Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

Towers have long captured the collected imagination of human kind. Whether it is the Tower of Babel in the Bible, or the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or the Chicago Water Tower, or especially the Twin Towers of Manhattan prior to its destruction, towers characterize technology, political power, and even sexual potency. The 2001 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers was not a happenstance assault.  The terrorists chose those two buildings in particular because these structures were in the heart of the world’s greatest economic center.

In Freudian terms, destroying the towers represented a symbolic castration of the United States. From the terrorist perspective, attacking these centers sent a most auspicious message to the world of Islamic jihadists: The United States’ days of being the Number One Superpower are finished. Now that they have been castrated by the forces of radical Islam, it is only a matter of time before the armies of Islam eventually conquer all of the United States and the Western world.

Over one decade later, most of our country has barely come to terms with the greater implications of September 11, 2001 and its symbolic significance. As a seminal event, the terrorists revealed just how vulnerable we were–and still are–to those forces poised to strike at her again. As the beacon and vanguard of democracy and liberty in the Western world, Radical Islam views the attack on September 11 as the opening salvo of a new kind of jihad against the United States precisely because it champions freedom, liberty, and the right for self-determination—anathemas that threaten the feudalistic mentality of Radical Islam.

With this thought in mind, the Jewish community has found itself divided as to how we ought to respond to the proposed Mosque that Mayor Bloomberg is attempting to build near Ground Zero. On August 3^rd, Bloomberg argued that denying the Muslim community to build its center would, “. . . betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands—if we treat Muslims differently than anyone else . . . In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.”

Jewish leaders on both sides of the issue are equally passionate in championing their cause. The ADL claims to have the best interests of the victims’ families who do not wish to see their loved ones’ memories be desecrated, while many Jewish liberals see this is an issue pertaining to religious freedom and the respecting human rights.

Unlike much of the Western society, the radical Islamic world operates on symbols, everything has to be symbolic.  And this — they chose this place in particular because of the symbol it represents to the Radical Islamic world.

As a rabbinic leader, I believe the Islamic leaders advocating this new center have a profound responsibility to publically discredit all terroristic organizations such as Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood before one single brick is laid near this sacred ground. Should any of the leaders have any kind of connection with these atavistic agencies, then the proposed center should be built elsewhere in Manhattan, but not near Ground Zero.