ENOUGH ALREADY. It must be the summer silly season, with the so-called ground zero mosque supplanting the shark attack stories. Even Peter Beinart, in a defense of traditional American values of freedom and tolerance, mischaracterizes the community center as a mosque.

Once upon a time, Republicans were so confident that the vast majority of Muslims preferred freedom to jihad that they believed the U.S. could install democracy in Iraq within months. Now, confronted with a group of Muslim Americans who want to build a cultural center that includes Jews and Christians on the board (how many churches and synagogues do that?), GOP leaders call them terrorists ...

I suggest it's more accurate to compare a cultural center with, oh, a Jewish community center (swimming pools! gym! day camp! Reform, Conservative, Orthodox can mingle and match without hiring Yenta) in which a few gentiles on the board of directors or the charity committee spins no yarmulkes.

As far as the cultural center as a stalking horse for sharia law, well, there might have at one time been communist cells in Lower Manhattan, but it was the late unlamented Soviet Union that complained about filthy lures from the west. Then there's John F. Kennedy, who some people feared was a stalking horse for the Vatican. After his murder, some of us learned a different version of the Our Father. Not long after that murder, Pope Paul VI made the meatless Friday volitional (the fish fry tradition hereabouts lives on, but the only orthodoxy is lake perch). In the Roman Catholic Church's scheme of things, it was only a very short time from the opening of the first McDonald's, and an even shorter time from McDonald's debuting the Filet 'O Fish, for the Pope to issue that edict. Could a fast-food fish fry be the ultimate embarrassment to the Holy See? (Yeah, it's impressionistic social science, but I dare you to falsify my hypothesis!)

Remember when George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies used to say that the “war on terror” was a struggle on behalf of Muslims, decent folks who wanted nothing more than to live free like you and me? Remember when Karen Hughes paid millions to produce glitzy videos of Muslim Americans testifying about how free they were to practice their religion in the USA?

Bring on the filthy lures from the west!