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Painful Memory for Muslims: The Outrage Over a Proposed Islamic Center After 9/11 - The New York Times

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To the two men who envisioned it, an Egyptian-American real estate developer and an imam long involved in interfaith initiatives, Park51 was a simple but necessary project: a Muslim community center, modeled on the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, with spaces for worship, athletics and cultural programs, open to the public.

But amid lingering tensions and increased Islamophobia 10 years after 9/11, some politicians and a few families of 9/11 victims opposed the plan to build the center several blocks from the former World Trade Center site and called it a “ground zero mosque.”

Opponents even suggested that the project was intended as a victory marker for Islamic extremists, although Muslims had long been part of the fabric of Lower Manhattan and lacked sufficient space for prayer in the area. The ensuing media melee eventually scuttled the plans.

Last week, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, apologized in an essay on CNN.com. The group, founded to fight religious bias, had pushed for a different location for the mosque.

Cordoba House, an organization founded by the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, welcomed the apology. The developer, Sharif El Gamal, declined to comment. But his sister, Jasmine M. El Gamal, who was a Middle East adviser at the Defense Department during the controversy, had a mixed response on Saturday.

“It takes guts to admit a mistake,” she said. “But the apology has an important missing piece: why the A.D.L. opposed Park51. It was Islamophobia and fear of standing up to it. After 9/11, Muslims were bad for politics.”

Ms. El Gamal, who has written about her experiences as a translator at Guantánamo Bay, said 9/11 was doubly painful since “Muslims were both targeted by extremists and blamed for extremists.”

“We were, and remain, caught between a rock and a hard place,” she said, “used as pawns and proxies to make a greater point or start a larger conflict.”

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Painful Memory for Muslims: The Outrage Over a Proposed Islamic Center After 9/11 - The New York Times
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