Daisy Khan, wife of Imam Rauf of Park51/Cordoba Initiative fame, weighed in recently on the controversy surrounding the Islamic community center to be built two blocks from ground zero. Struggling to understand why people are so opposed to this innocuous project, Khan turned on the obvious scapegoat: the GOP.

Khan said, “It’s hard for us to imagine we are in the thick of a controversy like this. The Republicans are really going after us.”

Someone of Khan’s beauty and intelligence does herself a disservice by saying such irrational things. Because, if the Republicans are going after her, she must consider that the Democrats are supporting her. Are they?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sure isn’t, as reported in the Huffington Post: “‘The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,’ reads a statement from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office (D-Nev.). ‘Senator Reid respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.'”

If New York Governor David Paterson supports it, he needs to think of a better compromise, having only thus far said, “Frankly, if the sponsors were looking for property anywhere at a distance that would be such that it would accommodate a better feeling among the people who are frustrated, I would look into trying to provide them with the state property they would need.”

In fact, more than half of the nation’s Democrats oppose Park51’s construction.

But on a smaller scale, I recently saw an even better reason for Khan to rethink her statement.

A video released recently by passerby Michael Ferrara and posted on Andrew Breitbart’s website depicts an argument between two people at a Park51 protest in New York City, entitled “Holocaust Survivor Cursed Out by Ground Zero Mosque Supporter.” It shows a heated Aug. 22 exchange between an older gentleman and a middle-aged one.

In much more colorful language, the younger man tells the older one he’s helping Bin Laden by making people afraid and by hating freedom. The old man informs his attacker that he’s a Holocaust survivor, and that he values freedom very much. To this, the younger man remarks Thomas Jefferson would be laughing at him and he would make George Washington ashamed.

Furthermore, he points out that the people protesting the community center are idiots. The older man said the building will only be built “over [the protesters’] dead bodies” and that they’ll lie down in front of the bulldozers. Then the old man walks away, reminding the other man that the protesters will continue to be nonviolent.

Ferrara decided to rendezvous with the younger man after the initial argument, and the latter immediately characterizes the Holocaust survivor as an “unpatriotic treasonous piece of garbage.” He goes on to claim “obviously he didn’t learn his lesson in all this time that he was a Holocaust victim, because right now he wants to do the same [censored] thing to the Muslims that happened to him.”

That’s coming from a Park51 supporter, people.

Does that point of view represent Democrats’ thinking today? To believe that people hate freedom because they’re peacefully protesting a mosque? To believe that people are “unpatriotic treasonous piece[s] of garbage” because they don’t want a community center casting a shadow over the site where the World Trade Center towers once stood?

This gentleman, by the value of his arguments, is simply wrong. It’s not his place to decide how patriotic someone is. He doesn’t know how the founders would react to these protests. And he certainly is wrong in asserting that protesting Park51 is akin to the atrocities against the Jewish people at Dachau and Auschwitz.

But in Khan’s mind, Park51’s supporters are all good people, even this gentleman, because they’re Democrats. And all the protesters are bad, on merit of all being Republicans.

So Daisy, I guess I’m an evil Republican. But Park51 needs to be moved. There won’t be any community healing coming from this place. It’s just too soon. It will be perceived as a deliberate provocation, an extended middle digit to Americans, whether it was intended as such or not.