The Whole Mosque Thing

When 9/11 happened, for those of us who were nearby, it felt like a local experience. It happened in a specific handful of places. Over the weeks that followed, we learned that the perpetrators were a specific group too; part of a small hard-core movement of nihilistic Islamic extremists.

Over the months that followed 9/11, it didn't feel so much like a local experience anymore. Everywhere you went in America, people had United We Stand bumper stickers, American flags flew everywhere, and housewives coast-to-coast had New York fireman calendars. People became wary of those who wear turbans, even though most of them are Sikhs.

Over the years that followed 9/11, it stopped feeling like it all came down to some cabal of dastardly villains lurking in the mountains outside Tora Bora. We were all over Afghanistan. Soon enough, we even took over Iraq looking for any sign that they too were involved in the events of that day.

For such a big event, 9/11's implications started out as relatively small. It was a terrorist act committed by specific people on specific places. Before too long however, everything had some relationship to the event. It seemed like people speculated on the impacts of ice cream sales in a post 9/11 world. Every small town had contingency plans. Laramie Wyoming was sure it was next on the list. Before we knew it, the whole thing went past a normal conflict between nations. It blew up into a full-on clash of civilizations.

I know how serious that day was. I understand the threats that face the United States and our allies. Having spent years in DC wondering if the sirens roaring past were responding to a bombing, or whether the street that was cordoned off had a suspicious package on it, I get it. That's terror. Beyond that, I get the whole geopolitical thing. There is a simmering movement of dangerous religiously-motivated people intent on doing us harm. Their representatives can be found on every continent. We need to do everything we can to stop them from carrying out their grizzly plans.

But it's the proportionality that I don't get. Terrorism and the motivations behind it are actions and ideas. They're not nations or races. Terrorism isn't a religion. We've taken something rather specific and made it into a universal, existential, all-out world war of faith. It's exactly what those bearded guys in caves wanted.

If this were truly a clash of civilizations, if this was an epic battle of capitalists versus communists, allies versus the axis, GI Joe against Cobra, I'd say it's not such a good idea for them to build a base right where they blew up one of ours just a decade ago. But this isn't some $100 million budget action movie. This is the West against primitive fundamentalists with street smarts and good networking skills. We took a group of cavemen with bronze-age mentalities, and turned them into the Decepticons to our Autobots in desert camo, adding hordes to their legions.

When we treat Al Qaeda as representatives of an equal, opposing force, we eliminate their intrinsic disadvantages as the little guy in asymmetrical warfare, giving them both the pity rights of underdog status, and the clout of a billion allies. When we lump all Muslims in with them in assigning blame for 9/11, we make the war a lot more symmetrical than it might have been. We make the war they wanted, the one we can't win.

If we're really better than Al Qaeda and the rest of them, we build that mosque right there at Ground Zero. We should make it an American institution, just like the JCC, the YMCA and baseball. At night we light its minaret up red white and blue, and during the day we teach water aerobics to the elderly of Lower Manhattan. I don't care what they'd do in Saudi Arabia. The whole point is that we're not them. The real danger is if the rest of the world forgets that.

Let's get back that proportionality. Hunt them down, arrest them, kill them. But don't turn this into the Lord of the Rings. Don't send the message to a fifth of the world that they're our enemy. Bush at least knew this much. Obama knows this too, but he's too damn timid to stand up to the demagogues like we need him to do.

America should do what America does best. Kill the ones who need to be killed with Special Forces. But kill their potential sympathizers with kindness, inclusiveness, and tolerance. Build it right there. I'll even make a donation in the name of peace and real moral victory.