This is a post by Moriel Rothman, the president of J Street U and a senior at Middlebury College.
The recent rise in American Islamophobia has taken many forms. This past May, someone attempted to bomb a Florida mosque in which 60 worshippers were praying. Perhaps more disturbing than the specific event itself was the failure of most major media sources to report the incident. That said, there has been no dearth of popular media coverage of the Park51 Community Center/”The Ground Zero Mosque.” The community center, according to a recent New York Times Op-Ed by Imam Faisal Rauf, is being built with the explicit goal of cultivating “understanding among all religions and cultures” and will include “separate prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, Jews and men and women of other faiths.”
Despite the project’s goals of fostering tolerance, the opposition to the project has been vitriolic and feverish. Criticism of the project–which is neither located on Ground Zero nor even primarily a mosque–has come from many angles, but the most troubling to me as an American Jew has been opposition to the mosque from Jewish groups and individuals, and the failure of other Jewish groups and individuals to come out strongly in support of the project. We as Jews know all too well what it means to be a persecuted minority, and it is thus our moral obligation to stand up for any other minority group experiencing persecution.
Every year, on the Shabbat that falls between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, Jews in the Diaspora read the Torah portion Haazinu. “Remember the days of old,” we are commanded. “Consider the years of ages past.” As a Jew, I can remember both personally and collectively the sting of discrimination, from my grandfather being turned away from university programs because they had “met their Jewish quota” to the group of kids in my Ohio high school who started using the word “Jew” as a synonym for “cheap” or simply “bad.” Through consideration of these memories, it becomes clear to me that I must speak out against discrimination against any and all religious and ethnic minorities in this country, that I must speak out against the rise in Islamophobia over recent months in the United States.
It is true that the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks were all Muslims. And it is also true that the Cordoba House was proposed by Muslims as a space for Muslim community. That is, however, the only link between those responsible for the tragedy of September 11th and those proposing the construction of a community center in downtown Manhattan that will promote religious tolerance and understanding: both groups consisted or consist of Muslims. Blaming or even associating the Muslims affiliated with the Park51 Community Center for the violent and despicable actions of a small number of their coreligionists would be like blaming all Jews for the actions of the horrific incident in 1994 in which a Jewish fanatic named Baruch Goldstein opened fire on peaceful Muslim worshipers in the West Bank city of Hebron.
Indeed, while on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the epicenter of tension and mistrust between Jews and Muslims, it should be noted that contemporaneous to the debate raging over the Park51 project, American-brokered peace talks have restarted between Israelis and Palestinians. One of the major features of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been blaming, harming, targeting or mistrusting an entire group based on the wrongs of a small number of that group’s members. The American government has stepped in, once again, and is asking the leaders of both sides to move away from suspicion and animosity and toward a future based on mutual recognition of the other side’s suffering: in other words, a remembrance and a consideration of the past. This kind of recognition would not be a panacea, but it is an integral component of successful negotiations. America’s ability to push other groups towards tolerance and respect is deeply compromised when we allow ourselves are suffer so blatantly from the same ills of bigotry and intolerance.
In light of the month containing Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, which is supposed to be a time of repentance, in light of remembering and considering what it means to be persecuted and in light of cautious hope for the success of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, we as Jewish Americans, along with non-Jewish Americans, must speak out against Islamophobia and in favor of the Park51 Community Center. May this new year bring increased peace, justice, tolerance and understanding to all of us, in America and in the world.
