on the side of the mosque, to the howls of many New Yorkers who view Muslims as we viewed Japanese during that war.

First, let's get a flavor of the controversy, then the news article reporting on it.

Friday, August 13, 2010

August 13, 2010, 9:28 am

In the Mayor’s Mailbag: Applause and Anger

By MICHAEL BARBARO

The letters and e-mails have poured in to City Hall.

One writer, upset about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s support for a proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, suggests that he move to Afghanistan so he can “really cozy up” with the Taliban. Another applauds his position, saying, “It is time for the hatred to stop.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s steadfast defense of the Park51 project — the product of personal history and beliefs — has not swayed since the controversy started, but aides said he has read many of the messages as he absorbs the debate.

What follows are e-mails to Mr. Bloomberg from New Yorkers for and against it. The mayor’s office, which made public a sampling of the e-mails, has redacted the names of the authors, but left their genders and ZIP codes, when available:

You are a coward! You can’t even stand up for the people of New York, you side with the scum of the earth the Muslim Imam! What kind of MAN are you, you yellow belly coward! You need to be impeached! You don’t even know what is going on down there at ground zero, the HOLY GROUND where people have lost love ones! You are going to allow the Muslims build a trophy building there on HOLY GROUND! What kind of person are you to spit in the face of all those people that were lost on 9-11. YOU NEED TO GO!!! Maybe we will ship you over to Afghanistan so you can really cozy up with your new found buddies!
God Help You!

Female name redacted
NY – neighborhood not given

---

I just wanted to praise you for your remarks from Governors Island today. Your consistent position on this issue is both constitutionally supported and morally just. You do our city and our nation a service by your words and deeds.

Male name redacted
Forrest Hills, NY 11375

---

I am disappointed and offended with the Major Bloombergs stance on the moslem masque being built 2 blocks away from ground zero. This has totally changed my opinion of the mayor who I had liked and would have voted for IF he ran for President BUT NOT NOW!!!

Female name redacted
NY – neighborhood not given

---

Thank you Mayor Bloomberg for your decision regarding the building of the mosque near WTC. It was a moving historical explanation of the all the religions that have been denied house of worship when New York City was settled up through the 19th Century. I understand this was a wildly unpopular decision but it was the courageous one. I was downtown for 9-11 and spent a harrowing day getting out. But I believe you did the right thing for the city and for America. All Americans should view your speech in its entirety. Thank you for having the courage to do this.

Female name redacted
New York, NY 10014

---

I Am A Very Tolerant And Liberal Person…Within Reason…
I Really Dont See Anything Good About Putting A Mosque Near The World Trade Center Site…It Skeeves Me…..If I Saw These People Show How Awful They Feel About What Happened ..Then Maybe…But They Dont Fight Their Own People…I Think They All Hate Us Or Are All Fearful…We Need Them To Build Elsewhere…It Is So Distasteful To Most Of Us…And Isnt That The Way It Should Be…Shouldnt We Have A Say???

Female Name Redacted
Brooklyn, NY 11204

---

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

I applaud your support for the Cordoba project. It is time for the hatred to stop and the healing to begin. I am not a Muslim but I believe this cultural center will be an asset to the city. Sincerely yours,

Female Name Redacted
Bronx NY 10463

---

Hard to believe that you cannot foresee the London Paris problems come to our wonderful New York City should this structure be built at the WWC site. I am one of those New Yorkers who had previously looked for a Michael Bloomberg as President of the USA. Please rethink your stand on this issue. It will be the END of New York City as we know it if this happens.

Female Name Redacted
New York, NY 10003

---

I would like the thank Mayor Bloomberg for his speech in defense of religious liberty in this country today. His speech in defense of the planned community center 2 blocks from the WTC site was his finest moment as mayor.

Male name redacted
Brooklyn, NY 11222

Related Posts

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13 Comments

1. 1. August 13, 2010 9:52 am Link

   I think Mayor Bloomberg just picks whatever position is most likely to anger people and bring him the most attention.

   — Jamie
2. 2. August 13, 2010 10:30 am Link

   Mr. Mayor,

   You’re doing a great job defending freedom of speech, religion and property. My family is Jewish and many of our friends are Catholic and Christian. We are ALL 100 percent supportive of you and your fight for liberty.

   I live in Arizona and the truth is that you are my new hero! Who would have ever thought that in 2010, that one of the only American elected officials that I can admire is the mayor of New York!

   Thank you!

