Mosque to be Built Near Ground Zero

Was that statement sincere or a hypocritical battle tactic ?
We are IGNORANT of which it is.

Quote:

We have to deal with idiots like you on a daily basis.

I have a hard deal I know, but somehow I will need to make being right, and being on the winning side of the argument be enough to sustain me.

Thus building a rabat close to Ground Zero would be in accordance with a tradition started by the Prophet. To all those who believe and hope that the 9/11 ghazva would lead to the destruction of the American "Great Satan," this would be of great symbolic value.

Faced with the anger of New Yorkers, the promoters of the project have started calling it The Cordoba House, echoing President Obama's assertion that it would be used to propagate "moderate" Islam.

The argument is that Cordoba, in southern Spain, was a city where followers of Islam, Christianity and Judaism lived together in peace and produced literature and philosophy.

In fact, Cordoba's history is full of stories of oppression and massacre, prompted by religious fanaticism. It is true that the Muslim rulers of Cordoba didn't force their Christian and Jewish subjects to accept Islam. However, non-Muslims could keep their faith and enjoy state protection only as dhimmis (bonded ones) by paying a poll tax in a system of religious apartheid.

If whatever peace and harmony that is supposed to have existed in Cordoba were the fruit of "Muslim rule," the subtext is that the United States would enjoy similar peace and harmony under Islamic rule.

A rabat in the heart of Manhattan would be of great symbolic value to those who want a high profile, "in your face" projection of Islam in the Infidel West.

This thirst for visibility is translated into increasingly provocative forms of hijab, notably the niqab (mask) and the burqa. The same quest mobilized hundreds of Muslims in Paris the other day to close a whole street so that they could have a Ramadan prayer in the middle of the rush hour.

One of those taking part in the demonstration told French radio that the aim was to "show we are here." "You used to be in our capitals for centuries," he said. "Now, it is our turn to be in the heart of your cities."

Before deciding whether to support or oppose the "Cordoba" project, New Yorkers should consider what it is that they would be buying.



Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/what_the_mosque_would_really_be_SZ9RUEpKoSxbBfcOCwEbvL?CMP=OTC-rss&FEEDNAME=#ixzz0z6S8xkoF

We should tread carefully. I don’t doubt the sincerity of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind a mosque project expressing what he calls the “common impulse of our great faith traditions.”

But nor do I see the project as a test of American religious freedoms. They are abundantly established, not least by the nondenominational chapel — often used as a mosque — at the Pentagon. Nor, above all, do I doubt the pain of many families of the dead who recall Atta’s words and are troubled by a major Islamic center so close to the hallowed ground and hallowed air into which their beloved were vaporized.

I went to Auschwitz 12 years ago to cover the story of a burgeoning field of crosses outside the death camp put there by Catholic protesters. Their tone was ugly but it was hard to argue with them: Close to 100,000 non-Jewish Poles had died in the camp, a number dwarfed by the Jewish dead, but not insignificant.

Still, the crosses were a bad idea. They were offensive to Jewish memory. All but one was eventually removed.

The mosque project near ground zero upholds a great American principle, but it’s not a sensible idea. Good sense is needed when a harvest of anger is in.

eptember 9, 2010
Harvest of Anger
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — A cover of The Economist right after 9/11 declared: “The Day the World Changed.” It has, and not just at airports where several billion shoes have been removed. Nine years later a harvest of anger is in.

Burning books is a lousy idea. Heinrich Heine, the German poet, foresaw the worst early in the 19th century: “Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.” Less than a decade separated the Nazi book burning of 1933 from the crematoria of the Final Solution.

Terry Jones, the pastor of a small church in Florida, did well to heed history’s warnings — as well as the warnings of America’s top military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus — and cancel his planned Koran burning to mark the ninth anniversary Saturday of Al Qaeda’s attack.

Images of Islam’s Holy Book in flames in northwest Gainesville would have enraged Muslims and become a powerful recruitment tool for the very jihadists who attempt to sanctify indiscriminate violence through selective references to the Koran.

