tea party leader mark williams is calling for a "mirror image" of the cordoba community center built in mecca "that would be dedicated to showcasing American values."
why are they so fixated on mecca? again and again, you hear cordoba house opponents saying their should not be a "mosque at ground zero" until someone can build synagogue or church in mecca. why the fixation on mecca? sure, it is the holiest city in islam, but it's not the only holy place in the religion. is ground zero the holiest place in the u.s?
maybe it is to some people, but i'm guessing they are a minority, or maybe are overly caught up in the heat of the current controversy. i'm not sure how anyone would rank holiness of american icons and there are probably a lot of competing ideas for how various "hallowed grounds" in the u.s. would stack up against one another. mormons, for example, would probably disagree with ground zero holding the number one slot. more secular-minded people might rank historic places central to the formation of this country like valley forge or independence hall a little higher than ground zero. after all, those are sites that mark the creation of our country, not one of its catastrophes. and what about gettysburg? pearl harbor? the mall in washington? which of them is more hallowed?
for the mecca analogy to work, ground zero must not just be hallowed ground, it must be the hallowest ground. there are a lot of important muslim sites that are not in saudi arabia and are quite close to christian or jewish sites. the umayyad mosque in damascus is just a short walk from the christian quarter, and not much further is the jewish quarter. the whole reason that the cordoba house opponents keep coming back to saudi comparisons is because that is the muslim government virtually no freedom of religion. it's quite revealing that of all the countries in the muslim world, the one that the tea-partiers keep demanding we emulate is the one with the least religious freedom.
