A new mosque at Ground Zero would symbolize Islam’s triumph

Frank J. Gaffney Jr.,
Washington Times | Jun. 29, 2010

The supremacist program authoritative Islam calls Shariah is big on symbols. Arguably, none is more effective than its practice of building mosques on its conquests’ most sacred sites.

In Jerusalem, triumphant Muslims built the Al Aqsa mosque on top of the Jews’ revered Temple Mount. They transformed what had been for 1,000 years the largest cathedral in Christendom, Constantinople’s magnificent St. Sophia basilica, into a sprawling mosque complex. The Moorish Umayyad dynasty in Spain made the city of Cordoba its capital and installed an immense mosque on the site of an ancient Christian church there.

Now, an imam in New York who suddenly has come into $100 million from undisclosed sources wants to build a 13-story Islamic Cultural Center adjacent to the site of Shariah’s greatest triumph to date in America: Ground Zero, the place where the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers proudly stood until they were destroyed by Shariah-adherent jihadists on Sept. 11, 2001. It is not a coincidence that the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, has called his project the Cordoba House.

Such a mosque on Sept. 11’s hallowed ground would not only constitute a durable, symbolic taunt by our enemies about their bloody victory. In accordance with Shariah, once ground has been taken for Islam, it can never revert to the non-Muslim Dar al-Harb, literally the house of war.

In other words, the ground zero mosque is designed to be a permanent, in-our-face beachhead for Shariah, a platform for inspiring the triumphalist ambitions of the faithful and eroding resistance to their demands for separate and (for the moment, at least) equal treatment in America.

So why, one might ask, have Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, various other elected officials and clergy and community leaders expressed support for the Cordoba House?

In part, it is a function of local considerations: Who wouldn’t welcome the prospect of an infusion of $100 million into the still-suffering economy of Lower Manhattan? What is more, if the mosque serves as a magnet for new Muslim residents, depressed housing prices could rebound.

The larger problem is that too few of our leaders understand the nature of Shariah and its implications. Even when a leader like Imam Rauf explicitly says he favors bringing Shariah to America, officials at every level of government seem untroubled by the fact that such an agenda necessarily is anti-constitutional and incompatible with our freedoms.

To be sure, Imam Rauf is a skilled practitioner of the Shariah tradition of taqqiya, deception for the faith. It turns out that he was to the manner born: As ace researcher Alyssa A. Lappen has documented, Imam Rauf has family and other long-standing ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

So, in a page taken straight out of the Brotherhood taqqiya playbook, the imam and his wife and collaborator on the Cordoba House project, Daisy Khan, have been much in evidence of late, professing their commitment to interfaith dialogue and the dedication of their new facility to serving the non-Muslim as well as Muslim communities.

As it happens, similar assurances about mosque complexes built elsewhere by other Shariah adherents have amounted to the old bait-and-switch scam. A group called Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) has monitored, for example, the Islamic Society of Boston’s Saudi-funded, city-enabled mega-mosque in Roxbury, Mass. Despite professions of tolerance, the mosque has ties to Hamas and other terrorists. According to APT, the mosque’s imam, Abdullah Farooq, has told his followers to ‘pick up the gun and the sword’ and supported local terror suspects Aafia Siddiqui and Tarek Mehanna.

In the United Kingdom, the North London Central Mosque (aka the Finsbury Park Mosque) has been embraced by the British government and is considered an archetype for its effort to counter radicalization by working with the Muslim Brotherhood’s nonviolent Islamists. Yet this mosque hosted one of America’s most wanted terrorists: Anwar al-Awlaki. According to National Public Radio, among those who attended his sermons was the Nigerian would-be panty bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

We have reason to fear that the U.S. government is poised to follow Britain’s disastrous course – further compounding the muddle-headed thinking among leaders across the country about Shariah and the threat it poses. John Brennan, President Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, has repeatedly signaled that he wants to reach out to moderate jihadists of the Taliban and Hezbollah. President Obama has said he intends to provide more than $400 million for Hamas-run Gaza.

Then, Mr. Brennan gave an interview in The Washington Times last week in which he displayed anew his profound misunderstanding of the enemy and its threat doctrine. As the Times’ Eli Lake reported: Mr. Brennan said that he opposed granting any legitimacy to what he called al Qaeda’s ‘twisted’ interpretation of Islam. ‘Clearly, bin Laden and al Qaeda believe they are on this very holy agenda and this jihad. However, in my view, what we cannot do is to allow them to think, and the rest of the world to think, for the future terrorists of the world to believe al Qaeda is a legitimate representation of jihad and Islam.'”

Such denials of the centrality of violent jihad to authoritative Islam – and the obligation to engage in more stealthy forms of jihad to the same end, the global triumph of Islam, where violence is not practicable – is a formula for disaster. Unchallenged, it will produce a toxic shrine at Ground Zero to the doctrine that animates al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood alike, Shariah.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the syndicated program Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9 p.m. on WTNT 570 AM.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Ex-NYC mayor says project supported by imam with links to terrorism

World Net Daily
Published: 06/10/2010 at 8:48 PM

by Bob Unruh

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who rallied Gotham’s denizens after the 9/11 attacks, says he objects to the idea of an Islamic mosque at the site of Ground Zero in the city where Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001.

