Other 9/11 Victims

The protests are continuing over the Islamic community center set to be built on the site of an abandoned Burlington Coat factory near Ground Zero in New York. If any of these protestors have ever passed the mosque that’s already operating four blocks from Ground Zero, none have ever given any indication of that. Nor have any of these opponents ever hinted about how they feel about a chapel that was built in the Pentagon shortly after the attack on that building that was dedicated to those victims. It is opened to people of all faiths, and on Fridays, Muslims worship there.

No, those who are opposed to the community center are centering on the idea of sensitivity to the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center and their survivors, such as Barbara Olsen and her husband, Ted Olsen. Ms. Olsen was a prominent conservative and a Fox News contributor. She had the misfortune of being in one of the planes that were used in this attack.

If anyone has the right to be offended by the idea of this community center, it would be Ted Olsen. But Mr. Olsen, who served as the Solicitor General under President George W. Bush, has, in fact, defended the viewpoint expressed by President Obama, which is that no religion should be forbidden from building a house of worship if they don’t violate any local laws. Furthermore, Mr. Olsen said “… we don’t want to turn an act of hate against us by extremists into an act of intolerance for people of religious faith.”

Why not? Perhaps Mr. Olsen knows that if we give into feelings of intolerance, mob rule is the result. And the result of mob rule? Hate crimes that don’t try to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. For instance, on Sept. 21, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot and killed by someone upset about the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Sodhi was, in fact, a Sikh, but his killer mistook him for a Muslim.

Unlike Mr. Sodhi, Salman Hamdani was a devout Muslim. Authorities sought to question him about the attacks on the World Trade Center, to determine if he was involved. Turns out this NYPD cadet and first responder was involved: It just took some time to determine the extent of his involvement. Six months after the attack, his body was found near the North Tower. He had his medical equipment with him, and he died trying to help save the lives of others.

More recently, in Boston, a crowd misidentified a passer-by as a Muslim, and someone attacked him with the pole on which an American flag was hung. In New York, over the weekend, supporters of a group protesting the community center confronted a black man because he had on headgear that made him look like a Muslim. He is not. Though this did not end badly, it very easily could have.

Charlton Heston once answered critics of a plan to hold an NRA convention in Denver weeks after the Columbine massacre by saying that his group should not be confused with those killers because both groups owned guns. Neither should those who want to build a community center be confused with terrorists who happen to be of the same religion.