It is “unethical, insensitive and inhumane’ to oppose the planned Islamic community center near Ground Zero, more than 50 leading Muslim organizations said on Wednesday as they characterized the intense debate as a symptom of religious intolerance in the US.
The imam behind the project, meanwhile, was preparing to return to the US after a taxpayer-funded goodwill tour to the Mideast, where he said the debate is about much more than “a piece of real estate.”
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf sidestepped questions about whether he would consider moving the US$100 million Islamic community center.
Instead, he stressed the need to embrace religious and political freedoms in the US.
Leaders of the Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York, an Islamic leadership council that represents a broad spectrum of Muslims in the city, gathered on the steps of City Hall to issue a statement calling for a stop to religious intolerance and affirming the right of the center’s developers to build two blocks north of the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
“We support the right of our Muslim brothers who wish to build that center there,” said Imam Al Amin Abdul Latif, president of the Majlis Ash-Shura.
“However, the bigger issue and the broader issue is the issue of ethnic and religious hatred being spread by groups trying to stop the building of mosques and Islamic institutions across the country,” he said.
This is the first time that the council as a body has spoken out on the weeks-old debate over the proposed center.
Leaders of the council said they were calling attention to what they claimed was an anti-Islamic climate, and that the development of a center near Ground Zero is simply one example.
They also cited a suspicious fire that damaged construction equipment at the site of a future mosque in Tennessee that is being investigated by the FBI, and the opposition to the proposed conversion of a property owned by a Catholic Church into a mosque and community center on Staten Island.
Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor of New York who has opposed the center in lower Manhattan, has said criticism is “not an issue of religion.” He has said it is an issue of being sensitive to the families of Sept. 11 victims and transparency regarding the center’s funding.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday showed 71 percent of New Yorkers want the developers to voluntarily move the project.
Islamic leaders on Wednesday said they would support a move to another location, if that’s what the imam and his supporters choose to do, but they emphasized that Muslims were also killed in the attacks and were first responders.
“We declare unethical, insensitive and inhumane, the notion that our co-religionists are not entitled to the respect of a place of worship according to their faith, near the location where men and women of our religion worked, lived and died — just like other people,” the group’s statement said.
The group is not associated with the planned Islamic center.
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