ABSTRACT
A group of American Muslims announced plans to construct an Islamic community center about two blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. A day after a New York City community board unanimously approved the $100 million project in May, 2010, a take-no-prisoners blogger, Pamela Geller, issued a vitriolic denunciation of the project. “What could be more insulting and humiliating than a monster mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Center buildings brought down by Islamic attack?” she asked (Geller, 2010). A week later, an influential New York City newspaper columnist picked up the banner, using Geller’s terminology to call the project fundamentally wrong, titling the column “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero.” Some of the relatives of 9/11 victims followed suit, calling it a “gross insult to the memory of those who were killed on that terrible day” (Jacoby, 2010).
