NEW YORK, Sept 12, (Agencies): Amid threats of Quran burning and a heated dispute over a planned Muslim cultural center in New York, Muslim leaders and rights activists warn of growing anti-Muslim feeling in America partly provoked for political reasons.
“Many people now treat Muslims as ‘the other’ — as something to vilify and to discriminate against,” said Daniel Mach of the American Civil Liberties Union.
And, he said, some people have exploited that fear in the media, “for political gain or cheap notoriety.”
The imam leading the project to build the cultural center, including a prayer room, near the site of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks said there was a rise of what he called “Islamophobia” and the debate had been radicalized by extremists.
“The radicals in the United States and the radicals in the Muslim world, feed off each other. And to a certain extent, the attention that they’ve been able to get by the media has even aggravated the problem,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in an interview with ABC news aired on Sunday.
Rauf said he wanted to correct a misperception that Muslims in the United States were under pressure and could not practice their religion freely.

“It is not the truth at all. The fact is, we are practicing. We fast, we pray, we do our prayers. ... The laws protect us. Our political systems protect us. And we enjoy those freedoms in this country. And the Muslim world needs to recognize that” he said.
He says the New York cultural center, a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, is meant to build bridges, but critics say it is insensitive to victims of the Sept 11 attacks.
Global media coverage of the issue reached fever pitch this weekend with an obscure Florida pastor threatening to burn the Quran, Muslims’ holy book, on the anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks. He subsequently dropped the threat.
President Barack Obama on Friday tried to quell signs of anti-Muslim sentiment and appealed for religious tolerance, a founding element of US democracy.
Despite the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against Islamic extremists like al-Qaeda, Obama stressed the United States was not at war with Islam.

“We have to make sure that we don’t start turning on each other,” he told a news conference. “And I will do everything that I can as long as I’m president ... to remind the American people that we are one nation, under God. And we may call that God different names, but we remain one nation.”
Some experts say the Democrat can learn from his Republican predecessor President George W. Bush who they credit with improving US attitudes to Muslims after the 2001 attacks.
Alan Cooperman of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said, “Americans’ opinions of Muslims became more positive after 9/11 than they were before 9/11.”
Pew polls from 2001 found 59 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Muslim Americans two months after the attacks compared to 45 percent in March of that year, and that the biggest improvement was among conservative Republicans.
Cooperman credited the increase to Bush’s outreach to show the Muslim community as a religion of peace.
On Friday, Obama himself credited Bush.
“One of the things that I most admired about President Bush was, after 9/11, him being crystal clear about the fact that we were not at war with Islam,” Obama said. “We were at war with terrorists and murderers who had perverted Islam, had stolen its banner to carry out their outrageous acts.”
Mistrust of Muslims has grown in recent years. A Pew poll released in August found the number of Americans with a favorable view of Islam was 30 percent, down from 41 percent in 2005.

Partisan
American feelings about Islam are partisan — 54 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Islam compared to 27 percent of Democrats. In November 2001 there was not the same partisan divide of opinions on Islam.
Some believe Obama could convert minds were he to mount the type of public relations campaign which saw Bush attend mosques and talk with Muslim leaders back in 2001.
Up to 7 million Americans are estimated to be Muslim. Having a favorable view of the religion is closely correlated with knowing a Muslim. Experts say American Muslims are well assimilated here, well-educated and fare well economically.
“We are Americans. We are doctors. We are investment bankers. We are taxi drivers. We are store keepers. We are lawyers. We are — we are part of the fabric of America, the New York Imam Rauf said.
“And the way that America today treats its Muslims is being watched by over a billion Muslims worldwide,” he said.
The run-up to the hotly contested November US congressional elections is also blamed for heightened tension, with some conservatives using nationalist rhetoric and touting their commitment to Christian principles.

