Here’s the thing: I totally get why someone would find it tasteless. But they aren’t getting preferential treatment - they own that land and have the proper zoning and stuff. Due process and property laws don’t fall under “preferential treatment”.
I think the gut instinct to say “it’s offensive” stems from the idea that 9/11 was Islam’s fault. Islam is not a perfect religion with zero moral qualms, but the people who perpetrated 9/11 were extremists who hated America. Religion was just an excuse.
I think it is distasteful to build a mosque there, but not because 9/11 was a uniquely Islamic crime. I think it would be distasteful to build a christian church there. The 9/11 bombers did not use religion as an “excuse”; the 9/11 planners used religion, but not as anything so trivial as an excuse. They used the religious fanaticism of others as a weapon, just as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld used the religious fanaticism of their own flag-waving citizens to bludgeon the rest of their frightened citizenry in order to pass a Patriot Act and enrich themselves via the illegal invasion of an oil state.
The use of that word, “excuse” (not at all limited to this post) is merely an attempt to downplay the role of religion in the events of September 11th, 2001. The bottom line is that religion is so much more than an excuse. In truth, it is a deadly weapon; it is an ancient philosophical system based on unreality and the circumnavigation of reason, and as such it is not merely open to abuse by a handful of cynical fanatics, but institutionally open to abuse by anyone who holds a position of power in a religious order. We are not dealing here with the case of a gaggle of evil geniuses who found a way to pervert the true nature of religion. We are not talking about cartoon Bond villians. Religion enshrines the notion of blind obedience as a virtue, it romanticizes hierarchical structures, it diminishes the value of individual will even as it seeks to convince the individual that he or she is special and valued. The purpose of brainwashing is to infantilize the subject, to remove their objectivity and ethical sense, then to rebuild them anew. Religion does this by making God the master of the universe, he who must be obeyed, then it introduces the concept that God loves you and has a plan for you. At this point, when the adept has accepted that God is in charge and His plan is beyond the individuals’ ken, it is a relatively simple task to convince the adept that funding an evangelist’s extravagant lifestyle is all part of God’s great plan, that giving your body to a priest is the Lord’s work and you mustn’t tell anybody or even that flying a plane into a building is what the almighty wants from you.
Without religion, humanity would find other means to brainwash and exploit others; fascism and communism both filled a void for a time. Religious apologists delight in (falsely) proclaiming that Hitler was an atheist and that Stalinism was godless, but these truisms miss the vitally important point that political extremism operates as a religion. It is not the holy books that are dangerous, but the psychological states promoted by the institutions that grow up around them. Just as it is perfectly possible to read Greek myth without sacrificing a bull to Zeus, just as it is possible to read Das Kapital without wishing to transport undesirables to gulags or to read Mein Kampf without developing a pathological hatred of Jews, so it is possible to read the bible or the Koran as literature, as a treasure house of ideas. The danger lies not in being inspired by the writing, but in placing that writing on an unwarranted pedestal, on signing up to a culture or subculture that has attached itself to it and claims a definitive interpretation of it, in special pleading on that texts’ behalf.
That religion is not the only weapon available to such monsters as Al Qaeda does not change the fact that religion is a weapon. We do not stop trying to keep guns out of the hands of lunatics because without guns they would only kill people with knives or baseball bats. Similarly we should not go easy on religion just because lunatics would use politics or patriotism or racial supremacy in its absence. We don’t forgive a murderer just because other people kill too, and we shouldn’t forgive venerated pipe dreams just because other pipe dreams exist.
Islam is no different to any other religion. It brings solace to many, but that comfort and joy comes at a heavy cost; the subjugation of women for centuries, the depressing history of so-called holy war, the entrenchment of class division and homophobia, the reduction of human beings to social and sexual charicatures, the murder of heretics and unbelievers. To place the comfort and joy you derive from your chosen creed above or somehow separate from the many crimes of that creed is immoral and solipsistic, as immoral and solipsistic as a communist excusing Stalin or a neo-nazi denying the holocaust.
9/11 is a minor event in the criminal history of religion. That it is merely a minor event in that history should prompt a pregnant pause for thought among religious apologists, but sadly it does not. We all know the old adage, fail to learn the lessons of history and you are doomed to repeat them. To frame 9/11 as an aberration where religion was merely an excuse, or to attempt to let religion off the hook entirely, is a failure to learn a lesson that dooms the human race to another century of pious atrocity.
A fitting tribute to those who lost their lives that day would not be a mosque or a church, but a library. As a species we can only hope to withstand the virus of fanaticism by studying it, by learning about it and about ourselves. We will never master this germ of unreason by the dubious power of prayer.
