It took guts, great courage and a hint of vocation to electoral suicide to do what President Obama did on Friday evening. He chose to openly rally — standing by the basic tenets of American society — for a mosque to be built two blocks away from the ghost of the Twin Towers because the U.S. is built on freedom of religion, any religion, for any citizen, in any place.
At such an awful moment for his popularity, which is beginning to edge him closer to the abyss of the Bush zone — and in turn, an awful moment for the future of the Democratic Party on his way to a possible historic electoral defeat in November — prudence, opportunism and shrewdness would have suggested silence about a matter that doesn’t have to do strictly with the White House, and from which he doesn’t have anything to win but everything to lose. Torn between a biliously popularity-seeking right wing and a haughtily touchy left, bogged down in an economy that is not recovering and that is dragging him down, Obama could have recurred to the old political jargon trick of “triangulation” invented by Bill Clinton: to say something, and do the opposite.
Clinton would have thundered against the Islamic fanaticism and in an underhanded manner, would have encouraged the Muslim community to build its center maybe just two blocks further up, or he would have invoked freedom of religion and then worked in silence to impede what most New Yorkers consider an offense to the memory of Islamic terrorism’s victims.
But Obama is not Clinton. His personal history, his nature, his aspiration to be an ethical leader and not only an administrator, prevented him from looking away like his advisors suggested to him. He is simply a believer in a civil religion, a faith in the history of America and the constitution as only first generation and ethnic minority citizens like him — who know the bitter taste of marginalization — cultivate. When the occasion for a deep, noble, always magnificently pronounced stance shows up, he can’t resist.
When he made the choice to talk, he had no choice. He couldn’t help saying that, as citizen and president — notice the precedence given to the word “citizen” — he believes that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anybody else in this nation. When what is sacredly obvious becomes electorally dangerous, that’s a sign that the times are no good.
In vain, his press agent, Robert Gibbs, now near dismissal, suggested that he should stay away from a strictly local matter like the one of this 13 floor mosque to be built two blocks north of the 9/11 crater, that almost ten years after the massacre remains a big empty space in the heart of downtown Manhattan. The mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, was already in favor of the project, in spite of the opposition of the Jewish community. The very powerful neighborhood committee had unanimously (a miraculous event in the most quarrelsome city in the world) rejected a motion to block the “Cordoba Center,” what the promoters called the project, referencing the great, exquisite, multiethnic, Andalusian town governed by the Arabs until the 13th century. Obama doesn’t have the power to impose nor impede the building.
If he felt the need to intervene before Muslim leaders and clerics invited to the White House for the “iftar,” the evening meal that suspends the daily fasting during Ramadan, it’s because Obama feels he is the heir and guard of a history that began with Thomas Jefferson 220 years ago, when the father of American democracy and the separation between church and state would hobnob with Muslims, because in his life he’s been exposed to different cultures, experiences, faiths and ethnic groups that makes it impossible for him to understand the intolerance and hatred that crater in the middle of Manhattan represents. He said he understands the emotions this issue stirs, but this is America, and the principle according to which the people of every faith are welcome won’t be treated in a different way by this government; it is an essential part of what makes Americans who they are.
Wonderful principles that made, more than cannons and the dollar, the greatness of this “city upon a hill” that the U.S. is, but that, politically, forget a terrible truth: that there exists a pre- and a post-9/11 America. A 13 floor skyscraper mosque 100 meters away from an open pit grave excavated by those who killed believing they were accomplishing a divine mission belongs to the “after.” There are no rational conciliations between those in New York — along with the crowds of followers of political manipulators like Sarah Palin (she called that Islamic center a “provocation”) — who ask, “Why a mosque right there?” and those, like Obama, who ask, “Why not there?”, considering that dozens of Muslims died together with Christians, Jews and Atheists.
As a matter of fact, Obama has been able to irritate everybody and not content anybody, like often happens to those who say the right thing (besides, of course, the promoter of the project, the contractor Sharif Al-Gamal). From the Arab and Muslim world arrives the accusation that Obama is just using “symbolism,” like in his famous speech about Islam in Cairo, and very little concreteness, while Guantanamo Bay stays open and the “collateral” victims, the innocents, increase under the bombs in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The main Jewish organization in the U.S., the Anti-Defamation League, is criticizing him and ferociously opposing the mosque, along with the shouting and clamoring Republicans who accuse the president of “sacrilege.”
And the economy, the one and only altar to which every tabernacle and holy book bows, remains a sulky and cranky goddess who’ll ask the civil sacrifice of a president who still believes too much in the civility of politics and the spirit of America, even when, and more-so when, he is brutally hurt and offended by the barbarians.