Thread: Why the Ground Zero Mosque Must Be Stopped

May 10, 2010
Why the Ground Zero Mosque Must Be Stopped
By Madeline Brooks

Planting a mosque just two blocks from where Muslims murdered Americans on 9/11 in the name of Islam is a huge slap in the face. Why shouldn't Muslims be sensitive enough to realize that a huge mosque planted right near the horrific wound to the U.S. created at Ground Zero by Muslims is outrageous to us? They claim a right to be insulted by cartoons mocking their prophet, even to the point of beheading people.

The Imam of the Ground Zero Insult, Faisal Abdul Rauf, is not the nice guy he likes to hold himself out to be. At his Friday afternoon khutbah services and in his book What's Right With Islam Rauf states that he wants the mosque to be a place where inter-faith understanding is fostered. His sonorous voice is smooth and almost hypnotic. His writing style appears to be rational and unthreatening.

However, this does not jibe with the aspects of him that are downright hostile and frightening.

During a recent Friday sermon, this writer did due diligence as a mosque monitor and heard Rauf deny that Muslims perpetrated 9/11. In an interview with CNN shortly after 9/11, Rauf said, "U.S. policies were an accessory to the crime that happened. We [the U.S.] have been an accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. Osama bin Laden was made in the USA." Elsewhere, Rauf has stated that terrorism will end only when the West acknowledges the harm it has done to Muslims. And that it was Christians who started mass attacks on civilians.

Rauf has numerous ties to CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Department of Justice funding case brought against Hamas, an openly terrorist organization. CAIR is also the initiator of numerous cases designed to intimidate non-Muslims from criticizing aggressive Muslim behavior, and to use our own legal and democratic processes to undermine and dominate America, forcing it to become Islamic.

Rauf calls himself a Sufi, evoking among non-Muslims a "peace and love" image. But that's not the whole picture. Sufism has many sides to it, including the Koranic injunction to spread Islam one way or another, and it has a rich history of waging war, too. Could it be that one of the frequently used tools of war, lying to the enemy, explains the contradiction between Rauf's image as reconciler of religions and his sympathies and associations with terrorists?

A previous Rauf project, Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow, clearly shows on its website that it is headed and funded by individuals from Saudi Arabia, the country that spawned fifteen of the nineteen jihad jockeys who rode the 9/11 planes of destruction. The funding for the mosque at Ground Zero is much murkier so far. All that has been publicly disclosed is that the support comes from unidentified sources in Saudi Arabia and Muslim-ruled Malaysia. Rauf reportedly says he paid $4.85 million for the property -- in cash. Where exactly did this money come from? Was it Wahhabist-supporting Saudi sources, which have already funded many other mosques in New York City?

The mosque is called Cordoba House. Muslims like to refer to Spain and especially the city of Cordoba as a place where their rule reached a glorious peak. Contrary to the myth of a Golden Age of equality during the Muslim occupation of Spain (and in particular in Cordoba), Spain and Cordoba were places where Christians and Jews suffered as social inferiors under Islamic oppression. Equal civil rights never existed for non-Muslims under Sharia, or Islamic law. Rauf even admits as much when he writes, "Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule simply had to pay a tax to finance their protection by their Muslim overlords." This is not equality! Americans do not demand a special tax to protect Muslims from ourselves. That would be extortion, not "protection."

Through another organization Rauf started called the Cordoba Initiative, he created the "Sharia Index." This will measure how closely countries follow Sharia, or Islamic law. While Sharia can cover such relatively innocuous aspects of Muslim life as religious weddings (hopefully not to twelve-year-old girls), it also demands that all Muslim life be governed by laws derived from the Koran, without the intervention of civic institutions, such as democracy. And the Koran dictates that everyone, even non-Muslims, must ultimately live under Sharia. Do you understand how that is in direct conflict with our Constitution and other aspects of our secular society?

Rauf gets even trickier here. He states in What's Right With Islam that a society that follows natural law, such as America, is already practicing Sharia. However, he does not note that his peculiar definition of Sharia acceptance is shared by just about no other Imam. So what prevents him from adjusting his singular idea of Sharia back to the norm of forced conversions, murdering non-Muslims and apostates, amputations of thieves' hands, stoning of adulterous women, execution of homosexuals, etc.? Throughout his writing, Rauf floats an image of a harmonious, pleasant Islam -- nice to everybody. But this is totally disconnected from Islam's actual history of bloody conquest, enslavement, and humiliation of other people -- which he never acknowledges.

Still another unsettling part of Rauf's problem mosque is why the city has given the building a pass. Records for the Department of Buildings have shown numerous complaints for illegal construction and no access, yet the issues were listed as "resolved."

Community Board One's financial district committee needs to reconsider its endorsement of this mosque. The prestigious American groups that are reportedly also financing the mosque, The Ford Foundation and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, need to think again about what they are getting into. The Department of Buildings needs to reassess its action. The Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, which supports the project (Why? What has a religious building got to do with immigration?) needs to reevaluate its approval.

