The New York City "mosque" issue reveals how scapegoating operates. My family knows about scapegoating.

As the Nazis consolidated power in the 30's, the Yiddish papers had a section where American Jews could ask Jews in Europe about the fate of their relatives. That's how my grandfather learned that the Nazis had taken the entire Greenbaum family into the town square, shot them, and left them to bleed to death. The Nazis blamed the Jews (and a few other "thems") for their national troubles during an economic downturn.

This is the same dynamic we saw in East Timor, Armenia, Rwanda, the Congo, etc. And it's the same dynamic that the right-wing haters are brewing with the mosque in New York City.

The mosque-haters say they understand all that First Amendment stuff but that, really, this is sacred ground, and we should negotiate. The principle here is that when some of "them" do something that hurts "us," "their group" has to negotiate with "us" over every move.

Forget about rule of law and zoning boards and the Bill of Rights. Common decency requires negotiating. You know you've started down the slippery slope of scapegoating when "reasonable" people can start talking about two sets of rules, one for "us" and one for "them."

And forget about the supposed East-West clash of cultures: the real clash here is between the cosmopolitan Lower Manhattan reality and conservative, nativist parochialism. We're hearing the objection that the Muslim community center is a "deliberate provocation," a slap in the face to the memory of those killed on 9/11. Putting aside the fact that Muslims died when the WTC was hit, there's the inconvenient fact that Lower Manhattan is home to a burgeoning population of Muslims from the subcontinent. A quick search-engine query reveals a list of 17 Indian restaurants in Lower Manhattan. And many of these restaurants are run by Bengali Muslims.

It was a natural and organic move on the part of the Muslims in the neighborhood to expand into the old Burlington Coat Factory building. It's THEIR neighborhood as much as anybody else's.

The polls tell us that a majority of New Yorkers have contracted anti-mosque fever. But Americans were wrong in 1963 when they opposed the Voting Rights Act, and New Yorkers are wrong now.

JON GREENBAUM, ROCHESTER