Some Thoughts on the "Ground Zero Mosque" Issue

As the mosque issue is still simmering, I thought it well to lay down thoughts on some of its dimensions.  I will try to be as brief as I can. 

(1) Perhaps it wasn't the wisest decision to have the proposed center near Ground Zero.  The location has a lot of sensitivity to it.  Out of concern and respect for the feelings of all who fell that day (and their families), it is a valid point that Muslims should take note of and weigh it in heavily with other considerations before pushing through with the proposed center.  There is still legitimate concern that the proposed center's location can be offensive particularly to the survivors and families of victims of 9/11. There is a possibility that Americans who generally and normally have no ill-will towards Muslims/Arabs can be hurt by the location of the proposed center.  Yet, it remains to be seen whether a calm undertones can endure throughout the discussion, or whether they will give way to deceitful sensationalism and exploiting hype will prevail at the end.  And that is a question whose answer does not seeming comforting at the moment.   

(2) LAW AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS: this issue has the potential to be a test of sorts for the values that we deeply cherish.

In terms of the law, it has developed into a First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment issue.  The main question here will involve the endurance of the Bill of Rights in the face of controversy, as pointed out above.  Our country has faced similar situations (dilemmas?) before, and I am confident that the endurance of the law and the principles of civil rights, at least from a technical legal and jurisprudential standpoint, will be once again reasserted. 

As for discussions over the cultural sphere, we often talk about how diverse our country is, how we pride of this diversity, and how much we find strength in it.  All of the pride and feelings we have about the blessings of our diversity, I believe and see, are genuine sentiments and realities that we truly embrace and act upon. 

Yet, here too exists the potential for a test being brought by the center issue.  The test (and implications) here could be a lot trickier and more difficult.  I am hesitant to think of this aspect, because some of the questions that comes to my mind is this: whether the proposed center--- in the proposed location, and with the existing climate in which it is being received and discussed---will be a test on how well Muslims have integrated and been accepted into the American fabric (socially, culturally, etc).  Because similar incidents (of anti-mosque opposition) have sprung up before and alongside the one in New York City, there is a possibility that the debate over the "Ground Zero mosque" is much more deeply than just being about the sensitivity of Ground Zero location.  Noting the virulence of these developments, a Washington Post article observed, "the intense feelings driving that [NYC center] debate have surfaced in communities from California to Florida in recent months, raising questions about whether public attitudes toward Muslims have shifted."  These developments have included anti-Muslim protests, by groups such as Operation Save America, across the country.        

There is still some lingering and growing mis-perception, mis-information/ predominantly selective media coverage, opportunistic smearing, and unfavorable views (prejudice)---in addition to rising discrimination practices and doubt---on part of some in the American public regarding Muslims/Islam (see here, here, and here).  Though not frighteningly rampant, these trends---including physical attacks against property---do not appear to be backing down in occurrences or strength.  In such a polarized (and polarizing) environment (for example: see this, this, this, this, and this), there would be concern (for example: see here, here) that the dynamics of exchange on the mosque/community center issue could mesh in (examples see here , here, here, here) with much broader behaviors and attitudes bearing hostility towards Muslims and Islam in America.    

On the other hand, it may turn out that however this issue is resolved (i.e. whether the center will be built in the proposed location) may strongly reinforce the diversity we have come to cherish about our country.  From a broader perspective, it is possible any lingering concerns about the full integration of American Muslims will be put to rest as unfounded.  In light of this and other similar road bumps the nation has faced, this broader perspective notion however is still very far from ascertainable.  

We can learn from controversies and difficult and sensitive issues (even those that involving diversity as an aspect/dimension).  And it is possible for us to gain deeper insights about ourselves as a society from probing such questions and dimensions, and to work on being more constructive.  But, of course, in dealing with this and similar areas we would need to be completely honest, civil and fair with ourselves and with others---whether we are Muslim or Non-Muslim.  Greater mutual measured communication and outreach, not re-entrenchment and receding, is needed.  

(3) THE POLITICAL FOOTBALL/ HOT POTATO: Finally, it is deeply alarming that the discussion over the issue has been hyped up into some political football or hot potato right before upcoming midterm elections.  Prominent politicians---including former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich comparing the center to a Nazi sign at a holocaust museum or a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor---as well as Republican candidates in gubernatorial and Congressional races have weighed in on the center/mosque debate.  [Even some 'embattled' Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the hype, as for example how Senator Reid's public break with President Obama's stance on the issue is reported to have played out.]  