“It not only is exactly the wrong place, at Ground Zero, but it is a mosque supported by an imam who has a record of support for causes that were sympathetic with terrorism,” he today told Jeff Katz on his morning drive-time radio show on WXKS. “Come on, we’re going to allow that at Ground Zero?”

He was asked about President Obama’s approach to battling terror and specifically about the controversy that has erupted over plans for the Ground Zero mosque.

WND reported just days ago when a crowd estimated at 10,000 thronged the location in protest of the plans.

Rally organizers then also announced they were planning a lawsuit over the proposal, while mosque supporters are projecting they will open the new project’s doors Sept. 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

Known as the Cordoba House, the mosque is the creation of the American Society for Muslim Advancement. As WND reported, the building at Park Place, just blocks north of the former World Trade Center site, was the site of a Burlington Coat Factory until a plane’s landing-gear assembly crashed through the roof on the day 19 Muslim terrorists hijacked the airliners and flew them into the Twin Towers.

The building was purchased last July by real-estate company Soho Properties, a business run by Muslims. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Kuwait-born founder of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, was an investor in that transaction. Pajamas Media reporter Alyssa Lappen noted that Rauf’s father was Mohammed Abdul Rauf (1917-2004), an Egyptian contemporary of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood – parent organization of al-Qaida, Hamas and other frontline terror groups.

Lappen also reported the society received large international donations in fiscal year 2009 – including $576,312 from Qatar, a nation known to harbor terror financiers and the location of Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf al-Qaradawi. She noted the society also received $481,942 from Holland’s Millennial Development Goals Fund, $144,752 from New York’s Carnegie Corporation, $53,664 from the U.N. Population Fund and additional donations from the Rockefeller Brothers and Hunt Alternatives funds.

Rauf has announced his plan to turn the building into a complete Islamic cultural center, with a mosque, a museum, “merchandising options” and room for seminars to reconcile religions “to counteract the backlash against Muslims in general,” the German magazine Der Speigel reported. The project may cost as much as $150 million. Plans for the facility also include a 500-seat performing-arts theater, fitness center, swimming pool, library, public conference rooms, basketball courts and restaurants, according to the Tribeca Tribune.

Giuliani wasn’t convinced that it is a good idea.

“It sends a particularly bad message, particularly if you knew the background of the imam supporting this,” he said on the Katz show. “This is an imam who has supported radical causes, who has not been forthright in condemning Islamic terrorists, and the worst instincts that brings about.”

He continued, “Nobody would allow something like that at Pearl Harbor. Let’s have some respect for who died there and why they died there. They died because of Islamic extremist terrorists,” he said.

“They are our enemy. We can say that. The world will not end if we say that.”

But he noted that criticism of opposition to the mosque fits into the general kid-gloves handling that the Obama administration has adopted toward Islamic terrorists.

“Every signal that the president is sending, in my opinion, is absolutely the wrong signal,” he said. “He’s sending a signal of weakness and desire to negotiate rather than of strength and a willingness to use all the power of this country to protect us and to crush Islamic terrorism,” he said.

He marveled at the president’s avoidance of the term “Islamic terrorism.”

“I have a hard time,” Giuliani said. “I have sort of a basic rule about how you deal with this. The only way to defeat them is to face them. When you can’t even utter their name, you create the impression, particularly [for] an enemy that’s as psychologically affected as this one, that we are weak and can be pushed.”

He cited a recent apparent attack by North Korea that sank a South Korean warship.

There was no response from Obama, he said.

“I wonder if North Korea would have done that with Ronald Reagan as president,” he said. “Or with George Bush.”

“You sit there and scratch your head and wonder why is the president doing this,” he said.

Similar criticism was leveled against Obama after he bowed to various foreign
rulers. The Seven Sided Cube reported on his bow to Hu Jintao, the communist leader of China, and WND reported on his bow to the king of Saudi Arabia.

According to published reports, the New York City community board recently approved the plan to build the mosque, even after tea-party activists said, according to the Associated Press, the center would be a monument to the victims of the terror attacks.

The mosque is being fought by the group Stop Islamization of America, led by Atlas Shrugs blogger and columnist Pamela Geller, and group Associate Director Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Spencer, author of “Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs” and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades,” said opponents of the project include Egyptian ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish, Sudanese ex-slave Simon Deng, Hindu human-rights activist Babu Suseelan and 9/11 first responders.

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after spending nearly three decades writing on a wide range of issues for several Upper Midwest newspapers and the Associated Press. Sports, tornadoes, homicidal survivalists, and legislative battles all fell within his bailiwick. His scenic photography has been used commercially.

All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.