   — Lisa
3. 3. August 13, 2010 10:53 am Link

   I love the difference in grammar/spelling/etc. between the bigots and the tolerant.

   — Liz
4. 4. August 13, 2010 10:54 am Link

   Either the Times is cherry-picking a bit here, or there is a 1.00 correlation between being anti-mosque and being literally incapable of writing a sentence in English.

   — J. Wellington Wimpy
5. 5. August 13, 2010 10:57 am Link

   I have to agree that a mosque or any other building should be allowed to be built near the former site of the World Trade Center, just as long as it’s not built on the actual site itself.
   That, of course would really be a slap in the face for those of us who live under the protection of, “Old Glory!”

   — Perley J. Thibodeau
6. 6. August 13, 2010 11:19 am Link

   Hi Mr. Mayor,
   You know that one Urdu poet he said that a daffodil cries of her ugliness for thousand of years, and an onlooker begins liking her after so much dilemma.
   But you are lucky that you have become the hero of Muslims in one shot. Congratulation Mr. Mayor.

   — Haider Ali
7. 7. August 13, 2010 11:20 am Link

   I’m on the mayor’s side on this and thought his speech was excellent. I do agree with Jamie, though, that the mayor is a master of making himself the center of attention.

   — Red
8. 8. August 13, 2010 11:26 am Link

   I disagree with Bloomberg on many things, but this principled and decent stand redeems him in my eyes.

   — ACW
9. 9. August 13, 2010 11:35 am Link

   Anyone else notice how most of the anti-mosque comments are riddled with mispellings, bad grammar, and questionable coherence?

   I’d say they must have cherry-picked, but looking at comments on related NYT articles seems to say that’s just par for the course.

   — Dave
10. 10. August 13, 2010 11:57 am Link

    I honestly have trouble believing that all of these negative email writers are New Yorkers. For example, 10003 should know that there’s a (very busy, locally famous, and peaceful) mosque just a few blocks north of his house; it seems strange to me that this person would think that building another mosque in Battery Park would lead to the “END of New York as we know it.” I simply don’t get it. Also: If you actually lived in New York, why wouldn’t you give your neighborhood, if for no other reason than to prove that you were actually a constituent? I just want to point out that there certainly seem to be alot of outside agitators upset over an essentially local issue. I actually live downtown and the vast majority of downtowners I know are fine with the project; how is my safety being threatened or the memory of victims of terrorists being disparaged by a peaceful Moslem group building a mosque? It doesn’t make any sense unless you actually think that all Moslems are terrorists.

    — Mike
11. 11. August 13, 2010 12:06 pm Link

    I took the time to listen to the arguments of both sides concerning the downtown mosque. I am a native New Yorker and a converted African American muslim (before 9/11). I write this because I was born in Harlem, I also cherish the landmarks of NYC. And,I too was Hurt and Horrified while watching the towers fall.
    At first I thought it would be a bad idea to build the mosque because it reminds me of the hatred, animosity and divisions that the 1960’s was known for, but if the intention is to build COMMUNICATION, PEACE & UNDERSTANDING amongst the three major religions Judaism, Christianity & Islam while advocating peace in America. Then it is essential that the mosque must be built and I am all for it, because just like Martin Luther King ( a christian) Michael Shwener (a jew) and Malcolm X (a muslim) whom had face adversity for the vision of peace, freedom & the pursuit of happiness for AMERICANS/Humanity, We as New Yorkers must at least give it a chance. I don’t say this as a Muslim but as a “New Yorker,”
    I must say with surprise that this Mayor may soon be ranked amongst these great visionary leaders. I write this in respect of his actions.

    — Gregory
12. 12. August 13, 2010 12:07 pm Link

    I guess he’d run into trouble if he were to set up that shop, pardon me, mosque, in let’s say, Tel Aviv. Overthere they don’t care if be bought his job

    — LanterneRouge
13. 13. August 13, 2010 12:27 pm Link

    Pollyannaish – 4 dictionary results

    Pol·ly·an·na   /ˌpɒliˈænə/ Show Spelled[pol-ee-an-uh] Show IPA
    –noun
    1
    . an excessively or blindly optimistic person.
    –adjective

    2. ( often lowercase ) Also, Pol·ly·an·na·ish. unreasonably or illogically optimistic: some pollyanna notions about world peace.

    Used in a sentence: Those who support the Mosque in lower Manhattan are pollyannaish.