We have seen this kind of distorted and dirty politicking that scapegoated Muslims and Arabs and that used them as impersonified pawns before in recent memory.  Remember the past presidential election, when Obama was branded a Muslim, Arab, or whatnot, and from there he was linked to being sympathetic to extremists---suggesting by implication that he couldn't be a loyal American?  Remember how the fact that his middle name happened to be Hussein was exploited in a similar manner?  Remember how McCain fell into the trap when he responded with something along the lines of "no, he's a good family man," in reply to a question fielded from a rally about whether Obama was Muslim or Arab? (In a tight and heated election season, a few courageous Republican voices spoke up against that nonsense, most notably Colin Powell.)

It is also disturbing that some sectors of the media and of the lobbying world have taken it upon themselves to exploit, conflate, and distort the issue.  These segments have apparently been at the forefront of the  anti-NYC center opposition and opposition to smaller mosque/Islamic center projects; have been working to influence politicians, lawmakers, government agencies, and the general public towards their views of Islam in America and of Muslim extremists; and have contributing to political campaigns.  It is also astonishing to see the phrases being thrown around by these bloggers and pundits---echoes of which have long predated the major thrusting of the Ground Zero episode into the spotlight.  Phrases and suggestions include an accusation against the proposed NYC center of being a victory mosque to celebrate murder, and more general exhortations such as the need to "stop Islamization of America" or to fight "creeping Sharia" in the country, or to "keep America safe."  [Much nastier comments about Islam, Prophet Mohamed, Muslims, and the like have been made by these bloggers and pundits---some as vile as the claims that "Hitler was inspired by Islam," that there are no moderates among Muslims---by extension, implicating all Muslims and Islam itself as immortal enemies of the free world, and a denial that American Muslims can be loyal citizens.]  


Sometimes I can't help but wonder if they are trying to exploit feelings and legitimate concerns, and couple it with a selective framing of this issue (and of others), in a manner as if to turn the issue(s) and their opinions into a referendum on the presence of Muslims/ Islam in the U.S.  Whenever a controversy or difficult issue brews, we can count on these people (examples: here, here) to make it even more fuzzy and unresolvable ...

On 'Radicals' and 'Moderates' : An Exploration of the Meaning of Malcolm X (May 19, 1925- February 21, 1965)

[Originally published Saturday, February 21, 2009 at 7:29am ]

INTRODUCTION: RADICALS AND MODERATES (PARTIALLY) DECONSTRUCTED

Here's some food for thought. What is more likely to be the greatest threat to a society--radicals or moderates?

I know what you may be thinking as you read that line: "You know better than to ask silly questions. The answer should be obvious." But then I would fire back: dear reader, are you so sure it is a worthless and absurd inquiry? Are you sure that the answer is as so obvious?

Let me add a few disclaimers here. This essay is written in honor of Black History Month and of a man who showed the depths of the low-times and high points of the Civil Rights Movement. To some noteworthy extent this person's complexity is a snapshot (or perhaps a microcosm) of the complexities of a series of struggles--the noble and the questionable--which, in their sum, were undertaken to achieve that basic, natural right of recognition of dignity, respect, and (ultimately) of humanity, from fellow humans.

Thus this piece is neither an invitation to, nor a lesson in, conspiracy theorizing. It is a call for reflection on the past with an understanding for both positive anticipation of, and hopeful pragmatism for, the present and the future. It is (I hope) also a reminder to all (including myself) that we must resist the temptation to rush to judgment upon others; like many other things the story of this person, as well as the general points in the broader essay, will show that a better understanding the world and our lives cannot be approached through a black-white lens. The world is full of gray spots and gray planes---and the sooner we realize this fact and act upon it, the quicker (I hope) we will devise better solutions to our baffling problems. Finally it is a reminder that where the gray spots and gray planes are becoming clearer or at least less gray, it is incumbent upon us to affirm and assert this clarity. Both the reservation to a rush in judgment and the defense of the clearer should help us to become wiser and more just.

We normally wouldn't consider moderates as a threat to social order and prosperity. After all, they do nothing out of the usual. They eat, sleep, work, relieve themselves, and have pleasure like the rest of us. But one thing that sets the active among them apart from the rest of the society is this--their ability to affect change. Through patient, wise, and compassionate effort, they are able to effect change that is more profound, more wide-ranging, more enduring. Even moderates, or those under moderating influences, make mistakes. But when they do, and especially if they are of the self-reflective and honest type, they admit to their mistakes and strive in the long process to rectify them. And this honestly is likely to bolster their efforts further.

