Glenn and Rauf

Recently, In his newsletter Glenn Beck has been talking a lot about a New York based Muslim Organization wanting to build an Islamic community center and Mosque in New York City a block or two from the 9/11 Ground Zero site. I don't have any real sentiment on the matter, but I am irked by the general fixation on this issue.

I fail to see why Glenn Beck wants to champion this issue, especially when it appears to be fairly straightforward. I don't know New York's municipal building code by heart or anything, but if it passes through the correct venues and gets approved, I don't see why we should care all that much. It isn't on Ground Zero, or even facing it, so I don't see why it would be an issue about sensitivity, and even if it were, it would be unfair to lump the Muslim Organization that is going to run the community center in with the fundamentalist terrorists that carried out the attacks. We wouldn't group the 700 club in with the likes of Timothy McVeigh, would we? Well, at least that would be my first thought. Enter Glenn...

In the linked transcript Glenn takes issue with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam of the prospective community center/Mosque. Specifically Glenn and friends get upset about these statements:

IMAM RAUF: We tend to forget in the West that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non Muslims.

IMAM RAUF: You may remember that the U.S. led sanctions against Iraq led to the deaths of over a half a million Iraqi children.

IMAM RAUF: This has been documented by the United Nations.

I haven't done any researching into what Imam Rauf said and the context he said it in, but even if this isn't a cherry-picked sound bite, I wouldn't exactly classify those statements as anti-American. In fact, they shed important insight into how the United States is perceived abroad. From listening to the sound bite it's clear that all of the incriminating statements made by this Imam were in response to questions from an at least partially non-Muslim audience in Australia. Rauf was likely trying to help his audience understand the mindset of the people of countries in which the United States is exerting military influence.

Rauf was not demanding reparations or that the US be brought to Justice or even directly indicting the US of moral responsibility. All of which you would expect a fundamentalist or extremist to do. I believe the point he is making is that it doesn't matter if the blood is actually on Saddam's hands, for the people of Iraq, and for many in the Muslim world, the US stands as an interloper to which they can ascribe their suffering. We are doing the same thing here in the US as we attribute as many problems as we can to illegal immigration. I'm not saying that we were wrong to impose those sanctions, I don't think Rauf was either. I think the bottom line is that we can't assume that just because we see ourselves having the moral high ground, others will see it that way too.