That Unfathomable Mosque Thingy

Drexel Hill resident Sid Holmes finds opposition to the Ground Zero mosque to be "unfathomable."

In an Op-Ed piece in today's paper, Holmes, the communications director for a children's health advocacy group, attempts to compare the sacrifice of Muslim Americans to that of African Americans throughout the nation's history.

His argument goes like this: American blacks were once denied the same rights as other citizens in this country even while serving in the military to protect it from harm. The same is now true of Muslim Americans, specifically a 20-year-old American soldier named Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, who died fighting for this country Iraq. The African American standard bearer for Holmes argument is a Lt. Norma Greene, who in 1942 was beaten by police down South for refusing to exit a whites-only bus.

It is pretty poor analogy. Greene was the victim of old Jim Crow laws in the aftermath of slavery that this country fought hard to overcome. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan was no such victim. He was a casualty of war.

It is America that was vicitimized on 9/11 in the name Islamic jihadism just nine years ago.

Writes Holmes: "

...it is shameful that our president, on the eve of the 9/11 commemoration, was placed in the unfortunate position of chiding our countrymen with the understanding that Muslims are indeed serving in our nation’s military – in Afghanistan and Iraq, no less – and that “part of honoring their service is making sure that they understand that we don’t differentiate between them and us. It’s just us.”

Yes, our poor president having to explain such things to the great American boobacracy.

Does Mr. Holmes actually believe there are a significant number of our citizens who don't know that Muslim-American are allowed to serve - and do serve - in our armed forces? Or know that among the people killed on 9/11 there were some muslims?

The controversy over the $100 million mosque and Islamic community center was generated mostly by people who lost loved ones in the attack on New York City. These people, and the Americans who joined them in opposition to what can be reasonably perceived as act of Islamic triumphalism in the shadow of the World Trade Center, don't need to be "chided," by the President of the United States or anyone else. Neither do they need to be brow-beaten and called religious "bigots" by the supporters of the project.

At least, and to his credit, Mr. Holmes avoided doing that. But his attempt to compare the experience of African Americans in the deep South during WWII with that of Muslim Americans in modern America is weak in the extreme.

It is, nevertheless, perfectly fathomable as an example of liberal thinking and argument.