Yes radicals, too, affect change and that change is likely to carry a punching impact. But it is more likely to be an impact of reactionary effect. That reactionary effect forces the status-quo, the convention, to be more forcefully defended. Or to create a new status-quo that more forcefully props the establishment. Their actions do not challenge people to think or reason, but merely to react in a way that could be guided (some would say "exploited") by an establishment of rulers, opinion makers/pundits, or others of prominent positions or hold on influence or credibility. To such an establishment, therefore, a radical is likely to be a "convenient enemy"--that which one in power or influence would "love to hate"--because the anti-entity's excesses (whether real or imaginary) would serve to justify the entity's increased power or influence/credibility.

The moderate seeking to affect change more peacefully and in "less controversial" terms, on the other hand, would be more threatening--yes, (you read my words correctly) more threatening. Because it would be harder to argue against the moderate--in effect, delegitimize him or her--the moderate would in essence serve as an "inconvenient friend" that the establishment or status-quo would "hate to love." Besides, a radical is discredited more quickly than a moderate, eventually having been seen as merely a counter-productive, reactionary element among his or her own most core supporters. Furthermore the radical faces the inevitable prospect of being declared as undesirable by the establishment and the rest of the society.

MALCOLM X: THE SHINING BLACK PRINCE

Having laid out my general ideas, I think we are now in a position to approach the story I was so anxious to tell at the beginning of this essay. I will discuss a bit on Malcolm X, because he was such a controversial character in his initial positions of opposition to non-violence and of racial separatism. Perhaps, he is equally "controversial" for his deep transformation in the last 1 to 1 1/2 years of his life. And this eclectic mix fits nicely in my search to answer the question posed in the title of this essay.

I am surprised by how much people have focused on Malcolm X's role in the Nation of Islam (NOI) as opposed to taking a broader view of the entirety of his life. To be certain, Malcolm's involvement in the NOI was a crucial part of his person. But such a short-sighted focus ignores two other critical phases of his development into an African-American leader: the tumultuous pre-NOI years and roughly the last two years of his life. In the interests of brevity, I will focus on the latter. Focusing on his NOI days neglects the fact that Malcolm's doubts with the NOI leadership and his trips to the Hajj and Africa and North Africa had profoundly affected his worldviews about the African-American struggle towards equality and dignity. This change was perhaps as deep as, if not deeper than, his initial contact with the NOI.

To claim that Malcolm X was a Black separatist and that he still harbored venomous hatred towards Whites near the time of his death is an estimation that sharply contrasts with Malcolm's own statements laid down in his posthumously-published autobiography and with the numerous statements that he has made in the press during that critical time period. After all, it does not seem plausible that a man who declares that "I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug)-while praying to the same God with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of the blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. ...I felt the same sincerity. ... We are truly all the same-brothers" would have us think that he still believed that Whites are devils or were created inferior to blacks for instance.

Malcolm's "By Any Means Necessary" speech late in his life suggests that had not yet learned to fully trust the White majority/ establishment. But we must not forget that that time was the chaotic 1960's whose mixture of high points and deep frustrations produced enormous uncertainty about the Civil Rights Movement. These uncertainty put pressures not only Malcolm but many other prominent Black and non-Black civil rights advocates as well. [We may for instance mention Stokley Carmichel, a promising activist who went from being a president of SNCC (Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee) to a "prime minister" of the Black Panthers to exile. Carmichel story is too complicated to go to any detail in here. Perhaps, someone else will write an exploratory essay on him.]

Two days before his death, Malcolm was reported to state in an interview:

"Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant—the one who wanted to help the Muslims and the whites get together—and I told her there wasn't a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I've lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then—like all [Black] Muslims—I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years. That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days—I'm glad to be free of them." [Malcolm X: The Minutes of Our Last Meeting. Gordon Parks. Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. Ed. John Henrik Clarke, p. 122.]

Some have painted Malcolm's assassination merely as the result of a power struggle between him and Elijah Muhammad, the leader most accredited with building up the NOI to the potent organization it became in the 1950s and 1960s. Some have also believed that his death was the summation of all of his years of being consumed by blind hatred. Both of these ideas apparently prevailed in The New York Times and the LA Times, for example.

I think these reporters were hasty at best, and malicious at worst, because they failed to see and recognize Malcolm's evolution. I am coming to the realization that they failed to see just how profoundly Malcolm had come since his "New York Red" and "Detroit Red" days of bootlegging, prostitution, and hustling. It seems to me that they failed to see that Malcolm had positive potential deeply hidden down beneath his terrible experiences suffered in childhood: he witnessed his family being harassed by the likes of groups such as the Klan and believed his father was killed through foul means. They failed to see how his academic and intellectual gift (he earned straight A's and became class-president of the eight grade in a school based in a community predominated by whites) was soured by the reported lack of faith and confidence from a teacher; it turns that this teacher discouraged from pursuing his goal to go to law school. Apparently they failed to realize how deeply Malcolm had changed within prison by, almost in a single stroke, relinquishing his past criminal vices. With identical energy, he helped develop a sense of purpose and integrity to many socially and economically disenfranchised African-Americans in Harlem.

