Must Read: The Mosque and the Mythical Backlash

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"By reframing the Ground Zero controversy as one in which the reasonable concerns of the vast majority of Americans were portrayed as bigoted, the organizers of the project and the Muslim organizations had scored a stunning victory. It may well be true that Abdul Rauf and his backers see the world very differently from al-Qaeda’s 9/11 murderers and do not intend their building to serve, as some critics fear, as a victory monument for Islam like the mosques built on the ruins of Judaism’s Holy Temple in Jerusalem or the minarets that adorn what was once St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Istanbul. But their mosque will be another kind of monument, one that serves to institutionalize a very different way of thinking about September 11."