Moreover, the same theory that considers every Muslim to be a Muslim forever — whether he wants to be one or not — analogously holds that if a given inch of land has ever been under Islamic domain, it is Islam’s property in perpetuity. There is a reason Islamic maps of Palestine do not reflect the existence of Israel and that Spain is called al-Andalus.

There are Muslims who want to change this, Muslims who want to evolve their faith into the light of ecumenical tolerance, Muslims who crave true religious liberty and reject sharia’s repression. These reformist Muslims face a daunting challenge, however. The power and money in the Islamic community is in the grip of the supremacists who pressure Muslims to resist assimilating in America.

It is a challenge that the president — if he actually had an “unshakable” commitment to religious freedom — could help the reformers try to surmount. No one credibly questions the legal right of Muslim landowners to use their property in any lawful fashion. Legality is an irrelevant issue, even if the back-tracking Obama now wants to pretend it is the only one he was really talking about on Friday night. The question here is propriety.

This president, uniquely, could have framed that question in the right way. He could have called on Muslims who claim to be moderate to reject Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda explicitly, by name and without equivocation. He could have called for them to support freedom of conscience, to support the right of Muslims to leave the faith. He could have called for Muslims to reject the second-class citizenship to which sharia condemns women and non-Muslims. He could have demanded that they accept the right of homosexuals to live without fear of persecution. He could have called for a declaration that sharia is a matter of private contemplation that has no place in the formation of public policy.

If the Ground Zero mosque were understood as standing for those values, it would be a monument worth having: A testament to the rise of a uniquely American Islam that stands foursquare against the hate-filled ideology we’re fighting, an Islam for which Americans would be proud to fight. But that’s not in the cards for a president whose idea of a symbolic gesture is a bow to the Saudi king and an open door to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The president may not have noticed, but the commitment of the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood to religious intolerance is utterly unshakable.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1594033773">The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.