By voting unanimously to deny landmark status to the building on the site of the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero, the New York City Landmarks Commission gave a well-deserved Bronx cheer to Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rick Lazio, and the horse the ADL rode in on to further the cause of anti-Muslim bigotry that the GOP and its Tea Party minions have loosed upon the land.

Ground Zero, of course, is different from Murfreesboro, TN, and Temecula, CA, where anti-mosque-building protests are in train. Or Staten Island, where the trustees of a Catholic parish yielded to public protests and reneged on selling an empty convent to a Muslim group that wanted to turn it into a mosque. Ground Zero has become like Valley Forge and Gettysburg, sites sanctified by the lives Americans gave for their country, shrines of the American Civil Religion.

There’s nothing wrong about that. What’s wrong is the association of Islam as a whole with the small group of zealots who destroyed the towers in its name. Ground Zero must be Islam-free territory or it will be desecrated–that’s the claim. Kind of like Bill Clinton conducting his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky in that Holy of White House Holies, the Oval Office.

How long this irruption of Islamophobia will continue is anybody’s guess. The slogan of the “Stop Islamization of America” organization, which is advertising on buses around the country, is “Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.” How do you like them apples, Citizen Paine?

There’s plenty to criticize in the Bush Administration’s War on Terror, but there’s no question that the formulation served to mitigate the rise of anti-Islamic activity. President Bush, for all his shortcomings, took considerable pains to prevent the struggle against al Qaeda and its allies from turning into a religious war.

Now, two years later, his party has decided to take the opposite route. And by the looks of it, it’s making considerable headway.