Beirut’s Synagogue And Lower Manhattan’s Mosque

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the kerfuffle surrounding the building of a Mosque in lower Manhattan near the site of the 9–11 attacks. Pretty much all angles of the story have been covered to death, but here’s an interesting one that uses Beirut as a higher standard to follow. It comes from a reader of the widely read Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog:

The synagogue was dilapidated and decrepit [..] Recently, with Hezbollah approval, what remains of the Lebanese Jewish community and several outside sources have begun a restoration project [..] If even Hezbollah allows a synagogue to be built in Beirut, maybe Gingrich should lay off the mosque in lower Manhattan. Surely that’s not too high a standard.

Sounds like a fair argument to me. Of course cynics would retort (and this is the land of cynics) that Beirut’s Synagogue was approved for its propaganda value to the west. That the Lebanese and Hezbollah want to show the world that we don’t hate jews, we only hate Zionism and the Israel government’s vicious policies.