President Obama offers a powerful quotation that we all need to take to heart:
“This country stands for the proposition that all men and women are created equal, that they have certain inalienable rights,” Mr. Obama said. “And what that means is that if you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on the site.”
There is no excuse for the violence breaking out in Muslim countries over the bigoted Koran-burning threat. Resorting to violence as a response to a slight or an insult. And there is no excuse for the blanket-blame thrown over all Muslims by critics of the downtown mosque and others.
The president, in this speech today, reaffirmed the nation’s commitment to religious freedom and diversity.
Bravo., Mr. President.
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Hank Kalet 
Sadly, it will take time for Muslim-Americans to be fully assimilated into our society. It took generations for all the successive waves of immigrants to be accepted into the mainstream. As an Italian-American and as a person of a certain age, I can vouch for the fact that it does take many decades before various ethnic, religious and racial groups can merge into the greater society. I wish I could feel proud for having two Italian-Americans on the supreme court but they are two far right wing pro corporate shills. Shared ethnicity is trumped by ideological differences. I wish that Scalia and Alito had never been appointed to the Supreme Court and that they would have been replaced by actual liberal justices of any race or of any ethnicity. For so many generations, Italians were regarded as uncouth, clownish, lazy, ignorant, criminal, hairy, large nosed, uneducated, low-brow, buffoons, gluttonous, guinea, WOP, dago, Mafiosi, grease balls. I remember back in the fifties Time magazine dependably and regularly had demeaning and debasing articles about Italy. The message was clear, Italy was a country of incompetent and inefficient clowns; they were only worthy of being mocked or laughed at. I remember the late Charles Collingwood of 60 Minutes (must have been the late 1960s) walking through an Italian neighborhood of NYC saying, in so many words, that these people would never amount to much, would never go to college and would just be store clerks, bus drivers and common laborers. Gee, thanks Chuck and shove it up your arse, too, wherever your soul resides at this point. Who knows, maybe that was the neighborhood where Pacino, DeNiro or Scorsese grew up. I remember being in a lecture hall at Rutgers in 1962 for a world history course. The topic was Italy during the Mussolini era and the professor at one point stated that the Italians were an intelligent people. The whole lecture hall of more than 100 students burst into uproarious laughter, I was not laughing. That was a real eye opener for me and I was rather shocked by this raw display of prejudice. To his credit, the professor kind of scolded the students for laughing at the proposition of intelligent Italians but he wasn't changing any minds or prejudices that morning. Most of the horrible hatred, the corrosive prejudices have evaporated as regards Italian-Americans. Italian-Americans have truly \”arrived\” in America and the sky's the limit to what they can accomplish in this country.