This copy is for your personal noncommercial use only You can order presentation ready copies for distribution to your colleagues clients or customers please click here or use the Reprints tool that appears next to any article Visit www nytreprints com for samples and additional information Order a reprint of this article now August 21 2010 OP ED COLUMNIST How Fox Betrayed Petraeus By FRANK RICH THE ground zero mosque as you may well know by now is not at ground zero It s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room It s not going to determine President Obama s political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012 Still the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan on the hallowed ground of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen s Club will prove eventful all the same And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24 7 over the parameters of tolerance religious freedom and the real estate gospel of location location location Here s what s been lost in all the screaming The prime movers in the campaign against the ground zero mosque just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America s nine year war in Afghanistan The wrecking ball they re wielding is not merely pounding Park51 as the project is known but is demolishing America s already frail support for that war which is dedicated to nationbuilding in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti Defamation League Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats that it has also rendered Gen David Petraeus s last ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York You d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan surge would not act against their own professed interests But they couldn t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country The ginned up rage over the ground zero mosque was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated but by the potential short term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy s evolution He reports that there was zero reaction to the ground zero mosque from the front line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front page article on Dec 9 2009 The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News where Laura Ingraham filling in on The O Reilly Factor interviewed Daisy Khan the wife of the project s organizer Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Ingraham gave the plans her blessing I can t find many people who really have a problem with it she said I like what you re trying to do As well Ingraham might Rauf is no terrorist He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan at the Manhattan synagogue B nai Jeshurun Pearl s father was in attendance The Park51 board is chock full of Christians and Jews Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi use community center an unabashed imitator of the venerable and Jewish 92nd Street Y uptown is its potential to spawn yet another coveted impossible to get into Manhattan private preschool In the five months after The Times s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up jettisoning Ingraham s benign take for a New York Post jihad The paper s inspiration was a rabidly anti Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X s illegitimate son Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on promoting the incendiary libel that the radical Islamists behind the ground zero mosque were tantamount either to neo Nazis in Skokie according to a Wall Street Journal columnist or actual Nazis per Newt Gingrich These patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9 11 attacks the Pentagon Their sudden concern for ground zero is suspect to those of us who actually live in New York All but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9 11 responders just last month Though many of these ground zero watchdogs partied at the 2004 G O P convention in New York exploiting 9 11 none of them protested that a fellow Republican the former New York governor George Pataki so bollixed up the management of the World Trade Center site that nine years on it still lacks any finished buildings let alone a permanent memorial The Fox patron saint Sarah Palin calls Park51 a stab in the heart of Americans who still have that lingering pain from 9 11 But her only previous engagement with the 9 11 site was when she used it as a political backdrop for taking her first questions from reporters nearly a month after being named to the G O P ticket She was so eager to grab her ground zero photo op that she defied John McCain s just announced suspension of their campaign Her disingenuous piety has been topped only by Bernie Kerik who smuggled a Twitter message out of prison to register his rage at the ground zero desecration As my colleague Clyde Haberman reminded us such was Kerik s previous reverence for the burial ground of 9 11 that he appropriated an apartment overlooking the site and designated for recovery workers for an extramarital affair At the Islamophobia command center Murdoch s News Corporation the hypocrisy is if anything thicker A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified reports that Park51 has money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas As Jon Stewart observed this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a