The ADL, Ilario Pentano, the Ground Zero mosque, and what it means to be an American

A few years ago, a friend of mine -- an editor, only about 10 years older than I, a man of some Italian lineage -- looked ahead to the 2008 elections and declared, flatly, that Barack Obama would never be president.

"Nobody becomes president whose last name ends in a vowel," he said.

The remark struck me, because I wasn't really used to thinking of my friend in ethnic terms.(He'd was a little over-rhapsodic about "The Sopranos," but then again, what man wasn't?) But my friend was heir to a not-so-distant history, the son of a family that -- thanks to its Mediterranean origins -- had just a few decades previous been considered not-quite-fully American. By 2005 or 2006, whenever I had that discussion with my friend, those days seemed past -- but he still felt it in his bones.

I thought about my friend last night, when I read the New York Times' story about how the Anti-Defamation League has decided to oppose the Cordoba House, better known as the Ground Zero mosque. I was already saddened by the turn of events when I stopped, gobstruck, by the Times' pullback to a national overview of the story.

In North Carolina, Ilario Pantano, a former Marine and a Republican candidate for Congress, has also campaigned on the issue, and says it is stirring voters in his rural district, some 600 miles away from ground zero.

A few days ago, at a roadside pizza shop in the small town of Salemburg, he attacked the proposal before an enthusiastic crowd of hog farmers and military veterans.

“Uniformly, there was disgust and disdain in the room for the idea,” Mr. Pantano said.

Ilario Pantano? That's a name with lots and lots of vowels! He's the son of an Italian immigrant, and he grew up in Hell's Kitchen, New York! Now yes, he's a Marine -- one with a controversial history -- but does anybody think that Ilario Pentano would've stood a chance in hell of being elected to Congress in, say, 1960? From North Carolina?


I don't mean to pick on my Tarheel friends. The North Carolina of 2010 is different from the North Carolina of 1960. That's at least partly because the America of 2010 is different from the America of 1960. (Or the America, say, of 1941.) Italian Americans -- except, maybe, for the ones on "Jersey Shore" -- aren't really seen as "others" anymore. The emphasis, for people who aren't Italian-American, is a little less "Italian" and a little more "American." Both sides have benefited from the exchange, I think. But it's not been that long since Ilario Pantano would've been seen as not-quite-American. He, at least, has reaped the rewards of an America that has broadened its mind about who gets to be in the club of "real Americans."

And he's using those rewards ... to try to keep other people out of the club.

The Anti-Defamation League fares much, much worse in this comparison, of course, because its whole reason for existing was to fight for the right of Jewish-Americans to live fully as Americans. And now it, too, has seen fit to try to keep other people out of the club.

Here, astonishingly, is the "about" section at the ADL's website:

The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 "to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all." Now the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency, ADL fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all.

A leader in the development of materials, programs and services, ADL builds bridges of communication, understanding and respect among diverse groups, carrying out its mission through a network of 30 Regional and Satellite Offices in the United States and abroad.

The parts in bold? Those words can no longer be considered true in any meaningful sense. They are, in fact, a lie. It hurts me to say so.

The people who oppose Cordoba House -- the people who, somewhat gleefully, would have America march off in a "clash of the civilizations" against the Muslim religion -- would have us believe that Islam, and Muslims, are a monolith. That the most extreme interpretations of that faith are, in fact, the only legitimate interpretations. That Osama bin Laden is no different from Feisal Abdul Rauf is no different from my halal butcher down the street.

But that's untrue. It's pernicious nonsense. And given five minutes of honest, empathetic thinking, most Americans would have to concede the actual truth: That it's complicated. That there are a few real violent nutjobs, like Osama and Al Qaeda, and a few more not-violent-but-still-kinda-asshole-types who want their religion to rule the rest of us -- and a whole lot more people who have faith, who wrestle with its demands, and just try to live each day as best their conscience allows.

Which is no different, really from the rest of America. Or the rest of humanity.

