Sarah Palin’s done it again with another contradictory statement so confusing it will make your brain hurt. In a Facebook post today, Palin decried Pastor Terry Jones’s plans to burn Korans. Sure, okay. Great. THEN she wrote that being sensitive toward other religions was the reason the Park51 prayer space shouldn’t be built. “People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation–much like building a mosque at Ground Zero,” Palin wrote. “Freedom of religion is integral to our charters of liberty… In this as in all things, we should remember the Golden Rule. Isn’t that what the Ground Zero mosque debate has been about?”
Not really, no. First of all, the Ground Zero mosque isn’t AT ground zero: it’s two blocks away, past the subway station, the Century 21 discount store, and dozens of other businesses that are much closer to the former WTC site than it is. Secondly, burning a Qur’an in Florida is NOT the same thing as building a prayer space in lower Manhattan unless you’re willing to assert that all Christians (Sarah Palin included) have the same beliefs as Terry Jones and all Muslims have the same beliefs as the 9/11 hijackers. In opposing the mosque, Palin is writing as if the 9/11 attackers represented the views of all Muslims, which is like saying the acts of the Ku Klux Klan represent the views of all white people.
In case Palin forgets, Christians do not have an exclusive right to the former WTC site AND the three-block radius around it. The twin towers themselves were almost certainly built on the graves of slaves, some of them Muslim. Ground Zero is equally hallowed for the Muslim, Buddhist, or Jewish office workers who died there on 9/11, and all should be allowed to pray nearby. To think that only Muslims should be forced elsewhere could be called “insensitive.”
