The heated debate around the high-profile Park51 Islamic Community Center in New York City’s lower Manhattan was a catalyst for anti-Sharia movements not just in the United States, but across the Western world as well. Both anti-Muslim opponents (and even well-meaning liberal supporters) inaccurately referred to Park51 as the “Ground Zero Mosque” and that only galvanized anti-mosque movements across the world. Yet the debates over this proposed space simply bore no relation to reality. The Park51 project was an Islamic community center created to propagate interfaith dialogue, and its location bore no intentional relation to the site of the September 11 attacks.

DEFINE: Clarifies that Park51 was an interfaith community center, not a mosque, and its location was coincidental to the 9/11 site.

XREF: Connects to the wider history of moral panics and inflammatory labeling in sociopolitical discourse.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 567