Why are Muslims being scapegoated?

What is happening to my country? One of the things that I was proud of after the 9/11 attacks was that Muslims in this country were not targeted by the U.S. government and that despite an increase in hate crimes against Muslims in the following year, there was not generally an upsurge of hatred against Muslims. I am sure that it was uncomfortable for Muslims then - I have certainly heard and read stories that do not shed a good light on the tolerance and acceptance of America for Muslims - but there was nothing like the groundswell of open hatred that has happened this year. No one was threatening to burn Qur'ans in the wake of 9/11. President Bush made a conspicuous point of saying that we should not blame all Muslims for the actions of a few. The Republican Party did not scapegoat Muslims en masse - perhaps because of the President's strongly expressed views.

Now, we have leaders of the Republican Party (for example, Newt Gingrich) openly engaging in anti-Muslim demagoguery that reminds me of the rhetoric historically used against Jews by anti-Semites. The former President Bush has not spoken up to reprove members of his party.

And ordinary Muslims and people from the Middle East are being turned into scapegoats for no reason whatsoever - as if they are to blame for all of the ills in American society.

The New York Times today published a very affecting article about the Muslim prayer room that used to exist at the World Trade Center before the 9/11 attacks: Muslim Prayer Room Was Part of Life at Twin Towers.

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

Moreover, the prayer room was not the only example of Muslim religious practice in or near the trade center. About three dozen Muslim staff members of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, used a stairwell between the 106th and 107th floors for their daily prayers.

Without enough time to walk to the closest mosque — Masjid Manhattan on Warren Street, about four blocks away — the waiters, chefs, banquet managers and others would lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.

During Ramadan, the Muslim employees brought their favorite foods from home, and at the end of the daylight fast shared their iftar meal in the restaurant’s employee cafeteria.

“Iftar was my best memory,” said Sekou Siby, 45, a chef originally from the Ivory Coast. “It was really special.”

Such memories have been overtaken, though, by others. Mr. Siby’s cousin and roommate, a chef named Abdoul-Karim Traoré, died at Windows on the World on Sept. 11, as did at least one other Muslim staff member, a banquet server named Shabir Ahmed from Bangladesh.

Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.

There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted salat al-Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.

“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr. Mamdouh, 49, said of the Park51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”

The people quoted in this article are good, honest people who deserve to live as securely as anyone else of any religion in this country. Why can't they?

Sima Schlossberg and her family in Jelgava

I just found another resource to research the Jews of Latvia - the Latvian Names Project. It is an attempt to do for all of the Jews of Latvia what Edward Anders and his co-workers were able to do for Liepaja - identify the fates of Jews who lived in Latvia before the Second World War. In 1935 the Latvian census recorded 93,479 Jews living in Latvia.

I looked up the name of my relative from Jelgava, Latvia - Sima Schlossberg. She came up on the list, and so did the names of her family - names that she doesn't refer to in her letters to my grandfather. Her sister's name was Miriam, and she was born on August 5, 1909. Sima herself was born on November 27, 1911. Their parents' names were Itzik Ruben and Esther Raschel. Only the possible fate of Miriam Schlossberg is mentioned - in the Riga Ghetto.

Looking back in correspondence from March and April of 2004 (with Miriam's daughter and with a cousin of Sima's), I discover, however, that I do know the fates of the people in the family. Sima escaped from Riga in 1941 with her parents first to Russia and then to Uzbekistan. Her sister Miriam was already living there because she had fled earlier. Sima's father Itzik died in 1942 from hunger. The two sisters and their mother survived the war. In 1942, Miriam married a man named Mikhail Golod, and her daughter was born in 1943 in Bukhara. They returned to Riga in 1945. Sima worked as a bookkeeper, and in 1955 was married to a man named Nohum Bruk and moved with him to St. Petersburg. She died there in 1988, leaving no children behind. Miriam died in 1980 and her mother Esther Raschel died in 1984 at the age of 100.

I'm going to have to write to the Latvian Names Project and give them information on all of these people.

