Ebert On Park51

By Isaac Butler

(alternate post title: Against Reasonableness)

Roger Ebert, in his new position as Mute Sage of American Culture, pens a pretty excellent column called "Ten Things I Know About The Mosque".  You can read it here, it's great. Except he gets one thing really, really wrong:

3. The choice of location shows flawed judgment on the part of its imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf. He undoubtedly knows that now, and I expect his project to be relocated. The imam would be prudent to chose another location, because the far right wing has seized on the issue as an occasion for fanning hatred against Muslims. It has also narrowly reframed the project as a mosque, rather than a community center with a prayer room, which is what it would be. To oppose it on the grounds that it is Muslim is religious prejudice and nothing else. The Muslims who attacked the World Trade Center are not the Muslims who are building the center.

The reasoning here is kind of tortured into an accidental blame-the-victim post.  The Park51 location choice is flawed because the Right Wing is using it to whip up prejudiced anti-Muslim hysteria.  But that shows flawed judgement on... Feisal Abdul Rauf's part?  That doesn't make a lot of sense.  Ebert is saying here that it was flawed because a bunch of hysterical people have shouted loud enough that it was wrong.  But the burden then falls on the hysterical reactors, not on Imam Rauf, doesn't it?

This also gets at something that's been bugging me lately, and that's the liberal tendency to concede major parts of an argument in an effort to appear "reasonable".  I think there's something hardwired into our DNA that makes us do this.  A good example is in the abortion debate. I know plenty of people who don't think abortions are particularly tragic or unseemly, but just a fact of life but still feel the need to nod their heads reasonably and stroke their beards and say "well, yes, of course abortion is tragic, but it should still be left up to the woman and her doctor to decide". 

We preemptively give up this ground, I think, because we want to be understanding genuinely and we think if we extent our hand, it will be shaken. But you can be understanding of and respectful of someone's viewpoint without having to concede your own.

Lately, with the whole Park51 Project, the liberal thing to concede is that it is in poor taste to build a Muslim community center four blocks away from the WTC site.  Let us set aside, of r a moment, the rank stupidity of claiming that anything four blocks away from Ground Zero could be called "The Ground Zero Anything" (which, come on, that's fucking idiotic) and let's just focus on this bad taste concession.  What that concedes is that there is something distasteful on a DNA level about Islam that links it in all of its forms, whether moderate or fundamentalist, with terrorism. This is given over so that the oh so reasonable liberal can then say "but religious freedom is a fundamental american value".

Why would you ever want to make that concession, though? That's the very thing we should be arguing about in the first place. We seem to want to have an argument about civics, but that sidesteps what we should be talking about, namely that there's nothing in bad taste about Park51, that innocent muslims died in the WTC attacks too, and that our war is with a handful of specific terrorist organizations, not the Islamic faith. We should be able to have that argument respectfully without needing to concede 50% of our point at the outset.

Comments

[Jihad Punk 77]

thank you. I saw a post via AngryAsianMan about how Japanese Americans got arrested for building Buddhist shrines and the similarities with Park 51 today:

http://www.theworld.org/2010/08/25/buddhism-and-islam-in-america/

[Ian Thal]

Ebert is free to decide for himself what he regards to be in "good taste" and what he regards to be in "bad taste." Our dedication to freedom of speech, press, and religion, has nothing to do with agreeing with or liking the speech, press, or religions of others, it's that we tolerate those with whom we disagree and acknowledge their rights to disagree with us.

Most New Yorkers have decided that Park51 is something they will accept on that location, and even if they hadn't, there's issues of both the Freedom of Religion, Due Process, and the Equal Protection Clause.

As to the "pick another location" issue. Keep in mind Pope John Paul II had the Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz removed because he understood it to be a hinderance to improved relations between Christians and Jews, something about which he was greatly concerned. 9/11 certainly was not as big as a full-on genocide, but it is an example that sometimes working towards co-existence requires some compromise regarding the other's sensitivities.

So Ebert is perfectly entitled to defend free exercise of religion and still find certain actions in "bad taste." Ebert is just trying to treat the controversy with some degree of nuance and realpolitik: i.e. inalienable rights that we all have in America and the sensitivities of the many different communities that live in America. One is an issue of law (which is pretty unambiguous in this case), and the other is an issue of ethics (which is not so clear-cut.)

[isaac]

I think I'm equally entitled to say he's wrong about it. While the convent at Auschwitz has been raised many times by Park51 opponents, the analogy doesn't even make cursory sense. 9/11 wasn't the holocaust. Park 51 will not be built for the purpose of praying for the souls of people who died in 9/11 regardless of their faith, and Park 51 is being built nowhere near (by NYC standards) the ground zero location. It's a not-mosque that's not-at-ground-zero, which is very different from a convent built at Auschwitz.

[Ian Thal]

Yes Isaac, and I'm inclined to agree on precisely those grounds (notice that I already stated that the comparison has very limited applicability), but I'm not about to lump those who are genuinely sensitive on this issue with the bigots who take their marching orders from Fox News.

As I said, we live in the United States, so the principles of religious freedom and equal protection under the law trumps community sensitivity in the courtroom-- though if one is trying to build bridges to other communities, sometimes some sensitivity is in order.