Excerpts
JIM LEHRER (Newshour): Mark, what about Michael raised the point in his original thing that the mosque controversy and what the president the New York mosque controversy and what the president said about that is an example of the kind of thing that a recent example of what he is talking about.
How do you see this, the way the president has handled it?
MARK SHIELDS (syndicated columnist): The way the president I think, first of all, the president had a responsibility to speak to the issue. The issue was...
JIM LEHRER: In other words, he had to say something?
MARK SHIELDS: It was going beyond New York. It had become a national issue, thanks in large part to talk radio, but to distinguished American Republican leaders, including Governor Palin and former Speaker Gingrich, who has redefined irresponsibility in this debate.
So, the president had a responsibility to speak. Did he choose the right venue, a Ramadan dinner at the White House? No. It was it could even look like he was saying something to please the crowd, instead of doing it to a national conference of Christians and Jews or something, to an interfaith meeting.
Saturday, when he qualified his unqualified endorsement of Friday night, was that helpful? No. But I think there was a responsibility to speak. And I think he spoke to values that are eternal with Americans.
And, Jim, he had to speak because of what had been going on, on the other side. I mean, for for Newt Gingrich to say that this is part of a conspiracy, to equate as he's done in his statements, to equate Islam with al-Qaida, Islam is not al-Qaida.
As Michael's former employer (G.W. Bush) put it so well, we were not attacked by the Muslim religion on 9/11. We were attacked by al-Qaida terrorists. And that had become such an irresponsible and provocative...
JIM LEHRER: So, he had to...
MARK SHIELDS: ... and, I think I think, incendiary debate, that he had to address it.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree he had to address it?
MICHAEL GERSON (Washington Post columnist): I fundamentally agree with that. I and I agree about the Gingrich approach on these things.
The argument that, somehow, Islam is fundamentally incompatible with American pluralism is a deeply dangerous argument. It's divisive at home. It undermines, in my view I spent some time in the West Wing it undermines the war on terror, because you have to work with Muslim allies all across the world in order to conduct this war.
So, the president of the United States, when he faces these issues, he's not a commentator, you know, who says concerned about the funding of a mosque here or the zoning rules there. You know, he has a duty. He has a duty to Muslim citizens. He has a duty to our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan who are fighting radicals at our side.
And he can't tell them that your house of worship, your holy place is somehow a desecration of Lower Manhattan. I don't think that is possible. The president faced a choice between silence or doing something similar to what he did, OK, in my view.
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MARK SHIELDS: These people, Jim, invoking invoking Islam and just ascribing the acts of al-Qaida and these terrorist to Islam, the rebuttal and the retort is just from is from American history, the Ku Klux Klan.
The Ku Klux Klan, as they burnt people to death, as they flogged people to death who weren't white, native, Protestant Americans that was their sin, and particularly African-Americans they did it with a burning cross. They did it while quoting Scripture, and saying they would do it in a Christian now, I mean, do we ascribe to Christianity those crimes, that odious and pernicious behavior? No, and any more than we would 9/11 to Islam.
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