Op-Eds

The controversy over the proposed mosque at the WTC site has become ground zero for American liberal fanaticism.

Reza Aslan is a contributing editor at The Daily Beast. He is the author of No God But God and Beyond Fundamentalism.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that the arguments against the construction of the Cordoba Initiative center in lower Manhattan were so stupid and demagogic as to be beneath notice.

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D. is emerita professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies and a frequent contributor to FOX News, Pajamas Media, and Middle East Quarterly.

One of the clearest lessons about Islam is found in the Sharia. The largest part of the Sharia is devoted to regulating the life of Muslims down to the smallest detail. There is no aspect of life that is not regulated-sex, food, art, business, education, prayer, manners, speech and how to think and not to think.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

There are cogent arguments for, against Park 51.

The most apt comparison between the debate surrounding the planned ground zero mosque is with the one which surrounded the planned Nazi marches in Skokie, a Chicago suburb inhabited by a large number of Jewish holocaust survivors.

After weeks of dodging the issue, at a White House Ramadan dinner Friday night, President Obama came out in support of Park51, the planned Muslim community center and mosque two blocks away from the World Trade Center site.The President says he wasn't endorsing the ground zero mosque—only defending the right to build it. Sam Harris on his failure to acknowledge that Islam is different than other faiths.

A few days ago an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, reported the massacre of six Muslim employees of the Al-Mokauloon al Arab construction company and the wounding of six others