By IRSHAD MANJI

Debates across America over Islamic centers and mosques won’t soon be resolved. But this summer’s hysteria is giving the upper hand to one nefarious force: the culture of offense.

Election-year politics, ratings-hungry media and deep personal fear foment raw emotion. In such an environment, « I’m offended » takes on the stature of a substantive argument. Too many Americans are mistaking feeling for thinking.

That’s true not just among antimosque crusaders, but also among warriors for tolerance. Consider Bob, who feels so offended by antimosque activists in his state of Tennessee that these feelings alone drive him to support more mosques—without prior thought to what, exactly, he’s supporting. « I found local citizens to be intolerant and un-American, » Bob tells me over email. « So as a gesture of tolerance and Americanism, I donated to the mosque building fund. »

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Associated PressA demonstration outside of Park51 last week.

Before pledging a penny, Bob should have asked the imam: « Where will the men’s side of this mosque be? » It’s a discreet way of discerning whether the project will replicate segregation, and thus whether the mosque will wind up bolstering the intolerant behavior that Bob can’t abide.

I am not saying that Bob should cast his lot with antimosque demonstrators. I am simply saying he should not give them the power to commandeer his brain by hijacking his heart.

Now apply this point to Park51, the proposed multistory Islamic community center and prayer space to be erected at the edge of Ground Zero. Let me be blunt about my own emotions: I am offended by its proximity to the site of 9/11. I am also disappointed that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf—who is not an Islamist—has nonetheless played crass politics unbecoming of a man of dialogue.

So far, the imam has rebuffed accusations of insensitivity. Yet he made those very accusations about the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. In a February 2006 press release, Imam Rauf announced that he was « appalled » by the drawings. He called it « willful fomentation » and « gratuitous » to republish them throughout Europe. In the following weeks, almost no U.S. newspaper printed the caricatures.

Three years later, it is the imam who the majority of Americans believe is engaging in « willful fomentation. » Yet his retinue has not publicly acknowledged that the feelings of these « appalled » Americans parallel how moderate Muslims such as Imam Rauf felt during the cartoon debacle.

But for all the restless offense I feel, I step back and force myself to think. As I wrestle with the issues, I realize that an opportunity exists for something more constructive than anger.

Namely, accountability. If Park51 gets built, thanks to its provocative location the nation will scrutinize what takes place inside. Americans have the opportunity right now to be clear about the civic values expected from any Islam practiced at the site.

That means setting aside bombast and asking the imam questions born of the highest American ideals: individual dignity and pluralism of ideas.

• Will the swimming pool at Park51 be segregated between men and women at any time of the day or night?

• May women lead congregational prayers any day of the week?

• Will Jews and Christians, fellow People of the Book, be able to use the prayer sanctuary for their services just as Muslims share prayer space with Christians and Jews in the Pentagon? (Spare me the technocratic argument that the Pentagon is a governmental, not private, building. Park51 may be private in the legal sense but is a public symbol par excellence.)

• What will be taught about homosexuals? About agnostics? About atheists? About apostasy?

• Where does one sign up for advance tickets to Salman Rushdie’s lecture at Park51?

These questions aren’t gratuitous. I, for one, remain haunted by the 300 Muslims chanting « Death to Rushdie » on Sept. 10, 2001. They gathered outside a theater in Houston, Texas, to protest a visit by the novelist—the target of a 1989 death warrant from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. One Muslim told reporters, « The fatwa is valid even if the Iranian government no longer supports it. » Another warned, « We have not forgotten about him and his evil act. » That man affiliated himself with Houston’s Islamic Education Center. Education or indoctrination? The question deserves an honest response.

Through engagement that emphasizes questions like these, Americans of all faiths and no faith at all may very well make the colorful neighborhood around Ground Zero host to the most transparent, most democratic, most modern Islam—ever.

As a proud New Yorker as well as a reformist Muslim, I think, and not just feel, that this would be a fitting salute to the victims of 9/11. It would turn the tables on the freedom-hating culture of al Qaeda. And it would subvert the liberty-lashing culture of offense.

Ms. Manji, a professor of leadership at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, is at work on a new book about how to advance liberal reform within Islam.

Moral Myopia at Ground Zero
Supporters of the mosque fail to see its true significance.

Sacrilege at Ground Zero
Even Mayor Bloomberg acknowledges that the rules are different when it comes to sacred places.

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.

That’s why Disney’s early ’90s proposal to build an American history theme park near Manassas Battlefield was defeated by a broad coalition fearing vulgarization of the Civil War (and wiser than me; at the time I obtusely saw little harm in the venture). It’s why the commercial viewing tower built right on the border of Gettysburg was taken down by the Park Service. It’s why, while no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up at Pearl Harbor would be offensive.

And why Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He was in no way devaluing their heartfelt mission to pray for the souls of the dead. He was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place, it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.

