Here are some tasty excerpts of  New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s speech concerning the news that the Cordoba Initiative is free to pursue its goal of creating a Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan.

Our doors are open to everyone. Everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it’s sustained by immigrants — by people from more than 100 different countries speaking more than 200 different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here or you came here yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter’s on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Read the full speech on the New York Daily News website.

The Right’s politico-cultural fight against the forming of an Islamic community center near the site of the World Trade Center attack shows disdain for the inherent American values of liberty and religious freedom.

There are a number of Tea-Party types entering the fray – Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin to name a couple. Newt in particular recently wrote on his blog:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.
[source]

No, Mr. Gingrich. This is explicitly why the Cordoba Initiative planned center should be welcomed and helped to flourish in the shadow of America’s greatest terrorist tragedy.

As your pal George W. Bush used to exclaim, “they” (meaning the ‘evil-doers’) hate our freedom. Consequently it is this same freedom to practice one’s religion that should never be curbed. It is this same liberty to exchange religious and cultural dialogue that made America unique in the world. It is this same religious tolerance that helped lure (and continues to lure) generations of individuals across the globe to our shores.

UPDATE:

I came across this excellent refutation of Newt’s speech based upon historical inaccuracies.
http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2010/08/professor-newts-distorted-history.html

I have also ran into a quasi-political organization that expresses their objection to the Cordoba Initiative. They seem to be a clearing house for a lot of the xenophobic rhetoric being thrown around recently with regard to this issue.
http://sioaonline.com/