Aug 30 12:07 AM US/Eastern

By RACHEL ZOLL

AP Religion Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - Adnan Zulfiqar, a graduate student, former U.S. Senate aide and American-born son of Pakistani immigrants, will soon give the first khutbah, or sermon, of the fall semester at the University of Pennsylvania. His topic has presented itself in the daily headlines and blog posts over the disputed mosque near ground zero.

What else could he choose, he says, after a summer remembered not for its reasoned debate, but for epithets, smears, even violence?

As he writes, Zulfiqar frets over the potential fallout and what he and other Muslim leaders can do about it. Will young Muslims conclude they are second-class citizens in the U.S. now and always?

"They're already struggling to balance, `I'm American, I'm Muslim,' and their ethnic heritage. It's very disconcerting," said Zulfiqar, 32, who worked for former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat, and now serves Penn's campus ministry. "A controversy like this can make them radical or become more conservative in how they look at things or how they fit into the American picture."

Whatever the outcome, the uproar over a planned Islamic center near the World Trade Center site is shaping up as a signal event in the story of American Islam.

Strong voices have emerged from outside the Muslim community. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been steadfast in his support for the project. Jon Stewart nightly mocks the bigotry that the protest unleashed.

"The sentiment, say, five years ago among many Muslims, especially among many young Muslims, was that, `We're in this all by ourselves,'" said Omer Mozaffar, a university lecturer in Chicago who leads Quran study groups as a buffer between young people and the extremist preachers on YouTube. `That has changed significantly. There have been a lot of people speaking out on behalf of Muslims."

Eboo Patel, an American Muslim leader and founder of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago nonprofit that promotes community service and religious pluralism, said Muslims are unfortunately experiencing what all immigrant groups endured in the U.S. before they were fully accepted as American. Brandeis University historian Jonathan D. Sarna has noted that Jews faced a similar backlash into the 1800s when they tried to build synagogues, which were once banned in New York.

Patel believes American Muslims are on the same difficult but inevitable path toward integration.

"I'm not saying this is going to be happy," Patel said. "But I'm extremely optimistic."

Yet, the overwhelming feeling is that the controversy has caused widespread damage that will linger for years.

American Muslim leaders say the furor has emboldened opposition groups to resist new mosques around the country, at a time when there aren't enough mosques or Islamic schools to serve the community.

Rhetoric from some politicians that lumps all Muslims with terrorists will depress the Muslim vote, analysts say.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said in opposing the Islamic center that, "America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization."

U.S. Muslims who have championed democracy and religious tolerance question what they've accomplished. If the "extremist" label can be hung on someone as apparently liberal as the imam at the center of the outcry, Feisal Abdul Rauf, then any Muslim could come under attack. Feisal supports women's rights, human rights and interfaith outreach.

"The joke is on moderate Muslims," said Muqtedar Khan, a University of Delaware political scientist and author of "American Muslims, Bridging Faith and Freedom." "What's the point if you're going to be treated the same way as a radical? If I get into trouble are they going to treat me like I'm a supporter of al-Qaeda?"

U.S. Muslims are themselves divided over the proposed mosque.

Feisal and his wife, Daisy Khan (no relation to Muqtedar Khan), want to build a 13-story, $100 million community center called Park51 two blocks from the World Trade Center site. It would be modeled on the YMCA or Jewish Community Center, with programming for the entire city, and would include a mosque.

Some Muslims felt from the start that the plan was misguided, given the wounds of the Sept. 11 attacks and widespread misunderstanding about Islam. Yet they felt compelled to defend the proposal when the discussion over religious freedom and cultural sensitivity turned ugly.

Days ago, a brick nearly smashed a window at the Madera Islamic Center in central California, where signs were left behind that read, "Wake up America, the enemy is here," and "No temple for the god of terrorism." This past week in New York, a Muslim cab driver had his face and throat slashed in a suspected hate crime.

The poisonous atmosphere comes at a still fragile time in the development of Muslim communal life.

Leaders have spent years trying to persuade Muslim immigrants to come out of their enclaves and fully embrace being American. The task became that much more difficult in the aftermath of 9/11. Many Muslims pulled back, convinced that if another terrorist attack occurs, the U.S. government will put them in internment camps, like the Japanese in World War II. Their American-born children, meanwhile, have felt rejected by their own country.

David Ramadan, a Muslim and vice chair of ethnic coalitions for Republican Party in Virginia, predicts that comments from political figures in both major parties will depress Muslim voting in years to come.

Ramadan and other Muslim Republicans have been pressing GOP leaders not to support a particular mosque, but to acknowledge that American Muslims have equal rights under the Constitution.

"Who wants to come into the fold of the Republican Party today, or even the fold of the Democratic Party?" Ramadan asked. "They just increased the number of independents in America."

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1409895&forum_id=2#15923121)

Updated | 6:50 p.m. Last August, there was anecdotal evidence that people in many parts of the global village were watching, if not always quite understanding, the furious debate in the United States over health insurance, as it devolved into televised shouting matches about “death panels.” This year, it seems that the same sort of attention is being paid to the similarly intense fury around proposals to construct a handful of mosques in American cities as far apart as New York and Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Last week, two terrorism experts who monitor jihadist Web sites warned that, with outraged protests against mosque-building and provocative events like a scheduled Sept. 11 Koran-burning in Florida and a “9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero,” Americans “are handing Al Qaeda a propaganda coup, an absolute propaganda coup.”

Days later, the Taiwanese newspaper, Apple Daily, certified that American passions about Islam have become as much a subject of worldwide discussion as the infidelities of Tiger Woods or the rage of Steven Slater by devoting one of its animated video reports to the question, “Is Islamophobia sweeping the U.S.?” The animation also confirms that the rest of the world is watching coverage of the debates not just on television, but also on YouTube.

On Monday, Newsweek reported from Afghanistan that a man identified as “a Taliban operative,” told the American magazine that the backlash against the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan is “providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” According to the magazine:

Zabihullah also claims that the issue is such a propaganda windfall — so tailor-made to show how “anti-Islamic” America is — that it now heads the list of talking points in Taliban meetings with fighters, villagers, and potential recruits. “We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks—and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York,” Zabihullah says. “Showing reality always makes the best propaganda.”

In Abu Dhabi, the front page of Monday’s edition of The National, a local English-language newspaper, is dominated by an interview with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, who is now on a speaking tour of the Middle East to promote religious tolerance on behalf of the State Department.

The banner headline for that interview is, “There Is No Struggle Between Islam and America, Imam Says.” That is because, the imam assured the people of the emirate, the struggle over his planned Islamic community center “is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between moderates of all the faith traditions and the radicals of all the faith traditions.”

Mr. Rauf explained that Christian and Jewish leaders have backed his project, in a spirit of interfaith dialogue, before noting: “there are also those very small, loud and vociferous voices who are beating the drum for the opposite kind of discourse.”

The imam added:

[T]his is why it is important, the issue of radicalism is a threat to all of us. We have radicals in the Muslim world and we have radicals in the other faith traditions as well.

The radicals feed off each other and need each other to sustain themselves. So we need right now to combat the radical voices. That’s the only way we can win this struggle, and establish a peaceful world order, which is what everybody wants and everybody needs.

We are evolving an American Islamic identity, and the struggles we are going through today are of the same genre as what the previous faith communities had to face — Jewish immigrants, Catholic immigrants had to face even worse attacks against their communities.

But as time goes on and as the second generation establishes itself and is rooted in the United States they articulate an expression of who we are as Americans and to be seen decreasingly as alien and being local.

Another sign that the rage expressed on American streets and television sets is being watched, and not quite understood, comes from a Times reader in Afghanistan.

Earlier today, a reader of The Lede who describes himself as a “rank-and-file do-gooder in Afghanistan,” wrote in a comment thread discussing a fire at the site of a planned Islamic center in Tennessee:

I’m afraid you have NO IDEA how horrifying this looks to Muslims living in other parts of the world. America, of all places, heaving with irrational fear and loathing of fellow Americans and their houses of worship?! Afghans here have remarked recently to me, “It is confusing why the people turn on each other like the enemies,” and, “Has some madness entered America?” and, most worryingly, “We had hope America was a friend to show us the way to peaceful living together.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1409895&forum_id=2#15924529)

“We can’t say all Muslims are terrorists,” Mr. Dewey said. “There is a huge population of Muslims throughout the world, and we will have to deal constantly with them in the future. If we make enemies constantly, then we will constantly have war.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/nyregion/03poll.html?pagewanted=2&hp

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1409895&forum_id=2#15949056)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703713504575475500753093116.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_world

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1409895&forum_id=2#15977288)

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42029.html

“I would never have done it,” he said when asked what he would have done had he anticipated what would happen. “I'm a man of peace. I mean the whole objective of peace work is not to do something that would provoke controversy.”

Rauf said that developers were still deciding whether they would relocate the proposed mosque, but that he feared moving it could cause an uproar in the Muslim world.

"My major concern with moving it is that the headline in the Muslim world will be Islam is under attack in America, this will strengthen the radicals in the Muslim world, help their recruitment, this will put our people — our soldiers, our troops, our embassies, our citizens — under attack in the Muslim world and we have expanded and given and fueled terrorism," he said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1409895&forum_id=2#16028204)

REMINDER: these radicalization hearings are so offensive that we're SURE to drive some peace-loving american muslims to terrorism!!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1409895&forum_id=2#17478811)