Listen: a terrible wound was inflicted upon America on 9/11. I know: I saw the wreckage of the towers myself and smelled the smoke. I visited the field in rural Pennsylvania where Flight 93 crashed. These experiences marked me and changed my life.

But we betray our values, deeply and perhaps irreparably, if we hold all Muslims culpable for the acts of a few. This moment is a crucible. I really believe that, 20 years from now, a few people will be pround of having been on the right side of this issue -- and the few people who still stand up then for today's discrimination will be viewed much like Ann Coulter defending McCarthyism today: as embarrassments.

The history of America encompasses many stories, many narratives, but one of them is this: the ever-expanding notion of what it means to be American. Ilario Pentano is, I believe, aware of this story. The folks at the ADL certainly are. We are always proud when those definitions expand -- and always ashamed, even if it takes a few years, when they contract. This can be a moment when we choose to be proud before posterity. I sincerely hope it is.

The Cordoba House mosque, Ground Zero, and all you religious people trying to run my life

That's the topic of my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk this week. Since you already got most of my take in blog form last week, let me do something different and focus on Ben's take.

An excerpt:

Now let's contrast Washington with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the Cordoba House project who wrote a fascinating book in 2004 called "What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America." In it, Rauf casually argues that the U.S. Constitution and the core principles of Islamic law (sharia) are not in conflict at all and, indeed, the "American political structure is sharia-compliant."

"Islamic law and American democratic principles have many things in common," Rauf wrote, stressing that sharia's support for "political justice" and "economic justice ... for the weak and impoverished" "sounds suspiciously like the Declaration of Independence."

To the casual reader, maybe. Fact is, sharia doesn't recognize the separation of church and state, has a medieval understanding of equal rights and sanctions treating Christians and Jews as second-class citizens who must pay a tax to receive Muslim protection. In other words, to "demean themselves as good citizens" in a "sharia-compliant" America is something very different from what George Washington would have understood.

I'll sum up, at the risk of oversimplifying: Muslims -- at least the Muslims involved in Cordoba House -- think that society should be run according to Islamic precepts. And my response is: Of course they do!

To my liberal, agnostic eyes, though, that doesn't appear all that different from, well, any other religious group -- or, admittedly, that different from secularists who'd like to get through the political day without having to argue against somebody else's faith. There are very few people who think that society shouldn't be run according to their particular view of the universe.

Let's take the Southern Baptists. Here are some excerpts from a resolution "on political engagement" members of the convention approved in 2008:

WHEREAS, Christians acting as the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13-16) have a responsibility to engage their culture, including participating in the political process; and

WHEREAS, Candidates for political office seek the endorsement of Christians for their candidacies; and

WHEREAS, Christians exercising their rights as responsible citizens may choose to endorse candidates for political office as part of the exercise of their engagement of culture; and

WHEREAS, Christians should seek to apply their spiritual and moral values to the political process rather than politicize the church;

(snip)


now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That we urge Christians to engage the culture through discipleship within the churches and through participation in the democratic public policy and political process in order to help fulfill the kingdom mandate taught in the Bible and expressed in the Baptist Faith and Message “to bring industry, government, and society as a whole under the sway of the principles of righteousness, truth, and brotherly love,” while always protecting freedom of conscience; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we encourage our churches regularly to teach and preach biblical truth on moral issues and to urge their members to vote according to their beliefs, convictions, and values; and be it further

RESOLVED, That we call on candidates for political office to endorse the Judeo-Christian beliefs, convictions, and values upon which society should rest.

Now, see, I find that last part alarming -- the Constitution pretty clearly states there should be "no religious test" for public office, but the Southern Baptist Convention believes candidates should have to pass the test anyway. They may not be at odds with the letter of the law, but it's certainly against the spirit. And the Southern Baptist Convention does this all the time, letting officials know they don't want gay people to serve in the military or have marriage rights or even have the right to hold a job! Baptists aren't just stating personal preferences: They're stating that American society should be run along Southern Baptist lines.

