By Allen G. Breed
August 22, 2010, Arizona daily star

America the tolerant.

Or not.

As rancor swirls around the issue of whether a mosque and Islamic cultural center should be built two blocks from the New York site where the Twin Towers once stood, Americans are being forced to examine just how tolerant they are.

"We were never as tolerant as we thought we were," says the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "I think that the rock on which tolerance is built is often more like sandstone than it is granite. It is easy to erode at any times when problems in the culture develop."

Despite the current imbroglio over the Manhattan mosque, the Rev. Patrick McCollum says he believes Americans are becoming more tolerant. His proof: the fact that his house hasn't been firebombed in a while.

"There were people actually killed and such for having beliefs different than the dominant belief system," says the San Francisco man, a Wiccan minister in the "sacred path" tradition. "And that doesn't happen as much anymore."

McCollum, 60, has been involved in a seven-year federal court battle over California's policy of employing as state chaplains only Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and adherents to Native American religions. He attributes both his struggle and the Manhattan mosque fight to what he calls the "dominant religious lens factor."

"I think that the intolerance that we're experiencing right now is that for the first time in a long period of time, since almost the founding of our country, we've actually begun to allow pluralism to surface in our country," says McCollum. "So we've started to uphold the ideals that our country was founded on ... and the people who've been in the dominant position begin to feel like they're under attack."

Although not declaring his outright support for the mosque planners' real estate choice, President Obama has defended their constitutional right to be there.

Not everyone was satisfied with his words.

"I think to reason in that manner is to shortchange American identity; it's not to apprehend fully the robustness of American identity," says Brad Stetson, co-author of the book "The Truth About Tolerance: Pluralism, Diversity And The Culture Wars."

Anger understandable

America's "penchant for toleration," as Stetson puts it, is "beyond question." But he says that tolerance has always been "circumscribed by some understanding of what was best for the commonweal, the health of the social body."

Lynn can understand why some people are so upset about the Islamic center plans. "I'm not saying that everybody who is against building this mosque is some kind of a bigot," he says. But is building the mosque really the equivalent of, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested, putting a Nazi sign "next to the Holocaust Museum" in Washington, D.C.?

Yes, says 88-year-old Abe Rosenblum.

In 1943, Rosenblum was taken from his home in the Carpathian Mountains and "drafted" into the Hungarian labor force. When the Nazis occupied the area, he and the other Jews were sent to a ghetto, then loaded into boxcars, and eventually wound up in Mauthausen, a notorious concentration camp not far from Adolf Hitler's hometown of Linz, Austria.

By the time the Russians liberated him from another subcamp in 1945, the 6-foot-1 Rosenblum weighed just 85 pounds. His father, grandparents and five sisters all perished. Only he and his oldest brother, who had emigrated to Chicago in 1939, survived. Rosenblum eventually joined him, settling in the suburb of Skokie, Ill.

Remembering skokie

In 1977, Rosenblum and the many other Holocaust survivors who settled in Skokie were horrified when Frank Collin and his National Socialist Party of America announced plans to march there. Although the courts eventually upheld Collin's right to parade, the march was called off after Chicago, Collin's original target, agreed to grant him a permit to rally there.

Years later, when arriving for the dedication of the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Rosenblum looked out his bus window and saw a single protester standing in the rain, holding a Nazi flag and wearing a swastika arm band.

"We already lived through all these atrocities, and these guys come over here and still want to?" he says in heavily accented English, his respiration quickening. "They didn't have enough? … This is not free speech. This is antagonizing."

Rosenblum does not believe that Islam is an inherently violent religion. But he says Muslims have no more business building a mosque so close to ground zero than an order of Carmelite nuns had to establish a convent outside the walls of Auschwitz.

Lynn wonders who is speaking for the Muslim-Americans who died in the 9/11 attacks. "There was the same terror for Muslims as … for Jews or Christians or atheists that morning."

If Americans are conflicted, they can be forgiven, says tolerance museum director Liebe Geft. She admits to finding the word "problematic" herself.

Geft would like visitors to define tolerance "in a much more active way, putting respect into practice."

"It's not a mandate to accept everything," says Geft. "There are limits to what a civil society should tolerate. And when the human rights and dignities of others are being trampled and denied, that's not acceptable in a country that advocates rights and freedoms and dignity for all."

"It's not a mandate to accept everything. There are limits to what a civil society should tolerate."

Liebe Geft,

Director, Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance