It’s always wonderful waking up to a face full of bigotry. For all the defense of our nation’s morals being founded on Christianity, it is reassuring to see Christian leaders like Terry Jones of Florida’s Dove World Outreach Centre scheduling “burn the Qu’ran day”. Way to vacillate that defense; such notions of religious tolerance — I shudder thinking how many actually will show up.

To begin, Cordoba House’s Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a Sufi; the progressive Muslim sect unrelated to the militant extremists responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center. The house is two blocks from Ground Zero and will not even be visible from the site of the disaster — which, nine years later, barely has started reconstruction.

This serves to prove that Americans are more willing to allow ignorance and stupidity to reign over their common sense than to take a moment and think about not only the injustice inflicted on the civil principles of the U.S., but also the breeding of fearmongering, discrimination and prejudice.

To make the connection that any symbol of Islamic faith is synonymous with the ideology of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001; to name a Muslim a terrorist because one is too dense to consider one’s own narrow presuppositions; to drive from Texas to Connecticut to verbally attack worshipers leaving mosques because you feel some ill-placed sense of entitlement in persecuting members of a religion whose tenets evidently you don’t understand, and yet think one has the right to speak for the Christian God with signs saying, “Jesus hates Muslims”; to do all this and believe you’re justified is the most dangerous ideology of all.

It wouldn’t make sense if every Christian was vilified on the basis of the Ku Klux Klan’s ideology, or every Catholic church was protested because there was fear that their intent was to molest children in the basement. That is the logic suggested here: “They shouldn’t be allowed to build that mosque because they are terrorists; they are terrorists because they are Muslim.” The connection fails.

The building is hardly a mosque. It is a community center meant to foster religious tolerance, knowledge, and community ethics — things of which America is in need. But, of course, this doesn’t stop opponents from proposing that the center is a contrived way to exemplify Islamic victory. Contrived indeed, what a statement to be made: auditorium, swimming pool, bookstores and restaurants — this doesn’t scream sodality, obviously it screams terroristic militancy homage!

Really?

The reason Americans feel wronged when they see an Islamic-based cultural center close to Ground Zero, treading on their raw grief, is because they harbor prejudices and suppositions planted by their ignorance and fostered by political alarmists looking to incite fear for the sake their harebrained sense of patriotism.

The connections of this fear simply are an outlet for people’s misplaced need to hate. The roots lie in the hostility toward “different,” where the majority projects inferiority on the “other.” The hostility toward immigrants in general, of different cultures and ideals lead people to believe that an Islamic center is an affront to what is “American.” However, what is “American” dictates that, civilly and morally, there shouldn’t be anything preventing the structure from being built. What is “American” is religious tolerance, what is “American” is recognizing in its entirety what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, what purposes and notions led to that event, and to understand how it fundamentally is different from what is being suggested in building the Cordoba House.

The bigot Americans who curse at every person who wears a hijab, who feel justified in terrorizing Muslims, or who object to this building on the grounds that there is some tangible connection between it and Sept. 11, 2001 obviously need this — a cultural center to learn something other than their insecure need to hate in order to hide their ignorance.

Nicholas Earl is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at earlnich@msu.edu.