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 The World Trade Center Mosque and the Constitution

MARK HELPRIN


The plan to erect a mosque of major proportions in what would have been the shadow of the World Trade Center involves not just the indisputable constitutional rights that sanction it, but, providentially, others that may frustrate it.


Mosques have commemoratively been established upon the ruins or in the shells of the sacred buildings of other religions—most notably but not exclusively in Cordoba, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and India. When sited in this fashion they are monuments to victory, and the chief objection to this one is not to its existence but that it would be near the site of atrocities—not just one—closely associated with mosques because they were planned and at times celebrated in them.


Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant.


Disregarding pleas to build it at a sufficient remove so as not to be linked to an abomination committed, widely praised, and throughout the world seldom condemned in the name of Islam, the militant proponents of the World Trade Center mosque are guilty of a poorly concealed provocation. They dare Americans to appear anti-Islamic and intolerant or just to roll over.


But the opposition to what they propose is no more anti-Islamic or intolerant than to protest a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor or Nanjing would be anti-Shinto or even anti-Japanese. How about a statue of Wagner at Auschwitz, a Russian war memorial in the Katyn Forest, or a monument to British and American air power at Dresden? The indecency of such things would be neither camouflaged nor burned away by the freedoms of expression and religion. And that is what the controversy is about, decency and indecency, not the freedom to worship, which no one denies.


Although there is of course no question of reciprocity—no question whatever of a church in Mecca or anything even vaguely like it—constitutionally and if local codes applied without bias allow, there is unquestionably a right to build. Reciprocity or not, we have principles that we value highly and will not abandon. The difficulty is that the principles of equal treatment and freedom of religion have, so to speak, been taken hostage by the provocation. As in many hostage situations, the choice seems to be between injuring what we hold dear or accepting defeat. This, anyway, is how it has played out so far.

The proponents of the mosque know that Americans will not and cannot betray our constitutional liberties. Knowing that we would not rip the foundation from the more than 200 years of our history that it underpins, they may imagine that they have achieved a kind of checkmate.

Their knowledge of the Constitution, however, does not penetrate very far, and perhaps they are not as clever as they think. The Constitution is a marvelous document, and a reasonable interpretation of it means as well that no American can be forced to pour concrete. No American can be forced to deliver materials. No American can be forced to bid on a contract, to run conduit, dig a foundation, or join steel.

And a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution means that the firemen's, police, and restaurant workers' unions, among others, and the families of the September 11th dead, and anyone who would protect, sympathize with and honor them, are free to assemble, protest and picket at the site of the mosque that under the Constitution is free to be built.

A reasonable interpretation of the Constitution means that no American can be forced to cross a picket line in violation of conscience or even of mere preference. Who, in all decency, would cross a picket line manned by those whose kin were slaughtered—by the thousands—so terribly nearby? And who in all decency would cross such a line manned by the firemen, police and other emergency personnel who know every day that they may be called upon to give their lives in a second act?

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, says of those who with heartbreaking bravery went into the towers: "We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting."

Mr. Mayor, the firemen, the police, the EMTs and the paramedics who rushed into those buildings, many of them knowing that they would die there, did not do so to protect constitutional rights. They went often knowingly to their deaths to protect what the Constitution itself protects: people, flesh and blood, men and women, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers. Although you yourself may not know this, they did.

The choice is not between abandoning them or abandoning the Constitution, for although the liberties the Constitution guarantees sometimes put us at a disadvantage even of self-preservation, they also make it possible for 300 million Americans to prevail—reasonably, peacefully, and within the limits of the law—against provocations such as this.

They make it possible to prevent the construction of the mosque at this general location—with no objection whatsoever to, but rather warm encouragement of, its construction elsewhere—not by force or decree but by argument, persuasion, and peaceable assembly. These are rights that the Constitution guarantees as well, and clearly it is one's constitutional right to oppose the mosque, not to participate in the building of it, and to convince others of the same.

This small and symbolic crisis is not a test of constitutional liberties, for in regard to the question at hand the Constitution allows discretion. It is rather a test of how far America can be pushed, and America is not at all as powerless as it has been portrayed.

That is because the street in front of the mosque that the Constitution says can be built can be filled with people who can effectively protest it because the Constitution says that they are free. Those who do not fear to do so need only go there and stand upon their convictions, their beliefs, their reason, their laws, their history, and what is in their hearts.

Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt), "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt) and, most recently, "Digital Barbarism" (HarperCollins


Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2010


Hollow Talk in the South China Sea
 
By MARK HELPRIN

Lurking about the presidency in the guise of secretary of state, America's chief diplomat has embarked upon a mistake that someday may rival Dean Acheson's exclusion of Korea from the Pacific defense area, or April Glaspie's muddled words to Saddam Hussein. At a regional meeting in Hanoi in late July, Hillary Clinton unveiled an initiative the effect of which is an attempt to forge a defensive alliance along the maritime perimeter, with nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines. Like her predecessor Acheson, Mrs. Clinton seems averse or blind to military analysis. Her inevitably stillborn South China Sea initiative is showy diplomacy that may lead either to a military clash with China or, more likely, a ratification of China's aims as the United States lets its implied guarantees die on the vine.

