If any of those places were major cities where such buildings had to be built anyway, your analogy would make more sense. That's a fairly crucial difference. Wounded Knee is a tiny little town, far too small for a Walmart or other big store to be worth building if it was just a normal commercial decision. If on the other hand it had become a large town over the years, so that the name meant more than just the memory of the massacre, nobody would even think twice about having a Walmart there. There was that massacre in Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War, and if Boston had been and remained as tiny a place as Wounded Knee, no doubt it would have been the main association for people to make when they thought of Boston, and so a British consulate or cultural centre in Boston might've been considered insensitive. But Boston is a large city known for plenty of things, as is NYC. Of course this mosque is not just in NYC but also relatively close to Ground Zero, but then, how close is too close? A mosque *on* or right across from Ground Zero could be called insensitive with more justification, but since it's not, does it really matter if it's two blocks away, or five, or twenty?

If you're going to take pride in the ideals America was founded on and is supposed to stand for to this day, then yes, that comes at the price of having to live up to those ideals and resisting the temptation of glossing them over when it's convenient.

And "European"? I'm European, and so is Camilla, and snoop, and Tim and Elaine though those two only had one reply each that I've seen. That leaves a vast majority of American posters and posts in this thread. But, what, they're not real Americans if they have the nerve to disagree with you?