Jamie Chandler, political science professor at Hunter College in New York, said Obama should promote a more positive view of Islam but needed the support of fellow Democrats.
When Obama endorsed the right of Muslims to build at the New York site in August, several senior Democrats including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, publicly disagreed.
“That creates uncertainty in the public,” Chandler said.
Further uncertainty is created by public questioning of Obama’s Christian faith. A Pew Research Center poll in August showed nearly 1 in 5 Americans thought he was Muslim, up 11 percent from March.
Conservative talk show radio host Rush Limbaugh refers to the president as Barack Hussein Obama, pointedly using his middle name as if to imply he is Muslim.
When General Colin Powell endorsed Obama’s presidential bid in 2008, he said Obama was Christian and posed the question — what difference would it make if he were a Muslim?
But others feed the divisions. Republican Newt Gingrich, thought to be mulling a presidential run, recently compared the project for a Muslim cultural center near the Sept 11 site to planting a Swastika near Jewish monuments.

Recital
First came the tears, the solemn bugle call and the recital of the names of the dead. Then came the chants, speeches and angry shouts.
It was a Sept 11 anniversary unlike any other. For the first time, politics and rage were an overt part of New York’s commemoration of the anniversary of the attacks, an occasion marked in the past only by rituals of sorrow.
A Saturday morning ceremony in which relatives of the victims placed flowers in a reflecting pool and read the names of their loved ones gave way to an afternoon of protests and counter-demonstrations over a proposed Islamic center near ground zero.
Some called the rallies a disgraceful intrusion. Indeed, some of the people attending the protests came from far away, and appeared to be drawn only by a deep-rooted dislike of Muslims or passion for liberal causes.

But the throngs included an ample number of 9/11 mourners, too, who joined the anti-mosque crowd of about 1,500 after attending the ground zero memorial ceremony.
“A lot of people say it’s a day of solemn remembrance. But for us, every day is a solemn day,” said Al Santora, who lost his firefighter son, Christopher, in the 2001 attacks, and attended the rally with his wife, four daughters and four grandchildren.
For a few hours, the political and cultural furor over whether the proposed Islamic center and mosque belongs so close to the trade center site mostly gave way to the somber anniversary ceremony and pleas from elected officials for religious tolerance.
At the other Sept 11 attack sites in Washington and Pennsylvania, as at ground zero, elected leaders sought to remind Americans of the acts of heroism that marked a Tuesday in 2001 and the national show of unity that followed.
President Barack Obama, appealing to an unsettled nation from the Pentagon where 184 people died in 2001, declared that the United States could not “sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.”
“As Americans we are not — and never will be — at war with Islam,” the president said. “It was not a religion that attacked us that September day — it was al-Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion.”

In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, first lady Michelle Obama and her predecessor, Laura Bush, spoke at a public event together for the first time since last year’s presidential inauguration. At the rural field where the 40 passengers and crew of United Flight 93 lost their lives, Obama said “a scar in the earth has healed,” and Bush said “Americans have no division” on this day.
In New York, the leader of a small Christian congregation in Florida who had planned to burn copies of the Quran to mark the Sept 11 anniversary called off his plans.
Pastor Terry Jones gave an interview to NBC television’s “Today” after flying to New York in hopes of meeting with leaders of the mosque and persuading them to move the Islamic center in exchange for his canceling his own plans. No meeting had taken place, he said.
Nonetheless, he said, no copies of the Quran would be burned. “Not today, not ever.”
Jones’ plan had drawn opposition across the political spectrum and the world. Obama had appealed to him on television, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a personal phone call, not to burn the Islamic holy book. Gen David Petraeus, head of the US mission in Afghanistan, said carrying out the plan would have endangered American troops.
Nevertheless, there were isolated reports of Quran desecrations on the anniversary, including two not far from ground zero.