Why, almost a decade from Mohammad Atta, with his parting call to “read the Holy Koran” and “remember all of the things God has promised for the martyrs,” has there been scant healing? Why is America now bitterly divided over plans to build a mosque and Islamic center in the immediate vicinity of ground zero, and Europeans almost equally split over the growing Muslim presence in their societies?

This is a sullen time. Only a spark, it seems, separates resentment from uprising.

Since returning to Europe recently, I’ve been struck by the venom in the air: a German Bundesbank board member lamenting the Muslim dilution of his nation in a best-selling book called “Germany Does Away with Itself;” the growing political clout of the Dutch rightist Geert Wilders who is expected in Manhattan Saturday to address an anti-mosque rally; a political climate that sees Turkey’s entry into the European Union receding, a Swiss ban on minarets and French and Belgian acrimony over the veil.

All this is happening as the American right seizes on the lower-Manhattan mosque plan to galvanize anti-Islamic sentiment — lurking despite the better social integration of U.S. Muslims — and cast the Democrats as soft on Shariah.

The Sept. 11 attacks, seen now with a little perspective, shattered America’s self-image. A continent-sized sanctuary, flanked by the shining waters of two oceans, was no longer. A hideous neologism, the “homeland,” was coined to describe a country that now needed vigilant protection from within and without. Two wars, one longer than any in the nation’s history, deepened the trauma.

While one America fought, another shopped until the debt-driven spree ended in mayhem; and, to their horror, Americans discovered they could no longer cushion their declining incomes by borrowing against the once rising — now crashing — assets of their homes. Their last coping mechanism had collapsed.

What was left, and now feeds national anger, was a hard quest to keep house, habits and hope intact while the now bailed-out fat cats who’d invented securitized mortgages sloped off into the sunset, and veterans, scarred from faraway wars, limped back to the “homeland,” once just home. Inequality sharpened. American promise, for many, soured.

None of this fosters forgiveness. Rather, it feeds a quest for scapegoats — Wall Street or Wahhabis.

Europe, in Madrid and London, has also been attacked by jihadists, but its unease goes deeper — to chronic unemployment and aging and resentments spurred by the access of immigrants to elaborate, now cash-strapped social welfare programs. The self-image of a Christian continent persists, drawing lines between insider and outsider.

Against these backdrops, Islam is easily manipulated by those who would cast it as enemy. Its very effervescence — that of the youngest of the great monotheistic religions — and its conservative values, especially on women’s rights, are fodder. So are its political expression as an ordering framework for society and the contentious concept of jihad.

We should tread carefully. I don’t doubt the sincerity of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind a mosque project expressing what he calls the “common impulse of our great faith traditions.”

But nor do I see the project as a test of American religious freedoms. They are abundantly established, not least by the nondenominational chapel — often used as a mosque — at the Pentagon. Nor, above all, do I doubt the pain of many families of the dead who recall Atta’s words and are troubled by a major Islamic center so close to the hallowed ground and hallowed air into which their beloved were vaporized.

I went to Auschwitz 12 years ago to cover the story of a burgeoning field of crosses outside the death camp put there by Catholic protesters. Their tone was ugly but it was hard to argue with them: Close to 100,000 non-Jewish Poles had died in the camp, a number dwarfed by the Jewish dead, but not insignificant.

Still, the crosses were a bad idea. They were offensive to Jewish memory. All but one was eventually removed.

The mosque project near ground zero upholds a great American principle, but it’s not a sensible idea. Good sense is needed when a harvest of anger is in.

This column has been updated to reflect the news.

Agreed, and this is the consensus. This group has the right to build this, they should not build it. Americans have shown good sense and judgment.

As President Obama said, they are us; not them and us.

eptember 10, 2010
Muslim Prayer Room Was Part of Life at Twin Towers
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Sometime in 1999, a construction electrician received a new work assignment from his union. The man, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, was told to report to 2 World Trade Center, the southern of the twin towers.

In the union locker room on the 51st floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam went through a construction worker’s version of due diligence. In the case of an emergency in the building, he asked his foreman and crew, where was he supposed to reassemble? The answer was the corner of Broadway and Vesey.

