ground zero mosque

Today in Mosque: A Compromise Is Not Looking Imminent

The debate over the Islamic community center near ground zero rages on, as it will day after day after day, until it’s finally built the election is finally over. And though some people talk of a “compromise” between the owners of the site and their critics, positions, if anything, seem to be hardening. Sorry, Howard Dean.

• While Imam Faisul Abdul Rauf begins his probably awkward Middle East interfaith tolerance tour, his wife Daisy Khan doesn’t sound like she wants to move the mosque. “There is too much at stake,” she says. “Constitutional rights, the development of the Muslims here, how the world is watching the United States. We tell people America upholds religious freedom. We should not compromise those values.”

• A boycott of the mosque among construction workers and suppliers of building materials is growing online, according to the Daily News. “Hopefully, this will be a tool to get them to move it,” said the creator of a website organizing construction workers against the mosque. “I got a problem with this ostentatious building looming over Ground Zero.” Right over ground zero!

• Speaking of location confusion, Palin made some kind of vague, cranky comment about the AP’s decision to ban the use of the phrase “ground zero mosque.” She also pointed out that if Nancy Pelosi wants to investigate the opposition to the ground zero mosque, she’ll be investigating Harry Reid and Howard Dean.

• Dean was on Countdown last night, telling Keith Olbermann that “this might be the time where we’ve got to start setting this stuff aside and listening to each other instead of talking past each other.”

• In interviews with Muslim New Yorkers, the Times finds a “a welter of mixed feelings.”

• Meanwhile, pretty much everyone in New York resents that “outsiders” all of a sudden care about what happens in the city. “Newt Gingrich is talking about Nazis and whatever, I mean, that means nothing,” says Republican congressman Peter King, a fellow mosque opponent.

Today in Mosque: A Compromise Is Not Looking Imminent