Websites on journeys to Liepaja

A number of other people have made a similar journey to Liepaja to see where their ancestors lived. I just found a website created by Arturo and Marc Porzecanski about their visit to Liepaja (among other places in eastern Europe) in 2002: Our trip. The direct link to the page on Liepaja is: Our Trip to Liepaja.

Brian Friedman created the Welcome to Avaslan website about his family in eastern Europe, including Liepaja. Like me and the Porzecanskis, he found the house where his relatives in Liepaja had lived. He also has a page on the Killing Fields of Skede and photographs of the memorials there.

Are we losing our minds over Cordoba House?

Good grief! What is happening to this country? Howard Dean, of all people, says that Cordoba House should be built somewhere else. First Harry Reid and now Howard Dean. Have they lost their minds? This is nothing but the rankest political cynicism on their part. It seems that we have to rely on Republicans like Michael Bloomberg and Ted Olson to uphold any honor for this country. (And remember - Ted Olson lost his wife on the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11/01).

For a concurring opinion, see Peter Beinart, America has disgraced itself.

See also Michael Kinsley, Cordoba House, Charles Krauthammer, and the First Amendment.

He writes:

Muslim American citizens have a constitutional right to build a religious and cultural center anywhere in this country that Christians or Jews may build one. This is so clear and obvious that opponents of the planned Muslim center near Ground Zero usually concede or avoid the point. Then they say that the center should not be built at this location anyway. I guess they mean that these Muslims should give up their right voluntarily--or under duress.

And why do they say this? Well, the two obvious possibilities are bigotry and political opportunism. Maybe they associate this Muslim center with the perpetrators of 9/11. That would be bigotry, since the only real connection is that both are Islamic. Or maybe, in the case of Republican politicians and right-wing commentators, it is simply a matter of taking advantage of a political opportunity that has fallen into their laps.

Both of these reasons are fairly unattractive. Is there any reason to oppose the mosque that isn't bigoted, or demagogic, or unconstitutional? None that I've heard or read.

I also heard a good interview today with Irwin Kula at Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! (I am generally not a fan of Amy Goodman, but she sometimes has really good interviews with people the mainstream press doesn't pay attention to). He's a rabbi who is the head of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, also known as Clal. Here are some of his words:

RABBI IRWIN KULA: ....But I actually think the distinction between the right to build and the wisdom to build is a very, very, very dangerous distinction. It actually is pernicious, in a way. And I would have liked the President to say something like this: "I reject the premises of the question, because I know where that question is coming from. That question is coming from already a premise that there are these terrorists and these American Muslims, and they’re equivalent. And therefore, you’re asking me about the wisdom of American Muslims, who have been in New York for a long time in a mosque that was twenty—that was within twelve blocks for the last twenty-seven years. And the very fact of the question of the wisdom is actually to presume suspicion. And so, I reject the question. There’s only two—there’s only one wisdom I care about: the wisdom of the Constitution, I care about, and the wisdom of distinguishing between our genuine enemies and American citizens."

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Rabbi Kula, let me ask you about the statement of the Anti-Defamation League. It published a statement opposing the Park51 project, saying, quote, "Ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment," they said, "building an Islamic center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right." The ADL national director Abraham Foxman later defended this position on CNN.

ABRAHAM FOXMAN: Our position basically was an appeal to the imam and his supporters. If you want to heal, if you want to reconcile, is this the best place to do it? Should you do it in face—in the face of those who are saying to you, most of the victims, families of the victims, the responders, are saying, "Please don’t do it here. Please don’t do it in our cemetery." I believe, on this issue, the voices, the feelings, the emotions of the families of the victims of the responders, I think take precedent maybe over even the Mayor’s.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League. Rabbi Kula, your response?

RABBI IRWIN KULA: I mean, I’m just deeply disappointed, and I was, you know, quoted as saying I think the ADL should be ashamed of itself. I think the sad thing here is that Abe Foxman, since 9/11, has been one of the most important advocates to ensure that there was not defamation and not prejudice for Muslims, and the shame here is that he actually knows Daisy and knows Imam Feisal for a long time. And so, what I think what we really have here is tremendous political pressure.

