While President Obama has undertaken a series of valuable efforts to emphasize to the Muslim world that the U.S. is not at war with them, that message is being undercut by radical conservatives here at home who are hell-bent on opposing the construction of Muslim places of worship. The most prominent example of this hysteria has been conservatives — including Sarah Palin — rallying against the construction of a mosque near the Ground Zero site in New York because, as the New York Post put it, “where there are mosques, there are Muslims, and where there are Muslims, there are problems.” The Manhattan fear-mongering is just one example of a national trend. In Murfreesboro, TN, a local Republican candidate for Congress recently claimed a proposed mosque was “designed to fracture the moral and political foundation of Middle Tennessee.” Meanwhile, the planned construction of a mosque in Southern California is currently inspiring fierce opposition from the local, “mostly conservative community.” The pastor of a church “just across a cul-de-sac from the site of the mosque” said Islam and Christianity “mix like oil water” and anticipated a “confrontational atmosphere” if the mosque is built. He ominously mused, “Are we supposed to be complacent just because these people say it’s a religion of peace?” In an event at the Center for American Progress Action Fund last week on homegrown extremism in the U.S., Duke University Professor David Schanzer expressed concerns about “the tone of public discourse” alienating Muslims within American Society. He observed that people have been allowed to “say things about Muslim Americans and Islam that they couldn’t say about any other racial or ethnic group and still be respected or still hold a high position in their community.”