To the Editor:
The attacks on 9/11 were perpetrated by religious intolerance and hatred toward the West. Nineteen men who considered us the infidel, and hated our lifestyles thought that gave them the right to do the inexcusable. Many people died that day who had every right to keep on living. The anger that people feel towards Islamic radicals is understandable.
And yet, as the President said today, the only to combat that kind of intolerance is not to embrace it ourselves, but to show the world that we can live without it.
Do we truly honor the memories of the people who died on 9/11 by the intolerance we exhibit towards fellow Americans who simply wish to exercise their right to worship in their own house? Is Ground Zero truly such a Holy of Holies that only people of a permitted faith can be allowed to even come near it?
To my mind the answer is no.
The only thing that opposition to Park51 is doing is substituting one form of intolerance for another.
None of us at this point can bring Osama bin-Laden to justice at gunpoint. Perhaps if we did, this could all be over. However, at this point we can do something else.
We can bring the intolerance that killed 3000 innocent lives to an end. We can end it here, in our hearts, in the way we behave toward our neighbors.
Already in Tennessee, there are a church and a mosque that have proven that this could be done.
The Heartsong Church in Memphis, has welcomed with open arms a new congregation called the Memphis Islamic Center. They have allowed this congregation to conduct services in the church until the mosque is up and running. Nobody is getting hurt, and two congregations are working together.
However, what the 9/11 survivors do not realize, is that even if they are truly trying to assuage their own sensitivities about Ground Zero, in doing so they have opened the barn door to any religious intolerance towards Muslims that has in fact arisen. Pastor Jones's dangerous Quran burning stunt may have been averted, but in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the site of a future Islamic community center has been vandalized. Tennessee is nowhere near Ground Zero, so 9/11 "sensitivity" does not apply. Prejudice does.
So we answer hate with hate. And what do we learn from that? That retaliation is okay? Well, "Do unto others as they have done unto you," is not the Golden Rule that I learned.
To fight intolerance, you must end intolerance. 9/11families should be the first to understand this. This country can no more tolerate a Timothy McVeigh than it can tolerate a Mohammed Atta. But if the 9/11 families persist in their dangerous narrow-mindedness, then all the Oklahoma Cities and Twin Towers in the world cannot teach them that hatred hurts, and that we can truly honor those who died on 9/11 by ending the thing that killed them.