But let's not pick on merely the examples I find objectionable. Let's take a look at a rather more liberal church, one whose beliefs are somewhat closer to my own: The Episcopal Church of America. Here's a list of legislation passed by church leaders at their 2009 convention -- there's a condemnation of "first strike" military action, a condemnation of the invasion of Iraq and America's "sin committed in Iraq," and even a call to end the U.S. embargo in Cuba. Episcopalians, in other words, want the United States to run its foreign policy along lines acceptable to a branch of the Church of England!

How crazy is that?

Well, it's both kinda crazy and not-so-crazy. It is -- again from my agnostic eyes -- a little weird that we let our speculations about the possibility of a divine entity who may or may not exist guide how we organize our society. But in my warmer, wiser moments, I realize that politics are an expression of values -- and that an invidual's values are shaped by their religion, or shape the religion itself.

On the other hand: America's about as secular as it ever has been in its history. And it's still pretty religious. Somehow, we've survived pretty well without becoming a theocracy and without banning Bibles from public streets. So maybe it's ok if I recognize that the tensions exist, but that they haven't overwhelmed our system. Southern Baptists surely have an influence on our governance, but they don't out-and-out run things. What's more, Southern Baptists have attempted to influence and shape American governance in a decidedly conservative way -- and yet there's never been any serious effort, that I know of, to deny them their First Amendment rights of worship. Why would we treat Muslims differently?

Most of us in this country are Christians and Americans and find ways to meld those two identities without threatening the good order of society -- and in lots of cases, society even benefits. And so it is, I believe, with the vast majority of American Muslims.

What's interesting to me, finally, is that my friend Ben and many other conservatives are so opposed to the possible rise of sharia law to dominate and shape America -- nevermind that Islam's numbers are too few to ever really permit that to happen, nevermind there's already a few mosques in New York -- that they seemingly don't have any real confidence in Amerca's ability to shape Islam right back. You know who actually has that confidence? The people behind the Cordoba House proposal in New York.

With the flexibility permitted by America’s religious freedom and openness, American Muslims can catalyze innovations in the global process of ijtihad (Islamic legal interpretation)just as American Jews and Christians birthed new developments in their faiths. They represent the diversity championed by both their own religious history and the heritage of the country in which they reside, positioning them uniquely to reach out to other Muslims and Americans and thus help close the gap in understanding.

Well, yeah. But if we throw up our hands in fear when somebody wants to build a mosque -- or if, worse, we act contrary to our own laws and values and decide not to let the mosque be built -- well, then, we may well blow that opportunity.

Ben closed his portion of the column with these words: "Let us give bigotry no sanction -- and be ever watchful of those who would exploit American openness and freedom to do just that." I couldn't agree more. And I'd add a second statement: "Let us give bigotry no sanction -- and be ever watchful of those who would end American openness and freedom to do just that." And that's the problem posed by those who would refuse the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. Right now, it's a greater threat than any posed by a hypothetical imposition of sharia law on American citizens.

I still don't believe the Tea Party: Eavesdropping edition

I've long believed the Tea Party phenomenon is mostly about sore loserdom -- the people who've been taking to the streets and raising hell at Congressional town meetings these last 18 months say they're alarmed at deficits and runaway government spending. But they were nowhere to be found while those same things were getting started under George W. Bush.

The complaints of Tea Parties have, generally, fallen under the rubric of "tyranny." The Obama Administration is infringing on our freedoms, it is said, to a degree unimaginable outside of historically extreme circumstances. But really, I don't believe the Tea Partiers on this front, either. Why? Well, let's look at today's Washington Post:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

Critics say its effect would be to greatly expand the amount and type of personal data the government can obtain without a court order. "You're bringing a big category of data -- records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information -- outside of judicial review," said Michael Sussmann, a Justice Department lawyer under President Bill Clinton who now represents Internet and other firms.

