I was thinking about opening up a Japanese cultural center across the water from the sunken USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. Just as soon as I lay the cornerstone of a new German Brauhaus on the grounds of Auschwitz. What’s the problem? After all, not all Japanese attacked us on Dec. 7. And I reckon most Germans are genuinely ashamed and horrified by the crimes of the Holocaust committed in their  name. Insensitive nonetheless? Even insulting, despite the passage of time and goodness of these two nations far removed from their WW2 past? Of course it is. Which is why no one in their right mind would propose such hypothetical projects.

I guess the key phrase here is “in their right mind” because wouldn’t you know it, a plan to build what would, at 15 stories, be the largest community center/mosque in New York City is being hotly debated at the moment. Why the debate? Because its location will be only two blocks from the World Trade Center Ground Zero site. Yes. You read that correctly. And just like in my hypothetical examples I set forth above, the obvious question arises: why there?

First, a little background on the mosque’s sponsors helps frame the discussion. The imam leading the project is Faisal Abdul Rauf. Like many imams, Rauf seems to be a split personality. If one were to pull up CNN’s website or open up the NY Times, one would be dutifully fed the story of a soft-spoken introspective man. A respected religious and community leader who is dedicated to reaching across the chasm of religious animus to achieve peaceful co-existence with his Western hosts. A man with a sonorous voice and hypnotic charm who, according to his book What’s Right With Islam wants the mosque to be a place where inter-faith understanding is fostered. Aww shucks!

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The LA Times has a piece out today that is entirely worth reading, about a brave and crazy Englishman who, contrary to all self preservation instincts, sneaked into Progressive Socialist death camps during WWII.

Bearing witness to Nazi horror

Reporting from Bradwell, England – The men in stripes came in looking like boxers and ended up like skeletons. Denis Avey could see them wasting away in a place so evil that even nature had abandoned it, without a bee or butterfly in sight.

They were the Jewish inmates housed in the ghastliest part of Auschwitz, subjected to brutalities and atrocities that Avey, an English prisoner of war confined to another section of the camp, could barely imagine.

But then, he thought, why only imagine them? What if, somehow, he could see those horrors for himself — see them, remember them, bear witness to the world about them?

So the then-25-year-old pondered and plotted, soon hatching a plan so audacious that, more than 65 years later, he shakes his head at its absurdity. While so many Jews and others held at the infamous extermination camp were desperate to get out, Avey was actually devising a way to sneak in.

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