China's assertions in regard to the potentially oil rich and strategically important South China Sea are consistent, clear, and patently absurd. Based upon the questionable ownership of uninhabited rocks and shoals, some which do not rise above water and others roughly the size of a Volkswagen, it claims an area almost as large as the Caribbean Basin and as far as 1,800 miles from its nearest shoreline.

In linking America's national interests to those of the coastal states thus insulted, Mrs. Clinton's recent comments are commendable but insufficiently backed. China above all is sensitive to "paper-tigerism" and ready to challenge it, especially in regard to its essential interests and where the balance of applicable power is swinging in its favor. A naval battle in which China has the upper hand? Do we not have the most powerful military in the world?
We do, but strategic appraisal must not be one-dimensional. Although decisive to some, that this country spends more on defense than the next 14 countries combined is irrelevant to things such as the scope of its commitments, personnel costs, the willingness or reticence of allies, purchasing power parity, force structure, asymmetrical advantage and disadvantage, domestic politics, strategical genius, its absence, and many other factors including not least geography.

China fought us to a draw in Korea more than half a century ago. In Vietnam we stayed our hand for fear of drawing it into the battle, when its primitive navy was not even a tenth the size of ours, it had no nuclear weapons that could threaten us, and the Western Pacific was an American lake with a necklace of massive military installations now largely abandoned and an alliance structure we are at present trying to rebuild with words. Whittled down by successive administrations, the big stick now turns on the Obama lathe as it is pressed against the Gates knife. If present trends merely continue, in five or 10 years, when the U.S. will have to decide whether to challenge China's claims or acquiesce, the correlation of forces will have shifted much more to China's advantage.

China hungers for the oil in these waters that break upon its coast. The South China Sea has long been the subject of its perfervid declarations and domestic propaganda as a kind of oceanic Tibet. Yet it is hardly likely that an American president in his right mind would go to the brink in the South China Sea. In the Taiwan crisis of 1996, Mrs. Clinton's husband cautiously or timidly kept naval forces east of Taiwan, as at China's behest President Obama has thus far kept a carrier strike group out of the Yellow Sea despite our declaration to hold an exercise close to where the North Korean provocation occurred.
China's chief advantage in the South China Sea is the force-multiplying proximity of its land-based air and naval power. Without fully developed expeditionary rights and facilities in surrounding states to negate this (i.e. the 1960s redux), the U.S. would be forced to strike airfields and ports in China itself, meaning full-scale war. The alternative would be a war of attrition against swarms of China's planes and submarines.

With no naval or air forces to speak of, and in fear of China's reprisals, our putative allies in the area might be reluctant to host land-based American aircraft. We would have to risk dispatching the bulk of our shrinking carrier fleet for the sake of deploying at most 350 fighter and attack planes against four or five times that number (by then including China's fifth-generation equivalent to our F-22 that we just nipped in the bud) rising from the giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier that is China itself. American hunter-killer submarines can decimate the Chinese submarine fleet, but by no means necessarily before—in conjunction with air and surface assaults, and terminally guided ballistic missiles—it can sink American carriers.
Distances and resupply are decisive. The Paracel Islands, a likely flash point, are 14,000 miles from Norfolk, 8,000 from San Diego, 6,000 from Pearl Harbor, and 2,300 from Guam, but only 200 from the Chinese base at Yu-Lin. China's Guangzhou military region is rich in dispersed bases that if they are vulnerable to attack are no more so than our far fewer and more remote bases in the Western Pacific. China's nuclear deterrent even now makes nuclear weapons immaterial to such a confrontation, no matter which way it goes. And if the United States, suffering losses such as have not been sustained since World War II, was seeming to prevail, the mystery—for some—of China's indulgence toward super-reckless North Korea would come clear as the North invaded the South and, with little in reserve, we turned impotently to the fate of millions of Koreans and the 27,000 American soldiers in their midst.

As Chinese naval, air, and nuclear power rapidly grows and ours diminishes, Mrs. Clinton's recent opening is an invitation to China to gamble on odds moving in its favor. Although the U.S. military has come up with an elegant, workable strategy to counter this dynamic—"The Air-Sea Battle"—it cannot succeed if the shrinkage of aircraft and ship numbers, ballistic missile defenses, foreign basing, flying hours, anti-submarine warfare, and the defense-industrial sector continues apace.

That our resolution is hardening as we strip ourselves of the means to support it is a cause of anxiety to China, which sees in the "wavering and chaos in U.S. policy" the kind of confusion that can lead to unintended consequences. We must not retreat from making demands that are reasonable and just, but we must be properly equipped to see them through. Diplomats should know this, and that in the relations between rival states little is more dangerous than hollow talk, except perhaps hollow talk that in the uninformed imagination of the speaker appears rock solid.

Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt), "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt) and, most recently, "Digital Barbarism" (HarperCollins).

This article appeared in the Monday August 16th edition of The Wall Street Journal. A typographical error has been corrected in this version.