>> reporter: ironically, muslims proposing that 13-story cultural center on park place two blocks from ground zero insist they are trying to honor the site. daisy khan is director of the american society of muslim advancement and wife of imam feisal abdul rf, organizs of the project. >> we've been in the neighborhood for 27 years. it's our neighborhood that got attacked, and it's our obligation and our responsibility and really even our honor to rebuild it. >> reporter: daisy khan insists that the center, which will include an arts theater, a place for prayer, athletics, and education, will be a testimonial to healing and interfaith harmony. >> the extremists have defined the agenda for the global muslim community, and we wanted to amplify the voices of the ordinary muslims who are, you know, law-abiding citizens. and it was my way of, like, helping rebuild by building a center that would create a counter-momentum against extremism. >> i want to make it clear that

i and my -- members of my group do not have anger towards muslims. but it's too close. it's too painful. it's too soon. i'm still trying to find remains of my son. >> it amounts to insult. it comes across as intentionally provocative. >> reporter: proponent khan, though, has drawn a line in the sand, arguing that being forced to move the site elsewhere amounts to "surrender." >> i think it would be un-american to ask anybody to leave the neighborhood. we're part of the neighborhood. i don't think anybody should be driven out of their neighborhood. it's about acceptance. muslims are not being accepted as equals in this country yet. >> reporter: indeed, throughout the country, there are recent signs of what some call islamophobia. >> no mosque, not here, not now, not ever.

nearby, on staten island, an abandoned catholic convent was to be sold to muslims to build a mosque. but after much protest, the board of the church that owned the convent voted the sale down. in columbia, tennessee, a mosque was fire bombed. in murfreesboro, tennessee, vandals targeted equipment being used to build an islamic center. and in temecula, california, the site of a proposed mosque brought forth both sides of the debate. >> islam is not a religion. islam is a totalitarian, terrorist ideology. >> there is nothing to fear from them. they are our neighbors, and they want to be able to worship freely, just as our ancestors did. >> reporter: against that backdrop, is it any wonder that a prominent anthropologist who's recently completed a landmark study of muslims in america concludes the muslim community feels "under siege"? >> americans are really going through a time of uncertainty, of some fear and some anger, and they want to blame someone.

and in times like this, that's why you're sitting on a tinderbox. it's very easy to then suddenly target or make a community a scapegoat. so even something as simple and ordinary as constructing a house of worship becomes an act of defiance, controversy, debate. >> reporter: the debate over that proposed muslim cultural center here, so close to ground zero, has been framed as a choice between religious tolerance and honoring the dead. but some would argue the real question is not the constitution butensitivity -- that given what happened on 9/11, shouldn't moral claims take precedence over legal rights? >> the legal issue's clear. there is a right to free speech, and there's a right to the exercise of one's religion. we have that. now what? what happens in situations where the exercise of that free religion, right, is going to trample upon the profound sensitivities of an already

vulnerable, traumatized group? >> reporter: thane rosenbaum, a professor at the fordham university law school, says the relevant precedent is 1984 when, 40 years after world war ii, holocaust survivors objected to a carmelite convent proposed near auschwitz and pope john paul intervened and moved the building elsewhere. that kind of compassion, says rosenbaum, should prevail at ground zero. >> this isn't about bigotry. this isn't about religious persecution. this really is about sensitivity and a profound sense of loss. there's something that just doesn't feel right about the haste, the speed, the urgency with which their mosque must be there. i don't see the tolerance in that. it seems to me the tolerance there is only one-way tolerance -- religious liberty and freedom at all costs. >> reporter: in the midst of all the turmoil, some relatives of

9/11 victims -- it is difficult to say just how many -- do support the cultural center near ground zero. on that terrible day nine years ago, herb ouid was working on the 77th floor of one of the towers, while his 25-year-old son, todd, was on the 105th. >> i said, "have a great day, sweetheart." i tell you those words because those were my last words to my son. >> reporter: a son, he remembers, who overcame a long battle with anxiety to go on and graduate from the university of michigan and have a bright future in finance. >> i think religious tolerance honors those that were lost. what we're saying for the muslim world is, "we don't trust you. we don't like you." >> reporter: "we don't want you." >> "we don't want you," and that's exactly a victory for al qaeda.

i don't want to give them that victory. i don't want to give them that victory. i'd rather say to them, "we stood by what we believe in, despite what you did to us." >> reporter: daisy khan says most 9/11 families agree with herb ouida and support the islamic center. but for relatives like sally regenhard, the refusal of those backing the islamic project to consider another site is just one more indignity. >> you can never change hearts and minds by shoving your culture or religion down the throats of others. i think they need to understand that. >> reporter: with both sides so entrenched, the outcome is uncertain. what is clear, though, is that this dispute is about far more than location or real estate. >> i'm just afraid that we -- that there's something we're unleashing here, something that we won't be able to control if we don't stop it. >> i think there's a bigger crisis taking pla right now, and that is really the battle for american identity itself. what is the america that's going

to come out of this? >> are we going to erode our ideals, or are we going to continue to live up to our ideals and let this moment be a passing moment, and let this be the test, the litmus test? >> reporter: it is much more than a litmus test, though, for some whose wounds may never heal. >> right now, we're asking for sensitivity, and maybe my son could have accepted what's happening now, but we mere mortals -- we cannot. >> reporter: in the midst of enduring pain, shrill protests, and calls for compromise, then, a head-on collision between legal and moral rights in a debate which could determine in post-9/11 america whether tolerance is a two-way street. for "religion and ethics newsweekly," this bob faw in new york. conservative lutherans have

formed a new denomination. the north american lutheran church was created as an alternative to the nation's largest lutheran body, the evangelical lutheran church in america. the elca has more liberal stands on gay clergy and interpretation of scripture. about 300 of the elca's roughly 10,000 churches are planning to affiliate with the new denomination. religious leaders and human rights activists are condemning a crackdown in france against the roma, or gypsy, community. since late july, french authorities have demolished hundreds of roma camps and expelled the inhabitants to romania and bulgaria. the french government says the camps were against the law. the catholic archbishop of toulouse compared the situation to the expulsion of jews during the nazi occupation. with president obama's

formal announcement that combat operations in iraq are over, two assesents of whether the war was t right thi to do. william galston is a senior fellow at the brookings institution in washington. michael cromartie is vice president of the ethics and public policy center, also in washington. welcome to you both. michael, was the iraq war the right thing to do? >> well, bob, you know the british prime minister, tony blair, has just come out with an autobiography, and he makes the point in there that the removal of saddam hussain from power was a great good. i agree with tony blair that the iraq war is tragic. it has been in the loss of life that's been sad. it was the right thing to do. >> if you had known in 2003 what the costs would be, the costs in lives and money and everything, would you still have favored it? >> bob, the cost of lives and money -- and every war is a

miserable cost, painful cost. and i think looking back on any war you want to say, is any war worth it after we see what the results are? that can't be coider without considering what was going on before -- what saddam did to his own people, what he did to his neighbors, the threat that he posed to so many parts of the world. >> bill, was it worth it? >> i don't think so. and equally important, a large majority of the american people don't think so either. and in a democracy, that's something that needs to be taken into account. it's not dispositive, but it needs to be taken into account. and one of the principles of just war theory is the principle of proportionality -- that even if it's justified, the good that is do has to exed the harm. there's also reason to believe that the war did not satisfy the requirements of just war theory. it was not a defensive war. it was not a preemptive war. it was a preventive war, which is very hard to justify, and the

administration's case for preventive war did not pass muster. >> so primarily on the consequences you think it was not right to do? >> no, there are two reasons. first of all, the prudential reasons, that is, the good achieved -- and there was some genuine good achieved -- was outweighed by the harm done. but also on the moral and legal plane, if you take just war theory seriously and apply it to this case, i'm afraid it doesn't pass. >> but let's look for a moment, bob, at the good achieved, if i could in response to bill. >> we don't know what the good was, do we, yet? >> well, i can give you some right now. one of the goods is that we now have an ally that doesn't support the war on terror but in fact supports us. we now have a country that ees not invading its neighbors. we now have a country that's not brutalizing its own people. we have a country that has the potential of bng something of a democracy in the region, so we now have an ally in the region that we didn't have before. we've also removed a man who brutalized his own people and he

brutalized his neighbors. >> what do you think the lessons are to be drawn? bill? >> well, one lesson is a lesson that general petraeus has articulated recently, as have a number of people around him, including general odierno, namely that we didn't know what we were getting into and we had a duty to know more about the courythe ciet the history, the complexities, the pitfalls. and general petraeus has taken that lesson with him into afghanistan, i hope, with better results. and another lesson i think we had better draw is the same one that the drafters of the declaration of independence understood full well, that is to say there is a decent respect owed to the opinions of mankind. and i'm afraid that we did not take that adequately seriously inhe run-up to the w or e

conduct of the war. and i think we've paid a huge price for that. >> michael, the lessons for you? >> well, one of the lessons is the mistakes that were made going in. remember secretary rumsfeld said we needed to have a light footprint, and i don't think even the surge would have been necessary if we had not done a better job of securing the country earlier. rumsfeld's view was that we would go in lightly and leave quickly. of course, none of that's happened, and i think that was a big mistake. >> tell me what you think about the possibility ofther situations where we think the head of a country is dangerous. do we -- >> there's still some of those around, by the way. >> do we still have the right to send in our troops, to invade, to kill the leader? do we have that right? >> no, of course not. of course not. and if you will remember, and as bill of course recalls, the amount of times we went to the

un before we went into iraq, and the amount of resolutions that were passed, and the amount of times that saddam ignored all of them. no, i don't think we have the right to just go and fly into a country without first going by every international -- passing every international legal agreement that we can before we do so. >> bill? >> well -- >> preventive war? >> preventive war. first of all, i think we have relearned what we should have known from the beginning -- that is a preventive war is the most difficult war to justify, and you'd better be darn sure of your facts and your grounds before entering into it. but the second lesson to be learned is that the argumt that good will be done if we perform act "x" is an inadequate argument on its face for two reasons. first of all, because there's also the other side of the balance to be taken into account. you need to do double-entry bookkeeping. and secondly, because not everything that is productive of

good is justified. there's lots of good that we could do potentially that we are stopped from doing because there are norms that prevent us from doing it, and there's a reason why those norms exist. and so arguments of the form "the worlis a better place because of 'x'" are not adequate. >> michael, quickly, you served for many years on the -- >> the u.s. commission on international religious freedom. >> the u.s. commission on international religious freedom. what's the state of religious freedom in iraq now? what's the state particularly for christians? >> it's very bad in iraq right now. christians have fled iraq. sectarian violence toward christians antoward churches is ia mirable state, and that's one of thareawhere the iraqi government needs to do a better job of insuring protection of all religious minorities in iraq, because it's not a good situation.

on our calendar this weekend, muslims celebrate laylat al qadr, or the night of power, when it is believed the first verses of the quran were revealed to the prophet muhammad. and later this coming week, muslims will mark the end of ramadan with the three-day festival of eid al fitr, the "feast of fast breaking." the holiday is celebrated by special prayers and visits to friends. the holiest time in the jewish calendar begins next wednesday evening with rosh hashanah, the jewish new year, and ends with yom kippur, ten days later. for jews around the world, it's a period of introspection and atonement. during both rosh hashanah and yom kippur services, congregants heathe sounding of the ras horn, or shofar. our producer noelle seper visited the glickman family near

buffalo, new york, for whom sounding the shofar has been a three-generation tradition. >> reporter: when the congregation gathers at temple beth am to celebrate rosh hashanah, they will experience what jews have for centuries -- the blast of the shofar -- as a kind of wake-up call. >> tekiah. soun the shofar ] >> it's a reminder. it sends a shiver. we can be better than we are. and how do we approach god but with that strange cry in our ear and perhaps on our lip, and we come before god and we say, "who are we? what are we? remember what we could be and help us along." the glickmans, for three generations, have been our shofar blowers here in this congregation. >> reporter: marshall glickman became temple beth am's ba'al tekiah, or the one who souns

the shofar, over 40 years ago. >> they used to time him because he could hold it so long, and they couldn't believe it. [ laughs ] he felt a commitment to his religion and a commitment to his god and to his congregation. he just felt like it was a gift that he was giving to the community and that he was the person through god giving that gift. at his funeral, there were over 800 people. >> when the funeral was over, when they put him in the ground, we blew the shofar. and it was quite nice. it was very lovely. the notes were great. i don't know that i've ever played the notes as well as we did at that point. but, at that point i guess, people said, "wow, you should keep on playing."

and "why don't you and your son play in echo?" >> tekiah. [ sound the shofar in echo ] >> it just gives the room a deeper vibrating, vibrational, sound that echoes through one's heart, one's chest. >> shevarim teruah. [ sound the shofar in echo ] >> they listen to the shofar and they can close their eyes and say, "this is the same sound i heard 10 years ago, 15 years ago,0 years ago." these are the same prayers, the same music, and they feel a oneness with times gone by. >> blowing the shofar is a family tradition that my

grandfather started when he was 15, and i started when i was 14. it just makes me happy to continue that tradition. >> tekiah gedolah. that's our program for now. i'm bob abernethy. there's much more on our website. you'll find many more stories and resources on the jewish high holidays and also a special look back at our coverage of ethics and the iraq war over the past eight years. you can comment on all of our stories and share them. audio and video podcasts are also available. and you can follow us on our facebook page. join us at pbs.org. as we leave you, scenes from last year's rosh hashanah service at temple beth am in amherst, new york.

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