I get -- even if I don't agree -- why Hayek-loving Tea Party folks think, say, slightly higher tax rates are a harbinger of a coming Orwellian world. What I don't get is their silence on the ability of government to reach into your private communications with fewer and fewer restrictions. (Read this for even more scariness.)

It could be that we'll suddenly see a spate of Tea Party criticism on this front -- but again, it'll be coming from people who were silent on this same subject during the Bush years. If they speak up now, they're hypocrites. And if they don't speak up now, well, they're hypocrites. Or maybe just extremely misguided: tyranny is not limited to merely economic matters, but our Tea Party friends don't seem to know that.

The shame of it is, if Tea Partiers accused the Obama Administration of enabling tyranny in this matter, I'd agree with them. As Kevin Drum posted: You know, if I'd wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him."

In any case, it all boils down to this: I still don't believe the Tea Party.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald points out an ACLU report showing the Obama Administration is preserving the Bush Administration's worst civil liberties abuses. (Sigh.) Is Ralph Nader running in 2012?

Tom Corbett still really thinks that unemployed people are lazy

Looks like Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett has decided to double-down on the "unemployed people are lazy" theme in fairly cowardly fashion:

Speaking to reporters after a campaign stop in Delaware County, the Republican nominee for governor noted that newspapers across the state are carrying line after line of help-wanted ads.

"Are there jobs out there? . . . How would you interpret that?" he asked.

Corbett reported seeing one newspaper page that he said promised thousands of jobs listings in print and online.

"You guys asked me if there are jobs out there," he said to a pair of reporters. "If I am a common citizen, the average citizen, and I look at a newspaper . . . and I see jobs - what's the answer to that question."

Asked if he was implying that the unemployed were not taking advantage of these listings, he said no-adamantly no-he wasn't saying that.

But he clearly is saying that. And he's being a punk by not owning up to the clear implications of his statement.

Now: Corbett has spent his career bouncing in and out of employment by the state of Pennsylvania; he's an attorney by profession, so I'm going to hazard a guess that he's rarely, if ever, had to seek a job by going through the classifieds of his local paper. It's not like turning on a water faucet -- hey, there's water! It's a more difficult and tedious process than that: You look for jobs that seem to match your skills and experience -- and, if you're lucky, your interests -- and then you further weigh if the jobs in question can provide enough income to sustain you and your family.

By the time you've gone through that process, there are -- for many people -- rather fewer than "thousands" of jobs available.

Corbett, like many other people, ignore the math: Nationwide right now, there are five job seekers for every job opening. Even if there are thousands of classified ads, there are tens of thousands of people who need jobs. Corbett's a smart guy with lots of information resources at his disposal; he could know this if he wanted to. Maybe he does. But he's choosing to judge the state of the Pennsylvania economy based on anecdotal evidence.

There is a long tradition, of course, of Republicans stirring popular anger among the "haves" against the "have nots." Does the phrase "welfare queens" ring any bells? Right now, there are more have-nots than there've been for a long time -- and their ranks include a lot more of the "haves" than there used to be. The GOP is doubling down on its rhetoric, though. And it makes you wonder: Who will they turn to for votes when there are more have-nots than haves?

This is why I won't read the Philadelphia Inquirer in print

At right is today's front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It's a demonstration of why -- much as I'd like to support local journalism -- I can't bring myself to subscribe to this paper in print.

The big main story? The one that occupies the two-thirds of the space above the "fold" and is thus the main selling point to buy the paper off the rack?

It's a two-day-old story.

And it was written by the Los Angeles Times.

The first issue is one that print newspapers will always deal with. They simply can't hit the news with the same speed as the web. (The story broke late enough Sunday that the Inky, apparently, couldn't or didn't get it on Monday's front page.) And the Inky's editors, in all fairness, went with a story that analyzes the fallout from the WikiLeaks document dump instead of reporting it as "new" news.

The second issue, though, goes to the heart of the Inky's problems. It used to be one of the newspapers of national record, with bureaus and reporters around the world. It's not that paper anymore. But it still plays at being that paper, which is why readers -- and potential readers -- are treated to front-page stories from the Los Angeles Times. Which, given 21st century technology, they easily could've read ... in the Los Angeles Times.

