I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I was perusing the Huffington Post and saw the headline, "Sarah Palin: Burning Quran ‘Antithetical To American Ideals.’" And then I got to the third paragraph:
"Book burning is antithetical to American ideals," she wrote. "People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation -- much like building a mosque at Ground Zero."
How clever. It reminded me of an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is telling Lisa about "unsults", or "insults disguised as compliments":
HOMER: Hey Lenny, it takes a lot of courage to wear suspenders when you’re not in the circus.
LENNY: Well, that’s very nice of you -- hey, are you saying my clothes are clownlike?
I couldn’t help but smile when I read the quote comparing burning the Qur’an to building a community center. Well played, Sarah.
I then saw that Glenn Beck had also come out and said that the planned Qur’an-burning was "just like the Ground Zero mosque plan." And then that Pastor Jones himself tried to draw an equivalency between the two by saying that he would cancel the Qur’an burning if the leaders of the Park51 Islamic Community Center in New York would move the building to another location.
So is this the new right-wing attack on Muslims? It’s kind of like an unsult. It’s a pointed criticism disguised as a defense.
I find it a little disheartening that on the night before Eid-ul-Fitr, one of the two biggest Muslim holidays of the year, I feel compelled to sit here and explain why building an Islamic community center is not the same as marking September 11th with a ritualized Qur'an burning ceremony, but apparently that is the state of affairs in post-racial America.
Let me first start by saying that I personally would not deny anyone the right to burn the Qur’an if they so chose. They have a right to do it, plain and simple. But as President Obama once said about the Park51 project, I am "not commenting on the wisdom" of hurling a heap of Qur’ans into a bonfire.
Of course at the time, I criticized Obama for his statement. But here’s the difference as I see it: Pastor Jones’s goal is to offend and hurt Muslims. There is no constructive reason for the proposed Qur’an-burning. Or to use Newt Gingrich’s analogy, it’s about as purposeful as "putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum." It is just an exercise in hate. Pastor Jones also has a right to shout racial slurs at anyone who doesn’t look like him, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right and decent thing to do. The First Amendment protects hate speech, but that doesn't make it wise.
The goal of the Park51 project, on the other hand, isn’t to offend or hurt anyone. The building will serve a constructive need in the community, both for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Yes, there are certainly people who are offended by it. But they are offended because on some level they are buying into the notion that all Muslims bear some level of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. They are not offended because the planners of the Park51 project set out to hurt their feelings. They are offended because of whatever lingering resentments they still have towards Muslims in the aftermath of September 11th.
In other words, the difference between Pastor Jones’s plan to burn Qur’ans and the proposal to build the Park51 Islamic Community Center is that the people who are offended by the Qur’an burning are offended because of Pastor Jones’s bigotry, while the people who are offended by the proposed construction of the Park51 project are offended because of their own inner bigotry. I would like to see more people in the press challenge the right-wing myth that the two are parallel situations.
That said, I adamantly support Pastor Jones’s right to burn Qur’ans as his own special way of propagating hate. But I respectfully question the wisdom of his decision to do so.
Eid Mubarak, everyone!