    — etc

Mayor’s Stance on Muslim Center Has Deep Roots

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Governors Island on Aug. 3 after his speech in support of a plan to build a Muslim community center at a site that is two blocks from ground zero.

By MICHAEL BARBARO

Published: August 12, 2010

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.

What a Mosque Says About New York

What role does the city play in the American political imagination in the post-9/11 era?

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The site of the proposed Muslim community center.

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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.

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MIKE CHEEK INQUIRES...

Loyal reader Mike Cheek asks, and I respond:

MC: 

' A majority of those African American people who voted in California voted for Prop 8. Surely African Americans know something about civil rights? In the previous column you're calling people who vote such a way "idiots". So are all these black people idiots?" RS:  No, thank you, Black Americans are no more idiots than White Americans.  Nor any smarter.  The fact is that all Americans, of whatever shade or skin-tone have a duty to think.  Few of us actually do this, at least not in public, the way you and I are doing. MC:     Second, whether or not people are idiots, sticks in the mud, etc., whether or not this is a stupid law, once the majority votes in a law the *only* thing that matters legally is its constitutionality. Many of your arguments seem to be ad hominem. The states have the constitutional authority to legislate marriage. They always have. These are matters that the Founding Fathers left to the states, right or wrong. Blacks weren't free until the Civil War Amendments were passed. Women couldn't vote until the constitution was changed. Shouldn't have been that way, but until these amendments were passed the states could control those issues. Now they can't. Well, that's all I have time for. Regards. RS:  Sorry if so many of my arguments seem to be ad hominem, the logical fallacy of claiming that the argument must be bad because the person making the argument is bad.  We don't want to do that. The states have authority, traditionally, to legislate on certain matters.  These include matters reserved to the states by the Ninth Amendment (left unspecified) and matters coming under the so-called "police powers."  These include legislation on health and safety, morals and welfare. Uncle Sam needn't concern himself with these.  We've made a policy decision to leave these up to the states.  The big exception?  Federal territory, such as the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Puerto Rico.   Congress rules there, even in this quadripartite area.  Well and good.  Someone has to be responsible for maintaining standards.  Agreed? However, there is one little problem.  While the states may be free to legislate on matters coming under the police power, there are limits.  These are the more general guarantees, or protections, of the federal constitution.  The states may not deprive anyone of due process liberty, substantively or procedurally, or the equal protection of law.  So, even if states were entitled, before the Civil War Amendments (13, 14, 15) were ratified after 1865, to legislate on various matters, after the war they were limited such that their legislative, judicial, and executive acts must not violate the protections of the federal constitution, which includes the 1868 14th Amendment. The federal judge in San Francisco who, after a trial and the taking of evidence and argument from both sides, ruled that gays who wanted to marry other gays of the same sex had that right as a matter of equal protection of law, was only insuring that California, which had forbade same-sex marriage by the enactment by voters, in an initiative process, of Prop. 8, had violated the 14th Amendment.  By the Supremacy Clause, federal law trumps state law.  This is why the federal court ruling would be law binding on California.  If upheld in the states comprising the Ninth Circuit, the ruling would be law withing the circuit, meaning those states, should the issue arise on one of these states.  If upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, then the high court's ruling would be the law of the land. I appreciate the good query and thank Mike Cheek for going to the trouble of making it.  I'd rather have an intelligent challenge than a mindless agreement, although I always appreciate it when, on rare occasion, someone agrees.

THE PROBLEM IS THIS

According to our history, it has always been taken for granted that there are some people against whom we may discriminate.

Today, with the issue of gay-marriage, it appears to be gays, who may not serve openly as gays in the military.  See 'Don't ask, don't tell.'

And Muslims, who may not build a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero in New York.  Mayor Mike Bloomberg has decried this publicly.

Yesterday it was the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexicans, the Blacks.  Oh, and the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Pacific-Islanders... the list is never ending.

Who was doing the discriminating against these good people?  The earlier folks, the ones with the attitude, "I'm aboard, pull up the ladder."

Whenever a new disfavored group comes along, we think, "Of course they're disfavored, look at who they are and what they do!  They're so different from you and me."

Of course they're different.  They're typically foreign newcomers.  They get into trouble.  Their kids get into trouble.  They're seen as problems.  They want to move into our neighborhoods and build mosques where our dying churches now stand.

This is seen as an affront that reduces property values in our neighborhoods.

No wonder neighborhoods are so important in New York, and elsewhere.  They're our last bastion against the world.  Not in my backyard!

