Responses to downtown mosque plan predictable

In New York City politics, two big subjects always drive debate: real estate and violence.

For real estate, we now have the case of the former site of the Burlington Coat Factory in lower Manhattan, a couple of blocks from where the World Trade Center stood.

For horrid violence, nothing has surpassed the al-Qaida attack in 2001 that destroyed the mammoth towers, killed more than 2,700 people and preceded our current foreign wars.

Now, a plan by the Cordoba Initiative organization to convert the Burlington property into an Islamic community center and mosque has won a key approval - and thus will generate more controversy.

The furor has already converted the Democratic and Republican camps into separate but equally predictable sound-bite factories. For state Republicans, the goal is to look tough and true against the Islamic extremist enemy. For the Democrats, the talking points are all about liberty, tolerance and - in a bit of a twist - property rights.

Rick Lazio, GOP candidate for governor, recently made this an electoral drama when he demanded Democrat Andrew Cuomo - whose office as attorney general regulates registered charities - investigate critical published reports on Cordoba to determine "if this 'charity' is using its resources in a legitimate, legal and charitable way."

Cuomo has never really said he would never look into this. But his public reaction was, in part: "What are we about, if not religious freedom? What is the country about if not religious freedom? What is this state about if not religious freedom?"

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has expressed support for the project. The local community board approved it. Against this backdrop Tuesday, the city's mayoral-appointed Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 9-0 to reject landmark status for the 152-year-old building.

This conflict has as much to do with landmarks and charity funding as, a generation ago, court cases against the Westway project had to do with protecting Hudson River fish. Which is to say, nothing at all. Opponents of a project will use any argument they can to block it.

Could Cuomo lose political points as Lazio intended? In recent days, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith came out against the project. And some in the Lazio camp sought to portray Cuomo's responses as preachy and insensitive to 9/11 victims.

Cuomo, in a radio interview, insisted he understands the feelings. Of Lazio's demand he said: "Now, well, maybe the financing will come from terrorist sources. Obviously, if that were the situation . . . everyone would have a different opinion. But there's no evidence that that's the situation. And the financing isn't in place, and the mosque hasn't raised the money yet."

Some responses have been less predictable than others. Assemb. Richard Brodsky, running for attorney general, was the only Democrat in a recent debate to say: "The mosque being built in that area is offensive to me, as a matter of my role as a citizen."

Separately, George Demos, Republican candidate for Congress in Suffolk, raises the symbolically significant matter of rebuilding the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at Ground Zero.

State Sen. Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat running for attorney general, said without qualification: "I think the mosque should be built." Carl Paladino, trying to outdo Lazio in the GOP primary for governor, saying he'd use "any means" to stop the mosque: "It's about the Islamists wanting to illustrate that they have conquered America by taking down the World Trade Center. It's a claim of triumph."

On New York's political map, this issue stands right at the intersection of lost industrial real estate and awful violence.