I can’t say it any better than what Eugene Robinson reports in his column Jefferson Would be Ashamed of Republican Mosque Panderers.

Most important, organizers have made clear that the whole point of the project is to provide a high-profile platform for mainstream, moderate Islam—and to stridently reject the warped, radical, jihadist worldview that produced the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.

“It will have a real community feel, to celebrate the pluralism in the United States, as well as in the Islamic religion,” Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said in May as she argued for permission to build the center. “It will also serve as a major platform for amplifying the silent voice of the majority of Muslims who have nothing to do with extremist ideologies. It will counter the extremist momentum.”

Actually, it will take much more than one community center to stop radical jihad in its tracks. But it’s hard to think of a better way to give extremist ideology a major boost than to demonstrate what far too many of the world’s 1 billion Muslims already believe is true: that the West rejects not just extremism but Islam itself.

“Three hundred of the victims (of the Sept. 11 attacks) were Muslim,” Khan told CNN. “We are Americans too. The 9/11 tragedy hurt everybody, including the Muslim community. We are all in this together, and together we have to fight against extremism and terrorism.”