Mayor Bloomberg himself needs to withdraw his support for this mosque, especially in light of the recent Times Square car bomb attempt. If not, he will be helping to provide a handy meeting place for future terrorists, those who understand Imam Rauf's real message: Speak sweetly, appear to be a well-adjusted member of American society, and plan the destruction of America, either with bombs or "peaceful" undermining.

http://suppressednews.com/cgi-bin/news/ ... ffsitenews

The Spanish Province of Cordoba once ruled over by Muslims, is central to the mystique of the "Islamic Reconquest" of Europe. Several Muslim tourists from Austria recently had to be physically evicted when they tried to conduct Muslim prayers in the following:

Great Mosque of Córdoba
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The (Great) Mezquita (of Córdoba or Cordova), now known as Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (English: Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption) is a Roman Catholic Cathedral originally built as a Mosque on the place (and partly with materials) of what previously had been a Christian Visigothic Church[1] in the Andalusian city of Córdoba, Spain. It is regarded as perhaps the most accomplished monument of the Umayyad dynasty of Córdoba. After the Spanish Reconquista, it was turned into a church, with a Gothic cathedral inserted into the center of the large Moorish building. Today the entire building is used to house the Cathedral of the diocese of Córdoba in Spain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosq ... C3%B3rdoba

Anger Greets Plan for Mosque at Ground Zero
Monday, 17 May 2010 07:33 AM

An ambitious plan to build a mosque next to New York's Ground Zero is prompting hope -- and anger -- in a city scarred by terrorism.

There's little to see now at the site, an abandoned clothing store two blocks from the former World Trade Center where nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001.

But Feisal Abdul Rauf, a New York imam and a leader of the project, says the planned multi-storey Islamic center will transform both the drab lower Manhattan street and the way Americans have looked on Muslims since 9/11.

Boasting a mosque with sports facilities, a theater and possibly day care, the center would be open to all visitors to demonstrate that Muslims are part of their community, not some separate element.

"There's nothing like this that we know of in the United States," Rauf told AFP. "This will be a community center for everyone, not just for Muslims, but non-Muslims."

These are tense times for American Muslims who find themselves increasingly painted both by the public and law enforcement bodies as a possible source of terrorism.

A failed car bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1 was allegedly planted by a Pakistani-born American, prompting senior figures in Washington to recommend stripping basic rights from US passport holders suspected of Islamist militant links.

The Islamic center is part of Rauf's program, called the Cordoba Initiative, meant to build bridges between the West and the Muslim world.

But because of the proposed mosque's location, just around the corner from the gaping Ground Zero hole, Rauf's call for peace is seen by some as a battle cry.

"The outrage continues," says website www.nomosquesatgroundzero.wordpress.com under a close-up of the collapsing Twin Towers.

Accusing the Cordoba Initiative of trying to "sneak it through," the protest site says the center will "cast a rude shadow over Ground Zero."

Others compare the idea to building a German cultural center at Auschwitz.

"Spitting in the Face of Everyone Murdered on 9/11," writes Blitz, a self-described "anti-jihadist newspaper."

That level of anger is not uncommon among New Yorkers who blame Islam, rather than just Al-Qaeda or other militant groups, for 9/11 and the global confrontation with the United States.

"This is the wrong neighborhood to put the mosque in," Scott Rachelson, 59, said as he went to his office. Rachelson, who works with people seeking compensation over 9/11 related damages, said his life changed forever the day that two hijacked airliners smashed into Manhattan.

"I was here. For me, and everyone else who was here, we have post-traumatic stress disorder," he said. "It feels like yesterday."

A woman living in the apartment building next to the proposed mosque said she couldn't accept the project.

"I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me a little nervous," said Jennifer Wood, 36, as she took her young son for a walk. "It seems a little in the face, a little too much too soon. I don't know why it has to be here -- this is a big city."

An eloquent and erudite man, Rauf sounds slightly weary when asked about hardcore opposition, but says he hopes the center will become a catalyst for helping Muslims and the wider community to integrate.

"It's about building an American Islamic identity, because we have second-, third-generation Muslims who don't feel they are part of (the country)," he said.

"The complaint throughout the years has been: 'Where's the voice of the moderate Muslims?'" Rauf said. "Well, here we are."

Many look forward to the center, which Rauf estimates will cost 105-140 million dollars to build, possibly financed with bonds.

Mohammed-Iqbal Hossain Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi immigrant running a newspaper kiosk across the street, called for an end to prejudice.

"The people who will come to pray here are working people. We are coming here to pray to God," the 42-year-old said, lifting his hands skyward with a huge smile.

"Ground Zero -- that is about terrorists. Terrorism is a different thing. There are a billion or more Muslims around the world. They aren't all terrorists! I hope people will see us coming here and see that all of us come from one god."

Walking past the shuttered-up Burlington Coat Factory retail store to catch a Subway train, local worker Angela Long, 60, said Muslims can be as American as anyone else.

"I don't believe that Islam equals terrorism. There are crazy people everywhere," she said.

And those arguing that a mosque has no right to exist near Ground Zero?

"They should read our Constitution," she said.

http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/Ange ... /id/359201