The owners didn’t need the board’s approval, actually. But if the hearing hadn’t been held, there would have been no opportunity for Manhattanites to lecture objectors about planting “a seed of peace” in the form of a mosque that’s positively guaranteed to attract triumphalist radicals thanks to its location. We’ve already been over the arguments here so I won’t belabor them, but suffice it to say, everything’s going according to plan on the political side. First the right responds to this obvious provocation by wondering why an alleged gesture of healing and community wouldn’t be withdrawn now that it’s reopened all kinds of wounds. Then the left — and I guess, per CK MacLeod’s latest, the center — congratulates itself for not being as bigoted as the right, even though almost universally the complaint on our side isn’t that the mosque is unwelcome, it’s that it’s unwelcome there. As Karol Sheinin says, “I will never understand … why our options are A) hating Muslims or B) building a mosque at Ground Zero.” The answer is that they’re not “our” options, they’re the options imposed by people who can’t quite grasp why, as Mark Steyn put it, a temple to Islam shouldn’t be placed on the doorstep of two buildings reduced to rubble in Islam’s name. With all the indulgences made to Islamic “sensitivities” these days (the occasional pushback notwithstanding), that seems like an exceedingly small bit of sensitivity to expect in return. But in an age of “self-inflicted cognitive dysfunction,” all bets are off.