There is plenty of ugliness in the acrimonious debate around the building of the Muslim community center near Ground Zero in New York City. New Gingrich has topped it all this morning when he compared Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf and other organizers of the center to Nazis putting up a sign near the Holocaust museum. This comes after a concerted campaign of systematic distortions about the history and place of Muslims in New York City and in America and the real motives behind a bridge-building initiative that is Park 51. I can certainly appreciate the raw pain of the families of the victims of 9/11 and I respect their opposition to building this center, but an important line in this debate between Islam and "Islamic terror" which was thin enough (even the neocons of the Bush era worked hard never to cross) has been shattered. What was fringe thinking a few months ago is now endorsed by high-profile politicians and pundits. We hear accusations from former and current congressmen, and maybe future presidential candidates, of stealth Jihad, triumphal Islam, creeping sharia law, and many other unsubstantiated epithets. If we were to believe these harbingers of doom, you might think that an Islamic army (there is no such thing) is waiting on the Hudson on high alert to take over America. This is complete nonsense bordering on paranoia, and the media have to bear this out instead of looking for what the crazy uncle on both sides of the debate will say at the dinner table.



One thing is clear: republicans seem convinced they've found a good trap for democrats in November's elections. This has been a calculated move on the part of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich and some other republicans to sustain the controversy through some vitriolic language, ads, and wild associations until President Obama is forced to publicly comment on the matter. We know what happened when he did last week: more accusations of appeasing Islam and siding with the terrorists, prompting his administration to clarify its position and distance itself from the project. What kind of public discourse is this, full of linguistic traps and devoid of any substance? I'm not even talking about Glenn Beck or Pamela Geller or any of those theatrical media buffoons. This is very much mainstream America which should be demanding a much more substantive and responsible debate of public issues both from the media and from their own politicians who prefer symbolic issues over real pressing problems they apparently can't fix.

As I'm finishing this post, I'm looking at a news item on my TweetDeck which reports that the organizers of the Muslim Center may have given up their project and agreed to move it somewhere else. I can't confirm this news yet,, but I think that is a painfully good idea overall. The whole controversy was going to be employed as a scare tactic to get people more afraid of Islam and even more suspicious of American Muslims. Apparently, the Republican Party was preparing a hostile television campaign on the matter to be released in a few days (others have already made vicious videos). I will never vote for any political party which sets its primary agenda around an issue like this, particularly at a time when there are far more important issues that require immediate and intelligent attention.