It's pathetic that we feel we have to say something about the proposed Islamic community center on Park Place in lower Manhattan. We once worked around the corner, on Murray Street, teaching a night class for Borough of Manhattan Community College, which has its main building nearby on Chambers Street and which lost a building, Fiterman Hall, during the 9/11 attack.
To us, the mosque is definitely not at Ground Zero, the site of the twin towers and the soon-to-be One World Trade Center. It's on a side street a couple of blocks north, which in terms of cramped downtown Manhattan, is as far away as Ironwood Drive is from Power Road.
There are already two mosques nearby, one dating from 1970 and one from 1985. There are also a bunch of bars and strip joints, as well as a pizzeria which serves the tomatoey, cheeseless marinara slices we like.
The people in charge of the proposed center worked with lots of New Yorkers, including a rabbi at an Upper West Side synagogue we attended when we lived in that neighborhood in the 1980s, to make it something like the J.C.C.'s - the Jewish Community Centers you find all over America, like the ones we know in Chandler and Scottsdale.
Growing up in Brooklyn, we knew Muslims and saw their mosques since childhood. The Islamophobia sweeping America is no different than the anti-Hispanic hatred that Arizona has, to its shame, become known for.
We agree totally with Mayor Bloomberg: New York is the freest city in the world, built and sustained by immigrants professing every faith, and inshallah, it will remain so. Stay out of city planning business, scummy anti-American bigots and sleazy politicians. Muslims have the same right to worship as you do.
