An upsetting proportion of non-Muslim Americans excluded Muslim Americans from their communities after the attacks of September the 11th. To suggest that any great number of these excluded citizens had ties to, or sympathies for, any terrorist organization is absurd. Yet these Americans were excluded, even treated as un-American.

I agree that building a mosque 600 feet from ground zero seems (and in many ways is) an act of ‘stunning insensitivity,’ as I have seen written on public forums. But I can’t help but notice another: that one of the most (allegedly) progressive democracies in the world ostracized a major world religion and all visible members of that religion because of the actions of a few violent radicals. That each of the religion’s practitioners, even those born and raised in the United States, even those with a love and pride for their American citizenship, were treated as outsiders, miscreants, and agents of evil; that their spaces and artifacts were treated as hostile forces. That we took from these, our fellow Americans, their nationality, saying that it was no longer theirs to have because some men who read the same book as them did an evil thing; probably not considering the shame many of them must have felt for being associated with such a horrible act. And, most importantly, that “we” felt compelled to unite against “them,” forgetting that “them” was in fact a tiny sect of the second-largest religion in the world, and that “we” includes literally millions of Muslim Americans. In the past century, did “we” unite against “them” when the Protestant-identifying Ku Klux Klan killed scores of African-Americans, Catholics, and Jews? We did not; we remembered that “we” and “them” are not such clearly delineated categories; that the Ku Klux Klan was just a tiny and distorted corner of Protestantism, an otherwise benevolent religion.

The blows that many Muslim Americans suffered after 9/11 were delivered by a hand both irrational and unjust. And, after nearly nine years of (much-deserved) sympathy for all other afflicted parties, where is the sympathy for them, the unfortunate scapegoats for all of our anger, the whipping-boy of American justice? Who shall clean their wounds?

Mayor Bloomberg says it well: “Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims different than anyone else.”

I think that this mosque (which is in fact a community center containing a mosque) may provide not only some of that cleansing and sympathy mentioned above, but do so in such a way that we might look to a future of coexistence with the Islamic world, which is becoming more a part of ours every day, rather than look back with anger on a tragic and painful wound. And we must learn to coexist, or we will be locked in a futile and stagnant conflict, the only result of which will be more lives lost, more families bereaved, more tragic days like September the 11th to remember.

Remember that the United States has been at many times divided in two. And Europe has seen itself cut into more cruel jigsaw puzzles than we care to remember. It was only after these places allowed the marriage of different ways of thinking and being, that they stopped senselessly ending lives. This mosque, I believe, is an opportunity to utter the first vow.