According to the editors at the Daily Illini, “those who oppose [the mosque’s] construction are letting unfounded, unnecessary fear dominate their judgment.” It must be hard work being so much more enlightened than the 62 percent of Americans that do oppose building a mosque at Ground Zero (your two blocks away semantics notwithstanding).

Opponents of the mosque don’t question the right Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has to build a mosque at Ground Zero. The First Amendment guarantees that he does. But just because you have the right to do something, doesn’t make it the right thing to do.

In the name of Islam, 3,000 Americans were killed during the attacks on September 11, 2001. How can you fail to see that building a mosque in such close proximity to where those terrible acts took place would strike some as insensitive?

Contrary to your dismissive attitude towards the nearly two-thirds that oppose building a mosque at Ground Zero, Americans are plenty intelligent to understand that Islam is a peaceful religion, and September 11th represents the actions of the fringe of the fringe of the approximately 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide.

However, we cannot escape the fact that the victims of the September 11th attacks were killed with Islam as the justification.

A prominent reminder of Islam so close to where 3,000 people were killed in its name demonstrates a callous disregard for those who still mourn family and friends lost on that tragic day. How about having a little compassion for those who lost loved ones, and moving the mosque somewhere else?

Joshua Esses,

sophomore in Business