Howard Dean, interviewed by David Goodman, host of the New York-based 77WABC Radio's "Goodman to Go" on wabcradio.com and a producer for The John Batchelor Show (audio provided by WABC):
Transcript:
GOODMAN: Governor, what's your position on the controversy surrounding the mosque near Ground Zero?
DEAN: I've got to believe there has to be a compromise here. This isn't about the rights of Muslims to have a worship...or Jews or Christians or anybody else to have a place to worship, or anyplace, or Ground Zero. This is something that we ought to be able to work out with people of good faith, and we have to understand that it is a real affront to people who lost their lives, including Muslims. That site doesn't belong to any particular religion, it belongs to all Americans, and all faiths, so I think a good, reasonable compromise could be worked out without violating the principle that people ought to be able to worship as they see fit.
GOODMAN: You're calling for a compromise, so are you calling for the mosque to be moved?
DEAN: Well, I think another site would be a better idea, again, but I'd look to do that with the cooperation of the people who are trying to build the mosque. I believe that the people who are trying to build the mosque are trying to do something that's good, but there's no point in starting off and trying to do something that's good if it's going to meet with an enormous resistance from a lot of folks.
This is a very difficult, delicate religious, and cultural issue. I think it's great to have mosques in American cities. There's a growing number of American Muslims. I think most of those Muslims are moderate and I hope that they'll have an influence on Islam throughout the world because Islam is really back in the 12th century in some of these countries like Iran and Afghanistan where they are stoning people to death and that can be fixed, but the way it's fixed is not by pushing Muslims away but by embracing them, and having them become just like every other American, Americans who happen to be Muslims.
So the way you do that is to integrate people into the fabric of the United States which is I think what this congregation wants to do. But I do think we ought to work out a compromise so that everybody is accommodated by this.
It's certainly disappointing to see Dean inject himself into the debate in this fashion, particularly with an argument as flawed as the one he's offering.
He's trying to split the baby by saying that his problem isn't with a mosque in particular, it's that he doesn't like the idea of putting any one religious institution at Ground Zero. Doing so, he says, "is a real affront to people who lost their lives" because "that site doesn't belong to any particular religion, it belongs to all Americans, and all faiths."
That line of reasoning fails miserably, however, when you consider that there already is a mosque in the same area and that there are at least three churches even closer to Ground Zero than the proposed Islamic community center and mosque, St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, Trinity Church, and St. Paul's Chapel.
Unless Dean is arguing that they have to move as well, what he's saying just doesn't make sense and represents a peculiar and unwarranted contribution to the debate.
Goodman told me that he reached out to Dean for the interview, which was conducted Wednesday afternoon. He says in addition to the discussion about the mosque, the interview also addressed other topics, including the midterm elections. Because this clip first surfaced on a video posted on Breitbart TV's YouTube channel, there's bound to be skepticism of whether it was edited or not, but Goodman told me that this portion of the interview was unedited.
(Update: Glenn Greenwald tells me that DFA vouches for the authenticity of the audio. Glenn's thoughts on Dean's disappointing comments are here. Update 2: Glenn wrote on his blog: "For those raising the issue that the tape of Dean was first released by Breitbart, and thus wondering whether it was distorted through editing, I emailed the Dean-affiliated Democracy for America, and received this reply from DFA official Charles Chamberlain: "It's not edited. It real." And just to bolster that: the website of WABC-77, the radio station on which Dean made these comments, has the same exact clip of Dean's comments on its own site. So clearly the clip is authentic and unedited.")
WABC is primarily a conservative format radio station, with a lineup that includes Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin.
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