Not to build Cordoba House would be to stab the heart of America

Former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin maintains that allowing Cordoba House to be built would be to “stab” American hearts. But it is quite the reverse. To block Cordoba House would be a stab at the heart of America.

To block it, would undermine one of the fundamental founding principles of the U.S. It would be saying that there are different classes of Americans and that American Muslims are not real Americans. Cordoba House is the brainchild of an American cleric, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who a has strong track record of promoting interfaith understanding, the main purpose for building the Ground Zero mosque.

Maybe when it is built Gingrich and the former Alaskan governor – the one who thought Russia was visible from her house — could take some classes there so that they can appreciate the difference between Sufi and Wahhabi interpretations of the Koran – the Imam is a Sufi Muslim. The Rand Corporation recently advocated support for Sufism because of its “open, intellectual interpretation of Islam” and identified Sufism as a counter-weight to hardline Wahhabism, the Islamic stream the Taliban swim in. Writer and historian William Dalrymple sees the mass base of Sufi Islam in the subcontinent as perhaps the only bulwark against a creeping Talibanisation of Pakistan.

And, of course, the Taliban detest Sufism and have targeted Sufi adherents and their shrines, most recently as last month when twin suicide attacks were launched at the shrine of a Sufi saint in the Pakistani city of Lahore leaving 44 dead and 175 injured. So Gingrich and the Cordoba House critics are opposing our allies in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. That’s smart.

As far as Gingrich is concerned Cordoba House should not be built “so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. But diversity and tolerance are our strengths and the lack of them is Saudi Arabia’s weakness. When did we think it was okay to be intolerant if others are? When did we think it okay to hold the rights of American Muslims hostage to the behavior of Saudi Arabia or any other Muslim country?

The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights group, says Cordoba House should not be built because “this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right”. What is right is that the mosque goes ahead and that its mission of interfaith understanding and dialogue puts to shame those in the U.S. or overseas who want to sow division and conflict.

Jamie Dettmer a former political writer at the Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Washington Times, and the New York Sun. He blogs at jamiedettmer.com.