From Beirut to Manhattan

Your country is attacked. Thousands are killed. And not even 10 years later, the co-religionists of the attackers decide to build a place of worship in the precise neighborhood where, just a few years earlier, their fellow Jews dropped bombs.

Jews? Didn’t I mean Muslims? Aren’t I referring to the plans of some American Muslims to build an Islamic community center near the site of Ground Zero?

Actually, no, I’m not. Last week, the government of Lebanon announced the completion of the restoration of the Magen Abraham Synagogue in Beirut.

Built in 1926, the Moroccan-style building was seriously damaged in the civil war between Muslim and Christian forces from 1975 to 1990. Its disrepair was hastened by the fact that all but a handful of Lebanon’s once-large Jewish population fled the country by the mid-1970s.

But because Judaism is one of Lebanon’s recognized faiths, the government voted to reconstruct the synagogue. Jews in Lebanon and elsewhere donated $200,000 toward the cost, and $150,000 came from the Beirut construction firm Solidere.

The planned restoration was delayed by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006. The Second Lebanon War, which Israel launched in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of five IDF soldiers, left 1,500 Lebanese dead, mostly civilians, displaced another million Lebanese citizens and severely damaged Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Now, you would think that Lebanese politicians would fight bitterly against the synagogue restoration, funded by people who likely support the country that caused so much destruction in their homeland.

That wasn’t the case.

“The Lebanese constitution protects the rights and freedoms of all religions,” Consul General of Lebanon Madonna Ghazal told me.

The refurbished synagogue won’t be a museum or community center. The remaining Jewish community intends to use the space for High Holy Days services and special occasions. Depending on the liturgy, that means Jews in downtown Beirut will likely use it to pray for the return to Jerusalem and peace for Israel.

And that, I probably don’t have to point out, is more than the opponents of the Ground Zero mosque are willing to allow American Muslims to do in downtown Manhattan.

It is shameful, really, this culture war over the right of one group of Americans to build their place of worship where they have been granted the legal right to do so. What we are witnessing is hate-mongering disguised as sensitivity, bigotry disguised as vigilance. It’s election-year steak that staunch Israel supporters like Victor Davis Hanson and the Anti-Defamation League swallowed whole. Thankfully, others, such as Alan Dershowitz and the American Jewish Committee, did not.

Yes, I understand the argument that the location of the center is insensitive, controversial and, therefore, inappropriate. Many Muslims share that opinion, including Miss USA 2010 herself, Rima Fakih, a Muslim American of Lebanese descent. But the First Amendment guarantees our right to offend others — a right others are not afforded, which is why there’s no Miss Saudi Arabia. And that’s why Jews, of all Americans, should see this battle, like it or not, as their own.

Last week, a handful of local rabbis joined with Muslims at a press conference in Los Angeles to declare publicly their support for the center. But, unfortunately, far too few of our rabbis have decided to speak out. What a precedent. Imagine if a national politician or popular pundit ever launches a similar campaign against a synagogue or Jewish community center — those who do not speak up now will have no right to look for allies then.

OK. Let me pause here to write the first lines of all the e-mails I’ll be getting. How can you be so naïve? If only you knew the true background of Imam Rauf, the man behind the center.

These letter writers will seek to educate me on the true nature of Islam, the real history of Cordoba. They will school me in the way extremists use the freedom of open societies to achieve totalitarian ends. They will even want to open my eyes to the true aims of the Lebanese government vis-à-vis that synagogue — to create a veneer of tolerance while Hezbollah is still spreading its poison. (OK, I’ll grant some of tht last part.)

They will continue to forward me Victor Hanson’s stirring rebuke, from FrontPage Magazine, to the center’s supporters.

“So, yes, of course, the mosque will get built,” Hanson wrote. “We will praise ourselves for our tolerance and liberality; voice the accustomed and now scripted condemnation of the supposedly Neanderthal Right for its unsophisticated and bigoted opposition — and then in due time we will read some exposé of the ties of some of the architects of this sick project to radical Islamist groups, as we hear the mosque heralded throughout the radical Middle East as proof of the ultimate victory of the 9/11 mass murderers.”

If I understand Hanson’s logic, we are to deny the right of some Americans to practice their faith because some fanatics somewhere, someday, may misinterpret that freedom as capitulation.

I have a different set of predictions. I predict that if the center is built, it won’t be the center of Islamic enlightenment its supporters advertise, or the command center of radical Islam Hanson warns. It will soon meld into the mishmash of Manhattan life. Sarah Palin will one day accept an invitation to speak there. And everyone will come to see that, in its weird way, the center will have come to both blend in and stand out, like a synagogue in downtown Beirut.