How would I have designed today's front page differently? Tough to say. But the Inky needs a different organizing principle. It's a Philly-Philly suburbs-South Jersey paper, and that's what it ought to look like -- not like a warmed-over New York Times. Switch up the sections -- the front page and everything in the front section should be local stuff (except in extreme 9/11-style "great moments of history" situations) and all that wire copy describing stuff going on in places that aren't Philadelphia should be relegated to the second section.

There are good journalists working at the Inquirer. I don't mean to diss them. But the changes I'm describing probably should've happened five years ago. At least. New ownership is in place. It's time to make the Inky more relevant to the communities it covers, and the front page is the best place to start.

Dennis Prager: Liberals hate conservatives

National Review's Dennis Prager departs from dispensing invaluable marriage advice to offer similarly valuable insight into human nature. Liberals, he says, hate conservatives.

Granting the exceptions that all generalizations allow for, conservatives believe that those on the left are wrong, while those on the left believe that those on the right are bad.

I'll grant that there are lots and lots of liberals who feel this way. But Prager's blithe dismissal of similar phenomena on the right suggests he's not dealing with the issue honestly. Because there's lots of conservatives who think that liberals are evil. For example: I was attending a conservative evangelical Mennonite college in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected president. I was one of the few students to openly support Clinton for president that year; many of my fellow students and faculty warned of literally Biblical, literally Apocalyptic consequences if he attained office. (The night of the election, a student in my dormitory openly wished for Clinton's assassination; I chalk that up more to immaturity than any actual desire.) This was not -- and is not, I think -- a narrowly held view. The whole existence of the "religious right" -- which a not-insignificant part of the conservative coalition -- is predicated on a Manichean view of the world: There's not really a distinction to be made in these circles (Prager's opinions aside) between "wrong" and "evil."

Prager might respond by saying that he's speaking only of "elite liberal journalists," and that "elite conservative journalists" don't demonstrate this behavior. But, uh, Andy McCarthy is making a career right now out of his belief that liberals and terrorist Muslims "are working together to sabotage America." Dinesh D'Souza took a different route, writing a whole (widely panned) book about how the 9/11 attacks were a response to American decadence unleashed by the left. The whole Tea Party movement is predicated on the idea that Barack Obama is a budding tyrant -- a belief promoted by, um, the conservative media. These are not the words and ideas of people who think the left is merely wrong; they're born out of a clear belief that liberals, if not inherently evil, at least act in evil ways.

More Prager:

Second, when you don’t confront real evil, you hate those who do. You can see this on almost any school playground. The kid who confronts the school bully is often resented more than the bully. Whether out of guilt over their own cowardice or out of fear that the one who confronted the bully will provoke the bully to lash out more, those who refuse to confront the bully often resent the one who does.

This analogy makes. no. sense. People LOVE the guys who stand up to the bullies -- in almost every case, almost without exception. That's why liberals and conservatives alike are fans of "Star Wars" "Karate Kid" "My Bodyguard" and virtually every great movie that features a confrontation between powerful evil and underdog good guys. It's the ultimate bully versus the standup guy scenario.

Where liberals might differ from conservatives is discerning who is a bully and how to deal with them. Liberals haven't always been right on this score, but neither have conservatives. And I'll go ahead and say this: Almost all of populist politics -- whether practiced by the left or the right -- can be boiled down to a powerful cultural desire to stand up to bullies.

In any case, Prager's argument is silly. It suggests that he doesn't actually know that many people on the left -- and, weirdly, maybe not that many people on the right.

Andy McCarthy in a nutshell

Abigail Thernstrom of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, replying to Andy McCarthy in National Review today:

McCarthy’s screed falls far short of reasonable disagreement, offering superheated and sarcastic rhetoric where evidence and logical analysis are needed.

Sounds about right.