AMY GOODMAN: And Daisy is Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal—

RABBI IRWIN KULA: And Daisy Khan, I’m sorry, yeah, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. And what we have here is tremendous political pressure. And I’m sure the stories are going to come out in the next months of the kinds of pressures that were put on somebody like Abe. And you can see the torturous kinds of statement that he had to make about the feelings, I mean, which—anguish, and I think we need to say something, that the anguish of people does not automatically translate into public policy. And sometimes anguish and really, really personal suffering needs to be disconnected from public policy, because anguish doesn’t allow us to abandon rationality. Anguish doesn’t allow us to abandon kind of first principles about what our country stands for.

And I had two friends who died in the World Trade Center. I was very involved in this for a long time. And to be able to use the sensitivities of people to really—to really stoke fear, there’s something very cynical about that. And there isn’t such a thing as the sensitivities of 9/11 families. There are a lot of different 9/11 families, and there are not only 9/11 families who lost directly people, but there are 9/11 families who were forced out of their homes for years in the neighborhood. So, what do we mean by the "the feelings of 9/11 families"? These are abstractions used to actually stoke fear in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about Imam Rauf, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is headed, by the way, on a State Department mission for two weeks to the Middle East.... How do you know him?

RABBI IRWIN KULA: Well, kind of in the interfaith work that we’ve been doing over the last decade. I was one of the readers of his book, What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision of Muslims in America. We were in Australia recently, at the World Parliament of World Religions. You know, in the interfaith world, there aren’t that many people working at the cutting edge of interfaith. That is what’s so crazy about this story. Imam Feisal has been at the cutting edge of whatever we mean by "moderate Islam." I mean, those words weren’t even used until very, very recently. This is a guy who, well before 9/11, he had two books that are very, very important—Islam: A Search for Meaning and Islam: A Sacred Law. These are things that people need to read. And it’s so easy to take one comment out of context. Any of us who have been in the media, any one of us who have been interviewed, you can take a statement and turn someone into a radical and turn someone into a terrorist. This guy has been at the highest echelons—State Department, FBI. He has spoken in the Aspen Institute. He’s spoken in Washington Cathedral. This is—I mean, it’s really crazy.

And that’s another part of the story that’s very scary. I mean, the community board, before anything, voted this 15-0. There was an amazing conversation. In fact, there was a request from—of Daisy Khan: Could you put a 9/11 memorial inside of the—of what is now Park51? And he said, "Of course. We’re planning on doing that." And it was—this got stoked by a very small group of people, and then—what I would say is an irresponsible national leadership, whether it’s Gingrich and Palin, and then a certain element of the media. And what’s very scary is, what was a local issue that was—that was a non-issue. This is a group of people, led by Imam Feisal, that has been ten blocks from there for the last twenty-seven years. This is a complete non-issue. And so, what it really says is, what’s going on in America?

What makes a place holy?

Charles Krauthammer begins his column decrying the building of the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center two blocks from the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan with these words:

A place is made sacred by a widespread belief that it was visited by the miraculous or the transcendent (Lourdes, the Temple Mount), by the presence there once of great nobility and sacrifice (Gettysburg), or by the blood of martyrs and the indescribable suffering of the innocent (Auschwitz).
When we speak of Ground Zero as hallowed ground, what we mean is that it belongs to those who suffered and died there -- and that such ownership obliges us, the living, to preserve the dignity and memory of the place, never allowing it to be forgotten, trivialized or misappropriated.

I understand why a place that people believe was "visited by the miraculous or the transcendent" is considered holy - Krauthammer might have given the example of the Ka'ba in Mecca as well - but why does the shedding of blood visit sanctity upon a place? He conflates several different circumstances here.

Gettysburg is the site of a historic battle of the American Civil War - those who died there were soldiers fighting for a cause they believed in. Thousands died in the fighting. For Krauthammer, and probably for many Americans, the place is made holy by the nobility and sacrifice of the soldiers who died there. But are all battlegrounds sacred? What about the battlegrounds of the First World War? Guadalcanal? The Ardennes Forest (where the Battle of the Bulge was fought)? Khe Sanh? Fallujah? The battlegrounds where Iranians and Iraqis fought each other in the 1980s?

