The ghosts of 9/11

STATEN ISLAND, New York — Afraid that radical Muslim extremists will not only take Manhattan, but the Bronx and Stat­en Island, too — not to mention Brook­lyn and Queens — a hundred residents of the Borough of Parks are standing on the sidewalk on a steamy summer Sunday and chanting "No mosque! No sale! No mosque! No sale!"

Protest is fermenting in New York City's least-famous fifth borough. The people of Midland Beach, as this sandy, middle-class enclave is known, have more urgent concerns than a frolic on the nearby Atlantic Ocean strand; namely, the fate of a neglected little two-storey brick dormitory with a crucifix in its brickwork.

A few weeks ago, the parish priest of the nearby St. Margaret Mary Roman Catholic Church, the Rev. Keith Fennessy, announced that a vacant and careworn building -- paint peeling, blinds twisted -- that once had been a convent for a small covey of nuns was going to be sold to the Muslim American Society (MAS) and converted into a house of Muhammadan prayer.

When a noisy community meeting was held to discuss the transfer, today's hyperpatriotic protesters tell me, a group of Muslims attending the powwow declined to stand up during the Pledge of Allegiance, their spokesman wouldn't renounce Hamas and Hezbollah, and things only got worse from there.

The "human civil rights director" of the MAS wrote a letter to the Staten Island Advance saying that "when stripped of all the propaganda, innuendo, and flat-out lies, the issue is simply one of religious bigotry and hatred." Chastened, Father Fennessy tried to retract the real estate deal, only to be told that the contract already had been signed and that only the parish trustees could overturn it.

The beleaguered trustees have scheduled a meeting for God knows when.

So the issue remains tense and unresolved and now we're out here sweating on the sidewalk and people are holding up placards that read SAVE OUR COMMUNITY and OUR FAITH IS NOT FOR SALE and my personal favourite:

STEREOTYPES ARE BASED ON SOME TRUTH

LIVE WITH IT

IT'S THE AMERICAN WAY

A man in full Highland regalia stands in the roadway and begins to play America the Beautiful on the bagpipes.

In the crowd, I meet a retired police officer named Jim Barile, who tells me that three men who lived within a block of the convent were killed on 9/11. So was the best man at his wedding.

In an Irish and Italian neighbourhood heavy with firefighters ("New York's Bravest"), cops ("New York's Finest"), and sanitation workers ("New York's Strongest"), and in a borough whose Himalayan landfills still are being sifted for atoms of human remains amid the World Trade Center rubble, there is little inclination to take the sons of Islam at their word.

"Thirty-seven of my friends died that day," Mr. Barile says.

Yet the protesters avow that the real issue isn't fear of Muslim extremism; it's where the worshippers are going to deposit their automobiles while they pray. The old dormitory doesn't have its own parking lot.

"First they told us it would be 50 people, once a week," says a woman who works at the church school and whose daughter is on active duty in the American army. "Now they tell us it's gonna be a hundred and fifty people, five times a day. Where are they going to park?"

That being said, the protesters admit that maybe it is about Muslim extremism, just a little bit.

"I don't think I'm ever going to get it out of my heart that terrorists come out of mosques," says Jim Barile, whose grandfather donated five dollars every week to help to establish the now-deserted convent.

"It's not just here," says The Lady Who Works At The Church School. "They're building mosques in Bay Ridge and Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, all along the water. I think they're trying to control the bridges."

In Lower Manhattan, a mosque and Islamic cultural centre are under development just two blocks from Ground Zero. That proposal was endorsed by the local community board by a vote of 29 to one. But Staten Island is not Manhattan.

"We're demonstrating to get the archdiocese to go against this sale," Barile says. "This is not the place for another place of worship, a gymnasium, anything."

"They can open a synagogue, for all I care," says The Lady Who Works At The Church, "as long as they have enough parking."

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist and author based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 10, 2010 h6