Muslim Republicans on Ground Zero mosque

The Huffington Post:

Concerned about the increasingly hostile tone of the Ground Zero mosque debate, top Muslim and Arab-American Republicans are working behind the scenes to try and tone down their own party's rhetoric.

Organized informally, the group includes officials who served in the Bush administration or have strong ties to GOP leadership. Their concerns are twofold: that there is something fundamentally unconstitutional about opposing the Islamic cultural center and that the tenor of conservatives risks alienating the Muslim and Arab communities (both domestic and abroad) for years to come.

"People like myself... who are hardcore Republicans and have been activists for years, with undoubted credentials on the Republican side, are really outraged by what is going on," said David Ramadan, a prominent Muslim-American conservative operative and a member of the Virginia delegation to the Republican National Convention. "We believe first and foremost in the Constitution. This is not a matter of this mosque or that mosque. This is not a New York mosque issue. It is a Constitutional issue.... This is absolutely unacceptable."

With close ties to both Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell national Republicans, Ramadan said that he and others will launch an outreach campaign in the days ahead targeting key leaders, from members of Congress on down. The hope is to bring the GOP closer in line with the position it held during the Bush years, when Islam was defined first and foremost as a religion of peace. He counted officials from that administration as some of the calmer voices in the debate over the Islamic cultural center. Though he added that recent comments from former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie -- who chastised both the mosque and President Obama's support for it -- underscore just how far the scales of the debate have tipped.

"He went with the wave, I guess," Ramadan said of Gillespie's appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" this Sunday. "I have put out an email and a call from Ed... and I am waiting for a call back."

What influence Ramadan and others might be able to exert over Republican leadership is unclear. The concern is not merely that the Muslim and Arab-American community doesn't have the lobbying clout to make a large impact on the mosque debate; but, rather, that electoral politics will overwhelm the matter. Even though the issue of building a cultural center in downtown Manhattan has been largely settled by local authorities, it still presents low-hanging partisan fruit for the GOP.

"It is the silly season and people appeal to the most basic of emotions when they want to get elected," said Randa Fahmy Hudome, a prominent Arab-American political consultant and former Bush administration official. " We are running for the House and the Senate and we want to win it and some of the party believe this is a really good wedge issue to run on... I happen to think we shouldn't relinquish our belief in the constitution, the Federalist papers, the Federalist Society, my people, for some base political idea."

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