¡No Masque!

What was it that Diderot said? That Abe Foxman should be strangled with the guts of Bill Donohue? I think that was it. Mister Smiff wised me to this odious little Nyawk Tiymz numbah, wherein Dishonest Abe rises like a rainbow trout to a bead-headed nymph, jaws agape, having heard the word that some Musselmans--egad!--are gonna build a mosque, a mosque I tell ya, within a secant-tangent's range of Ground Zero. In a "wrenching" decision--wrenching, one imagines, like passing a huge turd; I bet they felt great after it plopped--the ADL issued its bull: thou shalt not! True, they admit, it's irrational, but people are entitled to their emotions, Hashemdamnit, like Mel Gibson at a traffic stop.

By the way, can we stop calling it Ground Zero? It sounds like some kind of fad-diet coffee drink. Can't you just see some Cheshire-grinning thyroidal female celebrity hawking it on the daytime teevee? I have a Ground Zero for breakfast, a Ground Zero for lunch, and then a sensible dinner!

Alors. The moral odiousness of the anti-Islam crowd is only compounded by the insipid symbolism of the site. No one liked the World Trade Center towers until they got knocked down, and their proposed replacement, the Freedom Tower, which sounds like it was intended as a parody, is going to look like a cross between a knitting needle and a home enema kit, if it ever gets built, which seems to me to be doubtful. I can't frankly understand why anyone would want to pray in that neighborhood, but if they do, let 'em. Why does the ADL even care? Where's its skin in this game? You almost expect Foxman to start showing up at random coop board meetings, shouting down little old ladies. "Six million Jews!" "But . . . but what does that have to do with changing our policy on subletting units?" "Dachau! Bergen-Belsen! The St. Louis!" "Do you even live in this building, sir?"

The Pirkei Avot is a favorite Mishnaic text, a sort of Poor Richard's for the Chosen Peeps, and there is an admonition, often-repeated in the Shabbat liturgy: You are not obligated to complete the work; neither are you permitted to desist from it. It is meant as a moral admonition in this pre-Messianic age. Knowing not that you may achieve justice, seek after it nonetheless, and all that. Foxman, like all literalists, loses the message in the words. He appears to take it as a command to obsessive-compulsion. Whereof one cannot speak, say nothing? Bah. Wasn't Wittgenstein a Nazi or something? Whereof one has lips, keep 'em flappin.