The Mosque controversy – about 30 years ago

Amid all the fol-de-rol about the Ground Zero Mosque controversy I recall an incident in Oklahoma, around 30 years ago that presaged all this.

Dr. Nazih Zuhdi born 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon, to a Syrian father and Turkish mother, came to Oklahoma in 1957. In 1985 he performed the first heart transplant in the history of the state, and later founded a world-class interdisciplinary transplantation institute in Oklahoma City.

He and his wife were also frequent guests at Chez Vernon, the French restaurant in OKC I worked at for a few years. Witty, urbane and sophisticated, he seemed more French than Middle Eastern. The one concession to Muslim mores I could see was that rather than wine with meals, he always called ahead to have us chill a few bottles of Vichy water, “the king of waters!” he said.

(I suppose it’s a mark of my level of sophistication that to me, Vichy water tastes like Alka-seltzer. I do rather like Perrier though.)

At any rate, some years later (sorry, the timeline is vague in my memory) I remember reading Dr. Zuhdi had announced plans to build a mosque in Edmond, Oklahoma.

(Edmond is a rather affluent community just north of Oklahoma City proper. It has a small but well-regarded university.)

There was an outcry in the community, lead by some loud fundamentalist Christians who cried that the mosque would be a center for terrorism. Dr. Zuhdi very graciously backed down and abandoned the project.

At the time I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed to be an Okie.

Well how times change.

Today there are mosques all over the United States, and yes indeed many of them have links to terrorism.

Now a group wants to build a mosque next to the site of the Twin Towers, and the country is in an uproar. The would-be builders aren’t backing down though.

A great deal has been said about this: sense, nonsense, and irrelevant.

President Obama, discovering a hithertoo unsuspected respect for private property, has said the American Way and American law, holds people can do what they like with theirs.

True – but irrelevant. Having a right to do something is not the same as it being right to do it. Something often misunderstood about libertarians (and unfortunately by too many libertarians) when they advocate doing away with laws against victimless crimes.

And the private status of the property seems in doubt as well, as details of the funding become available – slowly and painfully, like pulling teeth.

One conservative commentator asked how we’d all like it if the Japanese wanted to build a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor?

Well, if they wanted to build a shrine for Japanese tourists to pray for the dead entombed in the U.S.S. Arizona I’d be quite touched actually.

However, by all indications that does not seem to figure in the motives for building Cordoba House.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg managed to first infuriate, then impress me. First by saying nobody had any business inquiring into how a place of worship was funded or what they say inside.

Wrong on both counts. How they’re funded is an entirely legitimate question we have every right to demand answers for.

As for what they say inside, if it’s in the nature of “subway jihad lessons next Friday after services,” or announce the opening of a free clinic for the circumcision of your daughters, we damn sure have a right to know – and interfere.

Christopher Hitchens rhetorically asked himself, “Am I in favor of the untrammeled “free exercise of religion”?”

He very sensibly answered, “No I am not,” and cited examples of religious practices from Mormonism to Judaism we do not, and should not, allow under our law.

I was about to condemn Bloomberg as a “capo” who sold out his people for considerably more than 30 pieces of silver (he is reported to have huge investments in the Arabian Gulf) when he came out in defense of that church in Florida and their plans to host a “burn a Koran day” this September 11.

I’m impressed Mr. Mayor. (And confused. Don’t you hate it when people aren’t consistently praiseworthy or condemnable? In short, when they act like people.)

So now we’ll see what the reactions to this grandstanding preacher are. I will study with interest the intricate knots I expect the Apostles of Tolerance to tie themselves into explaining how this is not a matter of freedom of religion.