Even New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who denounced opponents of the proposed 15-story mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero as tramplers on religious freedom, asked the mosque organizers “to show some special sensitivity to the situation.” Yet, as Rich Lowry pointedly noted, the government has no business telling churches how to conduct their business, shape their message, or show “special sensitivity” to anyone about anything. Bloomberg was thereby inadvertently conceding the claim of those he excoriates for opposing the mosque, namely, that Ground Zero is indeed unlike any other place and, therefore, unique criteria govern what can be done there.

Bloomberg’s implication is clear: If the proposed mosque were controlled by “insensitive” Islamist radicals either excusing or celebrating 9/11, he would not support its construction.

But then, why not? By the mayor’s own expansive view of religious freedom, by what right do we dictate the message of any mosque? Moreover, as a practical matter, there’s no guarantee this couldn’t happen in the future. Religious institutions in this country are autonomous. Who is to say that the mosque won’t one day hire an Anwar al-Awlaki — spiritual mentor to the Fort Hood shooter and the Christmas Day bomber, and one-time imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 terrorists?

An Awlaki preaching in Virginia is a security problem. An Awlaki preaching at Ground Zero is a sacrilege.

Location matters. Especially this location. Ground Zero is the site of the greatest mass murder in American history — perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.

Of course that strain represents only a minority of Muslims. Islam is no more intrinsically Islamist than present-day Germany is Nazi — yet despite contemporary Germany’s innocence, no German of good will would even think of proposing a German cultural center at, say, Treblinka.

Which makes you wonder about the good will behind Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s proposal. This is a man who has called U.S. policy “an accessory to the crime” of 9/11 and, when recently asked whether Hamas is a terrorist organization, replied, “I’m not a politician. . . . The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.”

America is a free country where you can build whatever you want — but not anywhere. That’s why we have zoning laws. No liquor store near a school, no strip malls where they offend local sensibilities, and, if your house doesn’t meet community architectural codes, you cannot build at all.

These restrictions are for reasons of aesthetics. Others are for more profound reasons of common decency and respect for the sacred. No commercial tower over Gettysburg, no convent at Auschwitz — and no mosque at Ground Zero.

Build it anywhere but there.

The governor of New York offered to help find land to build the mosque elsewhere. A mosque really seeking to build bridges, Rauf’s ostensible hope for the structure, would accept the offer.

You are not supposed to observe that Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and ’40s.

You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.

And you are not supposed to mention that, by inducing a variety of journalists and intellectuals to maintain a discreet and respectful silence on these awkward matters, the Islamist preachers and ideologues have succeeded in imposing on the rest of us their own categories of analysis.

Or so I have argued in my recent book, « The Flight of the Intellectuals. » But am I right? I glance with pleasure at some harsh reviews, convinced that here, in the worst of them, is my best confirmation.

No one disputes that the Nazis collaborated with several Islamist leaders. Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, orated over Radio Berlin to the Middle East. The mufti’s strongest supporter in the region was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna, too, spoke well of Hitler. But there is no consensus on how to interpret those old alliances and their legacy today.

Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic philosopher at Oxford, is Banna’s grandson, and he argues that his grandfather was an upstanding democrat. In Mr. Ramadan’s interpretation, everything the Islamists did in the past ought to be viewed sympathetically in, as Mr. Ramadan says, « context »—as logical expressions of anticolonial geopolitics, and nothing more. Reviews in Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and the New Yorker—the principal critics of my book—have just now spun variations on Mr. Ramadan’s interpretation.

The piece in Foreign Affairs insists that, to the mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler was merely a « convenient ally, » and it is « ludicrous » to imagine a deeper sort of alliance. Those in the National Interest and the New Yorker add that, in the New Yorker’s phrase, « unlikely alliances » with Nazis were common among anticolonialists.

The articles point to some of Gandhi’s comrades, and to a faction of the Irish Republican Army, and even to a lone dimwitted Zionist militant back in 1940, who believed for a moment that Hitler could be an ally against the British. But these various efforts to minimize the significance of the Nazi-Islamist alliance ignore a mountain of documentary evidence, some of it discovered last year in the State Department archives by historian Jeffrey Herf, revealing links that are genuinely profound.

« Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion, » said the mufti of Jerusalem on Radio Berlin in 1944. And the mufti’s rhetoric goes on echoing today in major Islamist manifestos such as the Hamas charter and in the popular television oratory of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a revered scholar in the eyes of Tariq Ramadan: « Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one. » Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and the New Yorker have expended nearly 12,000 words in criticizing « Flight of the Intellectuals. » And yet, though the book hinges on a series of such genocidal quotations, not one of those journals has found sufficient space to reproduce even a single phrase.

Why not? It is because a few Hitlerian quotations from Islamist leaders would make everything else in those magazine essays look ridiculous—the argument in the Foreign Affairs review, for instance, that Qaradawi ought to be viewed as a crowd-pleasing champion of « centrism, » and Hamas merits praise as a « moderate » movement and a « firewall against radicalization. »

The New Yorker is the only one of these magazines to reflect even briefly on anti-Semitism. But it does so by glancing away from my own book and, instead, chastising Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch champion of liberal values. In the New Yorker’s estimation, Hirsi Ali’s admiration of the philosopher Voltaire displays an ignorant failure on her part to recognize that, hundreds of years ago, even the greatest of liberals thought poorly of the Jews. And Ms. Hirsi Ali’s denunciations of women’s oppression in the Muslim immigrant districts of present-day London displays a failure to recognize that, long ago, immigrant Jews suffered oppression in those same districts.

