The weather is changing. Obama has at last crept out on the limb of supporting the mosque in downtown New York. The liberal media are preparing the ground for him. The other day Brian Lehrer of WNYC (whom I assailed repeatedly for the interview he did grilling the wife of the imam of the mosque near Ground Zero), shifted his tone and told listeners that there is no connection between the mosque and terrorist groups. Good for him.
And Michael Barbaro of the Times has a very good piece on Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to stick by the mosque in spite of flak from his own base. The piece is notable for the warm and fuzzy tone it takes re Debbie Almontaser, the educator whom Bloomberg abandoned 3 years ago, during the Khalil Gibran academy flap, and for its insistence that Bloomberg was sensitized by anti-Semitic housing discrimination in Medford, Mass., where he grew up.
Those claims [re the mosque and terror] infuriated Mr. Bloomberg, in no small part, those close to him say, because of his own family’s brush with prejudice when his parents shielded their identity from the seller of their house in Medford, Mass., a town where entire neighborhoods were still off limits to Jews.
Mr. Bloomberg’s instinctive discomfort with the nature and tenor of the growing debate about the center moved him to seek the counsel of others he trusted.
A few weeks ago, he approached an adviser on Muslim issues, Fatima A. Shama, a Palestinian-American who is his commissioner of immigrant affairs. He asked what she thought of the project.
Ms. Shama framed the issue in personal terms: she has three sons, she told the mayor, but there is no place in the city for them to share their Muslim faith with their Jewish and Christian friends.
“This could be that place,” Ms. Shama told Mr. Bloomberg.
Note that mega-donor Michael Steinhardt, who has supported countless Jewish causes, including birthright Israel and the New Republic, and a Jewish charter school, is sadly/predictably against his friend Bloomberg. Note that Bloomberg takes the counsel of a Palestinian-American aide. I gather that the New Republic site is happily split on the question. This might be a landmark moment, in which the Jewish parochialism of the neoconservative gang is taken on by a new universalism among empowered Jews (Peter Beinart et al) who understand their responsibility to a broader society.
And yes, let’s hope Shama talks to her boss about the right of return, and all the presidents who supported it…