Were those who died at Auschwitz martyrs? Emil Fackenheim has argued that before the Nazi assault upon Jews, Jewish martyrdom was something that could be chosen. Jews in the Middle Ages who were confronted with the choice of converting to Christianity or being killed, and chose to die, were in fact martyrs, witnessing to their devotion to God. (The English word martyr, taken from the Greek, originally referred to a witness).

But the Jews who were taken to Auschwitz were not confronted with any kind of a choice - they were killed. Nothing a Jew could do could dissuade the Nazis from killing him or her, since the Nazis thought of Jewishness as a racial, not a religious identity. Jews who had converted to Christianity were killed as Jews at Auschwitz (and other death camps). This is why Edith Stein died there, even though she had converted to Christianity and become a nun. Catholics regard her as a martyr for her faith, but I don't think many Jews would.

Krauthammer also says that Auschwitz was sanctified by the "indescribable suffering of the innocent." I certainly think it is more accurate to call those who died there innocent victims, rather than martyrs, since they had no choice about their fate.

And he also says that the World Trade Center site is "hallowed ground" because of the suffering and death of the victim on September 11, 2001. Again, these people were offered no choice - Osama bin Laden did not appear before them and give them the choice of martyrdom or conversion to Islam. They too were innocent victims.

So Krauthammer, and probably many other people, would consider the Gettysburg battleground, Auschwitz (and other concentration and death camps), and Ground Zero "hallowed ground" because of the deaths that occurred in those places.

But can death sanctify a place? In Jewish tradition, death is the greatest source of impurity. If one touches a dead human body, or enters a house or other enclosed space where there is a body, one becomes impure. In biblical times, this meant that the impure person could not offer a sacrifice in the Temple, or even enter the area of the Temple. According to the Torah, the ashes of the red heifer are needed to purify people from the taint of death. And since we no longer possess those ashes, we are all tainted with the impurity of the dead. There are still vestiges of this belief in Jewish ritual practices. Men who are kohanim generally do not enter graveyards. After visiting a graveyard, people will wash their hands. Jews place graveyards outside cities or other areas where people live. The fact that we are tainted with the impurity of the dead means, to many religious Jews, that we should not set foot on the Temple Mount, in accordance with the purity laws of the Torah, which state that the area is still holy.

Auschwitz, the other death camps, and many other places in Europe once occupied by the Nazis are full of mass graves of Jews and others murdered by the Nazis. Many of these places have, in fact, been forgotten. During the Soviet era, in the USSR, their character was distorted by Soviet memorial practices, which did not mention Jews as victims even when all or a majority were in fact Jews.

If the location of a mass grave has been suppressed or forgotten or distorted, is it still sacred ground? How would we know that it was sacred? Krauthammer says that Ground Zero is "hallowed ground" because it "belongs to those who suffered and died there." In this formulation, a forgotten mass grave somewhere in eastern Europe is hallowed ground because it belongs to those who died there. But how would the rest of us know this, if the memory has been lost?

This is something that has bothered me for a long time. It has always seemed to me that it would be right and proper that such a place - a mass grave, the site of a concentration camp or a massacre, places where great suffering and death have occurred - would announce itself, even if we did not know what happened there, so that when we came upon it we would know that something evil had happened there, that the land itself would be marked by a psychic scar perceptible to human beings who pass by. But this is not true. When people do not know that a particular place was where a massacre happened, or that a mass grave is located there, or that once there stood a concentration camp - the land itself does not cry out to us. Unlike the biblical story of Cain, the voice of our brothers' and sisters' blood does not cry out to us from the ground. A place cries out to us only when we know what happened there and mark it as a site of death.

But does mass death caused by great human evil make a place holy? When I think of what happened at the Skede dunes north of Liepaja, Latvia, along the Baltic Sea, it is hard for me to consider this place holy. For me, it is cursed. (Again, this is a human perception, since the ground itself does not cry out to us). What the Nazis and their collaborators did there (and in many other places) to innocent people are among the most dreadful things that human beings have ever done to other people. As Krauthammer says, the suffering of those who died there is indescribable. How could the wicked actions of the perpetrators or the horrible suffering of the innocent make this place holy?

