this summer's death panels:
ground zero mosque

i've got to admit the gops have an amazing capacity to keep coming up with wedge issues in their perpetual campaign to divide and conquer america.

here's how rupert murdoch's ny post puts it:

Feds funding Ground Zero imam's Mideast trip

The imam behind a plan to build a mosque near Ground Zero is set to depart on a multi-country jaunt to the Middle East funded by the State Department -- raising concerns that taxpayers may be helping him with the controversial project's $100 million fund-raising goal.

Feisal Abdul Rauf is taking the publicly funded trip to foster "greater understanding" about Islam and Muslim communities in the United States, the State Department confirmed yesterday.

& here's how huffington post responded:

'Ground Zero Mosque' Imam Helped FBI With Counterterrorism Efforts

In March 2003, federal officials were being criticized for disrespecting the rights of Arab-Americans in their efforts to crack down on domestic security threats in the post-9/11 environment. Hoping to calm the growing tempers, FBI officials in New York hosted a forum on ways to deal with Muslim and Arab-Americans without exacerbating social tensions. The bureau wanted to provide agents with "a clear picture," said Kevin Donovan, director of the FBI's New York office.

Brought in to speak that morning -- at the office building located just blocks from Ground Zero -- was one of the city's most respected Muslim voices: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The imam offered what was for him a familiar sermon to those in attendance. "Islamic extremism for the majority of Muslims is an oxymoron," he said. "It is a fundamental contradiction in terms."

It was, by contemporaneous news accounts, a successful lecture.

Flash forward six-and-a-half years, and Feisal Abdul Rauf occupies a far different place in the political consciousness. The imam behind a controversial proposal to build an Islamic cultural center near those same FBI offices has been called "a radical Muslim," a "militant Islamist" and, simply, the "enemy" by conservative critics. His Cordoba House project, meanwhile, has been framed as a conduit for Hamas to funnel money to domestic terrorist operations.

For those who actually know or have worked with the imam, the descriptions are frighteningly -- indeed, depressingly -- unhinged from reality. The Feisal Abdul Rauf they know, spent the past decade fighting against the very same cultural divisiveness and religious-based paranoia that currently surrounds him.

& here's something earlier from salon:

Building Love at Ground Zero

Believers in Islam should not become America's whipping boys, nor should the guilt from the attacks on 9/11 be assigned as collective guilt to all Muslims. As an African-American Southerner, I live and work near monuments that celebrate the Confederate legacy, hailing as heroes and valiant soldiers men who died for states' rights to continue the cruel and inhuman practices of slavery, including the December 1864 massacre of men, women, and children at Ebenezer Creek, outside of Savannah in Newt Gingrich's Georgia. (The loss of life by some estimates may have exceeded the 9/11 attacks.)I attend church with the direct descendants of those who once owned slaves. But I assign no collective or historic guilt to those whose current wealth and status derived in large part from this abominable practice.

meanwhile

...conservative radio host Laura Ingraham interviewed the imam's wife on "O'Reilly Factor" and said: "I can't find many people who really have a problem with it.... I like what you're trying to do."

but then

...I say the terrorists have won....

yes, the terrorists have won if they've turned us into intolerant fools who trample freedom of religion into the ground.

that's only one irony.

another is, as far as i can tell, you can't even see ground zero from the controversial proposed community center at park51.

one more is that stirring up so much heat pressures the organizers of the project to keep going with it. how can they back down in the face of so much islamophobia? it's like in to kill a mockingbird:

Atticus Finch: There are some things that you're not old enough to understand just yet. There's been some high talk around town to the effect that I shouldn't do much about defending this man.

Scout: If you shouldn't be defending him, then why are you doing it?

Atticus Finch: For a number of reasons. The main one is that if I didn't, I couldn't hold my head up in town.