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Argument: Religious buildings cancelled in past due to cultural sensitivities

Issue Report: Ground zero mosque

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The Directors of Red State. “The Ground Zero Mosque Should Be Stopped.” August 2nd, 2010: “there actually was an effort to establish a Catholic convent outside of the Auschwitz death camp from the late 1980s through the early 1990s. The parallels between this episode and that of the “Ground Zero mosque” are striking — and the differences are instructive. Roman Catholics per se were not the perpetrators of the Holocaust — to put it mildly, if you truly understand the history of Nazism and the Catholic Church — whereas Muslims acting in purported glorification of their faith were the perpetrators of 9/11; yet the late Pope John Paul II, in 1993, ordered the Auschwitz convent closed not because he felt Catholics were culpable for the Holocaust, but out of sensitivity to Jewish concerns. He understood that for Jews, this ground had been consecrated by the suffering of the victims of Auschwitz and rightly should be sacred to them and to their faith. This precedent was noted by ADL national director Abraham Foxman just last week, and indeed the ADL was involved in the controversy when it was current.”