But this reeks of bad faith. Ms. Hirsi Ali is one of the world’s most eloquent enemies of the Islamist movement. She makes a point of singling out Islamist anti-Semitism. And the anti-Semites have singled her out in return.

Six years ago, an Islamist fanatic murdered Ms. Hirsi Ali’s filmmaking colleague, Theo van Gogh, and left behind a death threat, pinned with a dagger to the dead man’s torso, denouncing Ms. Hirsi Ali as an agent of Jewish conspirators. And yet, the New Yorker, in the course of an essay presenting various excuses for the Islamist-Nazi alliance of yesteryear, has the gall to explain that, if anyone needs a lecture on the history of anti-Semitism, it’s Ms. Hirsi Ali!

Such is the temper of our moment. Some of the intellectuals are indisputably in flight—eager to sneer at outspoken liberals from Muslim backgrounds, and reluctant to speak the truth about the Islamist reality.

Mr. Berman is a writer in residence at New York University. He is most recently the author of « The Flight of the Intellectuals » (Melville, 2010).

Even the French Hate the French
Les Bleus Prompt a Rare Reaction After the World Cup: Universal Loathing

By DARREN EVERSON

BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa—You really have to hand it to the French. No team at the World Cup got the world’s attention like they did.
As we bid them bon voyage from South Africa, let’s count up all the lives they’ve touched. Ireland hates the French for cheating them out of a World Cup berth. The French people hate the French team for disgracing them on the world stage. The French team hates the French Football Federation for expelling one of its own.

And after Tuesday’s 2-1 loss to South Africa—a game that guaranteed both teams would fail to advance to the next round—the South African coach made it clear he wasn’t an especially big fan, either.

« It seems that the attitude towards them is justified, » said Carlos Alberto Parreira, who was reacting to French coach Raymond Domenech’s refusal to shake hands with him after the match.

Few teams at the World Cup have ever attracted such consistent and universal scorn. There were the Chicago « Black Sox » of baseball fame who conspired to fix the 1919 World Series, of course. Then there was that 2000 Spanish Paralympic basketball team that wasn’t actually disabled.

But let’s be honest, it’s hard to top this French team’s performance, which stands out in two major categories: gross incompetence and cartoonish dysfunction. Not only did France win the 1998 World Cup and make it to the 2006 final, it entered the tournament as the Group A favorite—only respond by scoring one goal, allowing four and finishing dead last among the four teams.

In doing so, the French saw one player, Nicolas Anelka, get sent home for allegedly insulting the coach at halftime of a loss to Mexico; the captain, Patrice Evra, get in a heated argument with a trainer; the entire team decide to lodge a protest by refusing to train; and the head of French soccer resigning. On Tuesday, in a scene that would make Molière beam with pride, Mr. Evra—who was stripped of the captaincy and didn’t play against South Africa—criticized Mr. Domenech for not allowing him to apologize to fans for the strike.

In Ireland, the French implosion was met with a fine helping of Schadenfreude. The Irish still haven’t gotten over how France qualified for the tournament at their expense, on Thierry Henry’s handball goal in a European playoff against the Irish in November.

« The French team are jumped-up, overpaid prima donnas, » said actor Gavin O’Connor. « It should be a privilege to play for your country and, in fairness to the Irish boys, they would have been proud to play for their country. We might have got hammered but we would have given 100%. »

Matthew Kelly, an Irish student living in Paris, called the Fench team « infantile, overpaid and self-indulgent. »

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called the team a « caricature » on French television and « a truly pathetic show. »
The French saw this disaster coming. The team hasn’t been the same without Zinedine Zidane, the legendary player who helped them to the 1998 title and the 2006 final, and it showed in Les Bleus’ shaky qualifying run.

« For six years, [the team] hasn’t worked, » said Camille Reverchon, an engineer in Paris. « Now it’s time to change the coach. »

Ah, the coach. Mr. Domenech couldn’t leave without one last controversy. After not shaking hands with his South African counterpart Tuesday, he refused to explain why during his news conference.

« Is there another question? » he repeatedly said, avoiding the issue.

Mr. Parreira said a French assistant told him that Mr. Domenech was upset because Mr. Parreira supposedly said that France didn’t deserve to qualify for the World Cup, because of the Henry handball incident.

« He said I offended his team, » Mr. Parreira said. « I can’t for the life of me think of what I said. »

All some French fans could do was look ahead.

« With Domenech it’s rubbish! » one fan told French TV in South Africa. « Viva Laurent! » he said, referring to the man who was set to replace Mr. Domenech after the World Cup, Laurent Blanc.