And yet again they had overlooked, through simple ignorance or deliberately convenient negligence, Malcolm's change of heart away from the NOI. In all of this, the man who met a gruesome and tragic fate was a complex person at a level farther than perhaps most who had estimated--one who had demonstrated the ability to be eloquent, conflicted by a history of troubled experiences, and one who above all demonstrated the ability and courage to be self-reflective and self-conscious as much as he was aware of the suffering of others. Even in his NOI days, so it seems, he was more complex of a figure than one who appeared to simply adovcated retaliatory violence. Adam Pachter notes a couple of significant traits that marked a reassuring consistency and restraint in Malcolm's personality. For example, Pachter explains that despite Malcolm's fiery speeches, he was polite to all who approached him in person. Pachter continues: "And the violence he claimed as a right was defensive -- self-defensive, to be precise. Malcolm X never advocated the initiating of violence, and several times he defused situations when a crowd threatened to get out of control."

I am inspired by Ossie Davis' famous (and no less eloquent) >February 27, 1965 eulogy of Malcolm X. Certain lines are powerfully revealing:

There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee even, from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain. And we will smile. Many will say turn away, away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man. And we will smile. They will say that he is of hate, a fanatic, a racist who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle! And we will answer and say to them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him. ... And we will know him then for what he was and is. A prince. Our own black shining prince who didn't hesitate to die because he loved us so.

But none of this must have passed in the minds of the reporters who were so seemingly easy to rush into judgment on Malcolm X, the meaning and legacy of his struggles and of many others. In fact repetitive references were made in the mainstream press to "[internal] feud" and to descriptions of Malcolm as "black militant" or "black extremist" or addressing a "black supremacist" rally, in some form or another. These simplistic portrayals or associations persisted despite that fact a deeper side to him was revealed through his statements quoted in other articles in the very same newspapers (which instead showed a more embracing and thoughtful Malcolm). For example, check the collection of newspaper clippings published under the section, February 21, 1965: The Assassination and Aftermath, as part of the The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University. 'Never mind he was claiming a change of heart', they were probably thinking, 'he's dead just because another jealous Black man put a bullet to his head.'

CONCLUSION: ON RADICALS, MODERATES, AND THE MEANING OF MALCOLM

These kinds of arguments and insinuations are the main reason why I am incorporating Malcolm's story into the general purview of my question that I originally set upon answering. I submit that Malcolm X may have been killed not because he was a radical or even a "repented" radical. From far that. Perhaps, instead, he was killed because he had demonstrated an openness, a courage, an ability to change for the better; perhaps his met his tragic end because he began to moderate his attitudes and beliefs.

Pachter's PBS article concludes:

Towards the end of his life, Malcolm was changing...Malcolm began to seek common cause with the civil rights movement, to declare himself for objectives -- like voting rights -- that as a separatist Muslim he had previously thought irrelevant. He was "not for wanton violence," Malcolm X insisted, "I'm for justice." And although his commitment to use any means necessary to reach that justice never wavered, it may be that towards the end Malcolm no longer thought that violence would be one of those necessary means." [Adam Pachter, Any Means Necessary.].

In light of all of the above, Malcolm may have been more of a "threat" to the anti-civil rights and anti-black improvement establishments after his break with the extremes of the NOI than when he was a rising proponent of them. If Malcolm had been allowed to live longer, it is possible that he could have eventually ended up working with Dr. King in non-violence and integration methods. If both had been allowed to live longer, perhaps much more could have been achieved in the Civil Rights Movement and in healing America's race (and minority) problems then. Unfortunately, both Malcolm's and King's deaths immediately provoked widespread violent race riots; their deaths were the flash of spark to a powder keg of tensions that had been brewing for a long time.

I do not pretend that radicals are not dangerous. But it may be time to start probing whether moderates are deemed more dangerous, not least because of their ability to affect more substantial and more enduring and productively transformative changes. We owe to ourselves, to the past, to the present and the future, and to rest of the world that we become more thoughtful towards our surroundings--that we appreciate any notion that a better, more appreciative understanding of ourselves and others can no longer be considered a luxury.