Over the next few days, noticing some fellow Muslims on the job, Mr. Abdus-Salaam voiced an equally essential question: “So where do you pray at?” And so he learned about the Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower.

He went there regularly in the months to come, first doing the ablution known as wudu in a washroom fitted for cleansing hands, face and feet, and then facing toward Mecca to intone the salat prayer.

On any given day, Mr. Abdus-Salaam’s companions in the prayer room might include financial analysts, carpenters, receptionists, secretaries and ironworkers. There were American natives, immigrants who had earned citizenship, visitors conducting international business — the whole Muslim spectrum of nationality and race.

Leaping down the stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he had been installing ceiling speakers for a reinsurance company on the 49th floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam had a brief, panicked thought. He didn’t see any of the Muslims he recognized from the prayer room. Where were they? Had they managed to evacuate?

He staggered out to the gathering place at Broadway and Vesey. From that corner, he watched the north tower collapse, to be followed soon by the south one. Somewhere in the smoking, burning mountain of rubble lay whatever remained of the prayer room, and also of some of the Muslims who had used it.

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Parc51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

How, when and by whom the prayer room was begun remains unclear. Interviews this week with historians and building executives of the trade center came up empty. Many of the Port Authority’s leasing records were destroyed in the towers’ collapse. The imams of several Manhattan mosques whose members sometimes went to the prayer room knew nothing of its origins.

Yet the room’s existence is etched in the memories of participants like Mr. Abdus-Salaam and Mr. Sareshwala. Prof. John L. Esposito of Georgetown University, an expert in Islamic studies, briefly mentions the prayer room in his recent book “The Future of Islam.”

Moreover, the prayer room was not the only example of Muslim religious practice in or near the trade center. About three dozen Muslim staff members of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, used a stairwell between the 106th and 107th floors for their daily prayers.

Without enough time to walk to the closest mosque — Masjid Manhattan on Warren Street, about four blocks away — the waiters, chefs, banquet managers and others would lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.

During Ramadan, the Muslim employees brought their favorite foods from home, and at the end of the daylight fast shared their iftar meal in the restaurant’s employee cafeteria. “Iftar was my best memory,” said Sekou Siby, 45, a chef originally from the Ivory Coast. “It was really special.”

Such memories have been overtaken, though, by others. Mr. Siby’s cousin and roommate, a chef named Abdul Karim, died at Windows on the World on Sept. 11, as did at least one other Muslim staff member, a banquet server named Shabir Ahmed from Bangladesh.

Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.

There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted salat al-Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.

“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr. Mamdouh, 49, said of the Parc51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”

The irony of it all; a prayer room for Muslims in the twin towers.

the very jihadists who attempt to sanctify indiscriminate violence through selective references to the Koran.

And it is hoped that Americans will have the good sense to not do every damn fool thing that we are allowed to do....be it building a mosque two blocks from ground zero or throwing Korans into a bonfire...

Controversial postings on "Atlas Shrugs" have included a number of false claims, including that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (who is Jewish) supports Nazi ideology (accompanied by a fake picture of her in a Nazi uniform), a video suggesting that Muslims have sex with goats, a doctored photo showing President Obama urinating on an American flag and false claims that Obama's mother was involved in pornography and that Obama "was involved with a crack whore in his youth". Geller has also used her site to accuse President Obama of anti-Semitism and doing the bidding of "Islamic overlords," while posting an essay suggesting, without any evidence, that the President is the "love child" of Malcolm X.During an RT Television News interview, reporter Lauren Lister repeatedly questioned Geller's claim that she is not anti-Muslim, at one point calling attention to Geller's having posted a drawing of Muhammad on her blog with the face of a pig superimposed over his own. Geller responded by saying "I don't know where it is in America that you can't make jokes or make fun."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Geller

That Pamela Geller brews a mean KoolAid. How much did you drink, Hawkeye?

@OmSigDAVID,

OmSigDAVID wrote:
First the Moslems knock down the American World Trade Center, as a symbol
Well, here's your problem. It wasn't "the Moslems" who destroyed the WTC, it was "the terrorists."
The two groups are not synonymous.

because the facts are well known,