In Afghanistan, two protesters died and four were injured as Afghans protested for a third day Sunday, an Afghan police official said, despite Jones’ decision to call off the burning.
There were no arrests in New York, police said. There were scattered scuffles in the streets, including one in which a man ripped up another’s poster advocating freedom of religion and the second man struck back with the stick.
Near the World Trade Center site, a memorial to the 2,752 who died there played out mostly as it had each year since 2001. Bells were tolled to mark the times of impact of the two hijacked jets and the times the twin towers collapsed.
Assigned to read the names of the fallen, relatives of 9/11 victims calmly made their way through their lists, then struggled, some looking skyward, as they addressed their lost loved ones.
“David, please know that we love you. We miss you desperately,” said Michael Brady, whose brother worked at Merrill Lynch. “We think about you and we pray for you every day.”
As they finished reading names, two relatives of 9/11 victims issued pleas — one to God and one to New York — that the site remain “sacred.”
Family members of Sept 11 victims also laid flowers in a reflecting pool and wrote individual messages along its edges.

Despicable
A senior Egyptian cleric on Sunday condemned a group of Christians who tore up pages of the Quran outside the White House on the anniversary of 9/11 saying their act was “despicable.”
“They are a minority full of rancour, blinded by extremism and bad intentions aimed at undermining Islam,” the grand imam of Al-Azhar mosque Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb said according to the official MENA news agency.
“Their despicable act will not harm” the Quran, he said about a small group of conservative Christians who on Saturday tore some pages from a Quran in a protest outside the White House.
Al-Azhar is the main seat of learning for Sunni Islam, and also runs an influential university based in Cairo.
“Part of why we’re doing that, please hear me: the charade that Islam is a peaceful religion must end,” said Randall Terry, a leading anti-abortion campaigner, and one of six people who took part in Saturday’s protest.
Another activist, Andrew Beacham, read out a few Quran passages calling for hatred towards Christians and Jews, and then ripped those pages from an English paperback edition of the book.
Al-Azhar had said in a statement on Thursday that a bid by the Florida church to burn copies of the Quran would be a “disaster for co-existence and peace between humans” that would provoke Muslim anger.

Mosque
In Berwyn, Pennsylvania, a new mosque recently opened in this well-to-do suburb of Philadelphia, but not many people noticed.
That was fine with leaders of the Islamic Society of Greater Valley Forge. Amid a tense national climate for US Muslims, they did not seek publicity for the happy occasion, only continued peace with their neighbors: a Jewish synagogue next door and Baptist church across the street.
The Muslims’ good relations with other faiths and the town at large offers a stark contrast to American communities torn by anti-Islamic acts, including arson at the site of a planned mosque in Tennessee and a threatened Quran burning in Florida.
In New York, debate rages over a planned Islamic center and mosque near ground zero. And everywhere tensions are heightened because Friday’s joyous Muslim celebration of Eid al-Fitr falls a day before the somber ninth anniversary of Sept. 11.
But in Tredyffrin Township, about 20 miles (30 kms) northwest of Philadelphia, community members say a tradition of religious tolerance, combined with an educated population and small-town friendliness, have yielded years of harmonious coexistence.
“We have much more in common than not in common,” mosque president Mohammad Aziz said. “We are blessed with very good neighbors.”

Township officials conceded some trepidation among residents when the Islamic Society sought construction permits in 2008. The growing Sunni group planned to build on land behind the small house it had used as a mosque since 1994.
Most concerns were standard zoning issues like parking, traffic and stormwater runoff. But the concept of a mosque was jarring to some, despite Muslims having long worshipped at the site, said Judy DiFilippo, a township supervisor for 20 years until her retirement in January.
“It was something brand new to the community. Even though they were using an existing building, it wasn’t an obvious mosque,” DiFilippo said.
The plans were approved; construction and fundraising began in earnest, capped by the mosque opening on June 5. DiFilippo said there have been no problems, which she attributed to an “underlying theme of tolerance that just comes with this community.”
Yossi Kaplan, a Lubavitch rabbi at Chabad Jewish Center next door, said he was approached by people seeking his opposition to the project — but waved them off. The two faiths were enjoying solid relations, to the point where they shared parking lots and Muslims helped with tasks that Jews cannot perform on the Sabbath.
The rabbi expected nothing less from his neighbors, regardless of religion. This is America, Kaplan said, and this is how it’s supposed to be.
“We’re just good friends. We’re really good neighbors,” he said. “There’s never been any issues.”