When I was there a couple of weeks ago, I didn't know exactly where the mass graves are, nor does the monument there specify where they are (unlike the memorial at the Rumbula Forest in Riga). The place itself did not speak to me, only the inherited knowledge of what happened there, which has been preserved in human memory.

So is Ground Zero holy ground? Is it hallowed by the suffering and deaths of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack? Or is it cursed by the evil of the actions committed by the Al Qaeda hijackers? The answer depends upon one's notion of what makes a place holy. And what should then happen is determined by what one thinks is appropriate to a holy or a cursed place.

For me, the Islamic center that Imam Rauf proposes to build two blocks from the World Trade Center site does not violate the sanctity of Ground Zero - if in fact it is a holy place, sanctified by the deaths of the victims of the attacks. Aside from the constitutional question of whether the government has any right to prevent an Islamic center from being built there (which it does not, as long as it accords with the zoning regulations of New York City), the place that he proposes to build is intended to build bridges among people of different religions, not separate them or incite further hatred. It seems to me that Cordoba House is exactly the kind of center that should be built close to Ground Zero - because what we need to learn is how to live together with each other in peace.

Good news

It's nice to have some good political news, two days in a row - the California anti-gay marriage amendment overturned and Elena Kagan confirmed as Supreme Court Justice.

Let's not have a new Lebanese war

Hopefully this is NOT the beginning of new war: Two Lebanese soldiers killed in clash with IDF on northern border. The report is pretty confusing - it's hard to know what exactly happened.

Israel's northern border erupted on Tuesday as an Israel Defense Forces tank exchanged fire with a Lebanese army position, killing two Lebanese soldiers, in what appeared to be the most serious military confrontation since Israel's month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006.

The Lebanese army confirmed that two of its troops had been killed when Israeli forces fired on a vehicle in which they were traveling, setting it on fire and wounding another.

In Lebanon, security sources said that Israeli shells fired at the southern Lebanese border village of Aadassi hit a house, wounding two - a soldier and a civilian.

Lebanese troops responded with artillery fire, Lebanese press reports said, while eyewitnesses said fire had broken out in two buildings in the village.

"It started when the Israelis wanted to cut a tree down inside Lebanon," one security source in Lebanon said. "The Lebanese army fired warning shots at them and they responded by shelling.

Hebrew article, which seems to be more comprehensive: Exchanges of fire between the IDF and the Lebanese Army.

Ynet has more details:

Fire in the north: A day after rockets were fired at Eilat, loud explosions were reported on the northern border as Israeli and Lebanese forces engaged in massive exchanges of fire.

Security sources and witnesses in Lebanon said three Lebanese soldiers and a local journalist were killed in the clash.

The fire erupted after IDF soldiers performing routine operations in a border-area enclave within Israeli territory came under fire. Northern residents have reportedly been ordered to enter secured rooms and bomb shelters. Many locals informed Ynet of loud explosions heard in the region....

Lebanese sources also reported exchanges of fire between Israeli and Lebanese forces. According to one report, the Lebanese Army fired at an Israel tank.

The IDF fired four rockets that fell near a Lebanese army position in the village of Adaysseh and the Lebanese army fired back," a security official in the area told AFP. According to eyewitnesses, the shells hit a Lebaense house. He said one Lebanese soldier and one civilian were wounded.

A Lebanese army spokesman said the clashes erupted after Israeli soldiers attempted to uproot a tree on the Lebanese side of the border."The Israelis began to fire and we responded," he said....

Notably, the clash erupted after Israeli forces were operating in a border-area enclave in Israeli territory. The army recently said such operations were necessary in order to prevent Hezbollah from taking advantage of vulnerable spots in the region. "If we don't operate within the enclaves on the northern border, we will create a dangerous vacuum that Hezbollah might use," a senior officer at the northern border said recently.