Fear and loathing in Manhattan: New Statesman

November 2, 2010

Opponents of the so-called Ground Zero mosque are giving the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks exactly what they wanted: a clash of civilisations. Muslims who once walked happily on New York’s streets now feel hate in the air.

Vanessa Lang Langer was pregnant and working as an office manager on the 93rd floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center when United Airlines Flight 175 hit the building at 9.03am on 11 September 2001. “She was wearing a black skirt that she had bought at Banana Republic and a black blouse,” her mother, Donna Marsh O’Connor, says, her voice breaking. Vanessa’s body was found “whole and intact” by rescue workers a fortnight later, “still holding the foetus that would never be born”.

Nine years on, O’Connor is one of the most vocal supporters of the proposed Park51 Islamic community centre in lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center site – denounced by its opponents as the “Ground Zero mosque”. Her decision to speak out has undermined those politicians and pundits who have claimed that the families of the victims of the 11 September attacks are united in their hurt and anger over the centre’s “sensitive” location and are collectively opposed to the development. What is most important to O’Connor, however, is not the memory of the attacks, but the preservation of American ideals.

“I’m an American. That’s what I thought being an American meant – the right to religious freedom,” she tells me. “Those terrorists were criminals with a criminal agenda and so I’m not going to hold Muslims as a whole accountable for their actions. How could I? I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for Israel’s hideous treatment of the Palestinians because I was born a Jew. And I wouldn’t shun my German friends because of the Holocaust.”

O’Connor believes that old-fashioned bigotry and racism against a minority are behind much of the opposition to the construction of Park51. “We cannot sit idly while we create a new generation of Muslim Americans who are not valued here,” she says. “What we do now affects how Muslim Americans function in our society and going forward for generations.”