Against this we have the notion of fairness in America, the idea that this is exactly how one must not reason, and especially must not legislate against.

Yet we do it all the time, which makes for constant agitation in the form of vandalism, lawsuits, and discussion in the press.

So, in order to keep one's perspective, one must pay attention to the earlier battles, often embodied in law cases, but not always, in order to see what we've fought for as a nation in the past in order to know what is worth fighting for in the future.

There are several sources to inform our views in this regard: 

1. The Bible tells us how people we regard as our ancestors, morally, spiritually, and in some cases historically, fought these same battles and the lessons learned.  The Old Testament is a history of tribal warfare and learning to get along; and
2. The history books, which teach what we've done, so we can tell whether we want to do that again; and
3. The case-law, the decided cases of the U.S. Supreme Court where these conflicts have been adjudicated and reasons given to explain the outcome.
4. The world's literature, the great stories, poems, and art, which confront injustice and react to it.
5. The world's religions, which profess a morality that has to be carefully parsed to avoid injustice in the name of religion.
6. The world's great philosophies, which attempt to explain the world of reason and morality in an intelligible, accessible way.
7. The great universities of the world which seek to assemble the accumulated knowledge and teach what not to believe, thus eliminating the propaganda and turning the learning into wisdom.  My definition of wisdom is learning what not to believe.
8. Our parents.  When I'd ask Mom, Molly Sheridan, 93, whether there were any such thing as ghosts, she'd reply, "People used to believe in such things; we no longer do."  That did it for me.  My own son, Rick, upon seeing a shadow moving up the wall from the passing headlights of a car that was climbing the hill, the beams shining through the Venetian blinds, asked, "Dad, is there any such thing as ghosts?"  It was pretty spooky, as I was watching the lined lights and shadows creeping up the wall at the same time.  "No, Rick, those moving lines were caused by that car climbing the hill out back.  You see its headlights shining through the blinds?  We don't believe in ghosts.  People used to believe in ghosts, but not any more.  They look for the causes of strange sights."  That took care of Rick and it took care of me.  Thanks, Mom.
9. Science, the body of knowledge formed by observing, questioning, and providing reasoned answers.  This is a full-time job for a lot of people.  Others turn their backs on it.  Religious fundamentalists have a particularly difficult time coming to terms with modern science.  Darwin and Einstein are the emblematic examples of science appearing to conflict with religion.  Religion promises certainty, one of our more attractive lies.  Science promises doubt, even when it is fairly certain, as the next larger generalization, such as the geocentric theory of Copernicus and Galileo may cast doubt on Ptolemy.  Newton cast doubt on Aristotle, Einstein on Galileo.  Darwin cast doubt on God, which is a very big deal when it comes to Who created What.  All this is great fun, of course, making fun of the Flat-Earthers among us, but who is to say that we've got it entirely correct, either.  The best we can do is to go with the accepted wisdom and be willing to make mid-course corrections as we proceed down the road.  So much depends on whom we accept as our authority, our church or our branch of science.  Thanks, Mom.

As you can see, it takes a lot of work to get this right.

Science has debunked much of the idea of race, for instance.  Yet because we can clearly see, in many cases, differences among people that we still classify in our mind as racial, the theory persists, even though there is no clear dividing line between me and the next person or whatever color or ethnicity.  We're all apples in a barrel.

Many people have trouble seeing matters that way.

Pity.

WE LIKE IT LIKE THIS

This is such a crazy country.  We do things that would make any sane person blanch. We've committed terrible atrocities:  slavery, Jim Crow.  We've embarked on imperialist adventures.  We've invaded Canada and Mexico.  We stole Texas and California, Arizona and New Mexico, from Mexico.  Yet we keep trying to throw back the Mexicans who jump the border to get in on the better economy here. "So far from God, so close to us," the Mexicans lament, about their lumbering neighbor to the north.

We have people in this country who will take away your rights just because they thought of it.  What they think, to the limited extent that they do think, becomes, for them, real.  A 'figment of the imagination,' I call it.

Today's big news is that just because one thinks of it doesn't make it right.

We have people objecting to building a mosque and community center near Ground Zero in New York.  That would be Manhattan.  They also object to mosques and meeting halls in Brooklyn and Staten Island.  Churches are okay, synagogues maybe, but not mosques.  "9 -11" they protest.  So we shouldn't have a mosque because the perpetrators who murdered the 2,700+ people at the Trade Center that day were Muslim.  Yes, the Muslims have more than their fair share of crazies, but as George W. Bush said as soon as he'd recovered his wits, we're at war with terrorists, not Islam.  Islam claims 20% of the population of the world.  We'd better learn to get along.  We don't want to repeat the crusades and the Battles of Lepanto, Vienna, Roncesvalles, Poitier, etc., the European Christian-Muslim war against each other.  Yet we're repeating it, and not necessarily our fault, certainly not as we see it.

They're terrorizing us.

We're threatening their old paternalistic order.

Our culture threatens theirs. We have movies and music and dance.  They have roadside bombs.

Our women are free.  Theirs are whipped if they drive a car or go outside unveiled.

This is going to take a very long time to resolve.

In the meantime, we have the question as to how we're going to treat people in this country.

We say we treat everyone equally before the law, but is this really true?

It's an ideal, and like a lot of ideals, equality is an elusive goal.  Why?

Because we tend to like the people who seem most like us and to disfavor those who seem most different.

When I was starting out, still in law school, I used to go to criminal court in Manhattan.  I watched Judge Comerford, a quintessential Irishman, the Grand Marshall of the annual St. Patrick's Day parade sentence a black kid to jail for participating in a demonstration against racial discrimination.  Even then I could see the irony of an Irish judge who demonstrates against British rule in Ireland sentencing to jail a black kid demonstrating against white supremacy in America.  Comerford was blind to it.  The black kid wasn't.  I wasn't.

Some things one can see, and some things one cannot.

The way we arrange matters in the U.S. is that once rights to equality become established, with great difficulty, such as in racial matters, we don't want them lost by the acts of voters who succeed in pushing a measure through the legislature, the city council, the mayor or police force, etc.  Once we establish rights, we regard them as permanent and no longer subject to the whims of the voters.  We know ourselves, and our voters, all too well.

So we set up barriers against the loss of rights.  We put them into a strongbox called 'fundamental rights' and leave it to our courts, our judges, especially our federal judges, to keep on protecting them.  How?  By bringing cases, and asserting defenses based on those rights, and expecting them to be recognized and honored, even if we don't particularly like the people claiming them, as Judge Comerford, the Irishman, disfavored the black kid and his cause in 1964. 

A movement is now afoot to abolish 'birthright citizenship,' the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to all who are born in the U.S., diplomats' kids excepted, as they're not subject to our jurisdiction.  This movement is by white people against Mexicans who come north w/o benefit of clergy, i.e., sin papeles, w/o papers, wet.

Lawbreakers!  Therefore let's throw them out of the boat, back into the ocean, where they can sink or swim, we don't care if they drown.  We had no problem crossing the border into their country but we do have a problem letting them cross into ours.

Europe has eliminated passports for those in the European Community, the EC.  I wonder what it would be like to have an American Community, the AC, in which border-crossing would be as effortless.

Why haven't I seen this discussed before?

We'll have to give it some thought.

I know, there are economic and racial and class distinctions to be concerned about.  We've been cognizant of those since day one.  We didn't annex the Philippines or Cuba, largely for racial reasons, after the war of 1898 with Spain.  My Staten Island congressman, Ray, opposed admission of Hawaii to the union for racial reasons, circa 1957 or 1958.

Race was important back in the day.  Still is to a lot of people.  Not to me.  Race is an idea.  Ideas come and go.  Some are very poor indeed.  Dividing people by race is one of them. Ditto religion.  When you see the race and the religion before you see the humanity, you've started down the wrong road.  This is the problem the Constitution tries to deal with, meaning that judges have to wrestle with, as they contend with their own racial demons, the ideas that they may have grown up with but must now abandon in view of the greater wisdom embodied in the better of our cases.  This involves choices, because our (old) cases embody terrible white supremacist views that we've since discarded.  See Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) overruled by Brown v. Board (1954).

In order to make the Constitution work, we have to stop making exceptions to its protections for people we dislike.  By freeing them, we free ourselves.  This is the lesson of Lawrence v. Texas, the great modern freedom case, one that restates our older, better values, thanks to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.  The case referred to gays, but more importantly, referred to us, the people who don't comprise that minority.  White people are a lot better off now than when they were concerned with keeping black people down.  Likewise as to gays.  We're better off minding our own business and letting others get along with theirs.

Our great unwritten amendment is to mind your own business and leave people be, let them alone.

Justice Brandeis in Olmstead referred to the greatest right of all, the right to be let alone.

We need more of it.