NY Sun Editorial: Cordoba’s Opportunity

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The NY Sun's Seth Lipsky has authored an editorial in Monday's edition regarding the controversy over the Ground Zero mega-mosque. Mr Lipsky suggests that the Cordoba Initiative has an historic opportunity to demonstrate respect, understanding, and forbearance, a move which would diffuse a contentious situation :

The battle over a proposed $100 million mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero could well be at a turning point, the New York Times reported over the weekend. Its assessment was made after the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, came out in opposition to situating the site adjacent to the epicenter of the attacks on September 11, 2001. We telephoned Mr. Foxman to offer congratulations. It had to have been a hard call for him, with so many supporters of the project suggesting that the sole reason for opposing it had to be bigotry.

That suggestion has struck us from the start as a libel. There may be some bigots in opposition to the project, but they would be a small percentage, in our guess. We thought Mr. Foxman put it exactly right in suggesting that the fact that the Cordoba Initiative may win the right to build at the site where extremists acting in the name of Islam slew so many innocent people doesn’t make building such a center there the right thing to do. We mentioned to him that we’d been impressed with the way Sarah Palin articulated her early opposition to the project.

“She’s got seichel,” we remarked to Mr. Foxman. It was a reference to the Yiddish word that has no single-word English translation but means a combination of intelligence, wisdom, and common sense. Mrs. Palin’s short messages on Twitter were crafted as a call not on the government to prohibit the project but on the moderate Muslims themselves to — in her now classic formulation — “refudiate” the plan. Her call was for forbearance out of understanding of the special nature of the Ground Zero site in the city’s and the nation’s memory...

Read the rest of today's NY sun editorial here.

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP