Weeks after the right-wing media generated a flood of absurd comparisons to mask their Islamophobia in opposing the proposed Islamic community center in Manhattan, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Mark Helprin making more of these absurd comparisons and echoing one coined by Rush Limbaugh.

From Helprin's Journal op-ed, headlined “The World Trade Center Mosque and the Constitution”:

But the opposition to what they propose is no more anti-Islamic or intolerant than to protest a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor or Nanjing would be anti-Shinto or even anti-Japanese. How about a statue of Wagner at Auschwitz, a Russian war memorial in the Katyn Forest, or a monument to British and American air power at Dresden? The indecency of such things would be neither camouflaged nor burned away by the freedoms of expression and religion. And that is what the controversy is about, decency and indecency, not the freedom to worship, which no one denies.