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Let us concede that it is not the business of the government to block the construction of Cordoba House, a 13-story Islamic

Center and mosque, even if it happens to be two blocks away from Ground Zero. This passage from New York Mayor Mike

Bloomberg's speech yesterday is largely correct:

The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship,

and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike

it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question:

Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their

particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

That being said, many supporters of the Cordoba House project, who insist that there can be no legitimate objection to a

mosque being built in lower Manhattan -- that anyone who is uncomfortable with the project is by definition a bigot -- are

telling themselves a fairytale in lieu of facing up to the realities of the global ideological struggle we're engaged in.

The fairytale goes like this: Not only do the principles our nation was founded on require us to respect religious freedom,

but respecting the religious freedom of American Muslims automatically contributes to victory against Islamic radicalism.

Jeffrey Goldberg sums up this view:

We must fight the terrorists with alacrity, but at the same time we must understand that what the terrorists seek is a clash

of civilizations. We must do everything possible to avoid giving them propaganda victories in their attempt to create a

cosmic war between Judeo-Christian civilization and Muslim civilization. The fight is not between the West and Islam; it is

between modernists of all monotheist faiths, on the one hand, and the advocates of a specific strain of medievalist Islam, on