Why the Ground Zero Mosque is Counterproductive
Islamophobic? The anti-Ground Zero mosque ad campaign that launched in New York City in August.
The best arguments in the debate revolving around the “Ground Zero” mosque in New York City are the thoughtful ones against the construction of it.
Yes, it is true that President Obama spelt out the legal argument that respects the rights of all people in America:
As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in lower Manhattan in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.
Even a prominent Republican, the governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, agreed with this logical articulation of one of the core issues in the controversial debate:
I think he’s right — I mean you know we’re a country that in my view stands for freedom of religion and respect for others . . . I know there are sensitivities and I understand them. This is a place where you’re supposed to be able to practice your religion without the government telling you [that] you can’t.
But demolishing a building to erect a new mosque two blocks away from where thousands of Americans were killed by Muslim extremists is not merely about legal issues and citizens’ rights. Yes, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf can build a mosque there. He and his community have the right to. But given the sensitive nature of this now sacred ground, why would they? This question is asked (and brazenly answered) by Tarek Fatah and Raheel Raza in an article titled “Mischief in Manhattan” published in the Ottawa Citizen on August 17.
New York currently boasts at least 30 mosques so it’s not as if there is pressing need to find space for worshippers. The fact we Muslims know the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel. The proposal has been made in bad faith and in Islamic parlance, such an act is referred to as “Fitna,” meaning “mischief-making” that is clearly forbidden in the Koran.
The Koran commands Muslims to, “Be considerate when you debate with the People of the Book” — i.e., Jews and Christians. Building an exclusive place of worship for Muslims at the place where Muslims killed thousands of New Yorkers is not being considerate or sensitive, it is undoubtedly an act of “fitna”
The Canada-based Muslim writers then ask:
Do they not understand that building a mosque at Ground Zero is equivalent to permitting a Serbian Orthodox church near the killing fields of Srebrenica where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered?
Pakistani journalist Irfan Husain offered these thoughts to the argument:
In such an emotionally charged debate, it’s hard to be rational. Logically, the location should be immaterial: after all, there is already a mosque in the area, not far from Ground Zero. So why should another make any difference? The truth is that the 9/11 attacks continue to resonate deeply in America, so what’s the point in insisting on a project that is like a red flag to a bull?
This is a valid point out, and arguably the most critical (and most Islamic) one. Yes, there is already another mosque in the area. And it’s one run by the same Imam who is heading the offensively named “Cordoba Initiative” – the name spurred protesters against the mosque to hold placards reading, “Islam builds mosques at the sites of their conquests and victories.” But is this the way to achieve harmony? Is this the way to soothe the pain of neighbours and fellow countrymen? There is no goodwill here. It seems like unnecessary expansion and extreme insensitivity. The type of insensitivity Muslims of all stripes deplore when people decide to draw pictures of the Prophet (PBUH): yes, they have the right to draw the pictures, but why do they insist on going through with it?
The proposed Mosque reportedly has a price tag of $100 million and there is much speculation that the majority of the funding is coming from Saudi Arabia. Husain adds this:
More to the point for me is that the Saudis have been funding mosques and madrassas around the world, in addition to paying for chairs for Islamic studies at major universities. All these have been used to project the country’s official Wahhabi version of Islam that has fuelled the rising tide of extremism and jihadi fervour. Against this backdrop, the question to ask is whether we need yet another such mosque.
Clearly this mosque will only widen the divide in the US between Muslims and Islamophobes.
In Fatah and Raza’s article, they add this:
If Rauf is serious about building bridges, then he could have dedicated space in this so-called community centre to a church and synagogue, but he did not. We passed on this message to him through a mutual Saudi friend, but received no answer. He could have proposed a memorial to the 9/11 dead with a denouncement of the doctrine of armed jihad, but he chose not to.
Fatah and Raza end their argument asking liberals to question their support for projects like this as they feel many liberals are blinded by their desire to be fair and tolerant, their unbending belief in upholding minority rights and a powerful sense of guilt. The words are tough, resonating and darkly cautionary:
As for those teary-eyed, bleeding-heart liberals such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and much of the media, who are blind to the Islamist agenda in North America, we understand their goodwill.
Unfortunately for us, their stand is based on ignorance and guilt, and they will never in their lives have to face the tyranny of Islamism that targets, kills and maims Muslims worldwide, and is using liberalism itself to destroy liberal secular democratic societies from within.
Watch these videos on the “Ground Zero” mosque debate:
- The first is a look at the ad campaign against the mosque and a peek at the mosque that already exists.
- The second gives a chance to a US Muslim who is not associated with the controversial mosque to defend the location.
An Ad Campaign Against the Mosque Hits NYC Buses
US Muslim Defends “Ground Zero” Mosque
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This massage is for the Imam of this mosque:
Thank you for your consideration about Iran,
We understand your point of view, you don’t want to discriminate between the muslem nationa that is why you are considering all of the muslem countries including Iran for the fundrising of this mosque, but please don’t ask funds from Iran for this mosque because united state has caused lots of trouble for Iranian people during the history and Iran has lots of problem with this country. I think this is not fair for the IRANIAN PEOPLE to give their mony to this country and some of them already have requested the government of IRAN not to give money for this country.
Thank you and good luck,
Some points may be noted:
1. The ‘opening to Muslims’ is a Obama project. Since Imam Rauf is cooperating with State Department and had been on several trips abroad on behalf of US administration, it can be surmised that the project ‘Cordoba Initiative’ had Obama clearance, if not active endorsement.
2. As Left liberals like Tarek Fatah were first to pounce on the project, as they would against any building of Mosques, anywhere in the world, they were not aware that Imam Rauf himself has liberal reputation and as such has nothing to do with hardliners, radicals, fundamentalists et al. as is being made out by one and all.
3. The campaign against the ‘mosque’ has some local political and commercial vested- interests involvement that have links to Jewish land Sharks and Neo-con Republican backing that is increasingly becoming apparent. The so-called ‘sensitivity’ is a contrived one and not as sincere as it is being made out.
4. Now US media is making out that the ‘project G0 mosque is not about any mosque, but a Interfaith Islamic Center which will have a prayer hall. The two ‘masjids’ cited by some being already in the locality are nothing but bare rooms being used for prayers. Such rooms are called ‘Musalla’ in Arab Gulf countries and found even at airports. They do not come into the definition of proper mosque with minarets and facilities for Azan. A BBC panelist admitted it is not going to be a grand mosque the like of Sofia Mosque of Turkey, for the opponent to dread the so-called ‘triumphalism’ of the conquering Muslims.
5. A new focus is now on the event of 9/11 itself, which is increasingly being analyzed by experts as a great hoax. You-tube is full of public testimonies of people who have first hand information as to how Jewish Land Sharks collaborated with elements in US administration and cooked up the whole ’9/11′ and ‘war on terror’, to invade Muslim countries and secure full control of oil and gas resources as well as transportation routes for their oil companies.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html?th&emc=th#
How Fox Betrayed Petraeus
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 21, 2010
THE “ground zero mosque,” as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room. It’s not going to determine President Obama’s political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012. Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan — on the “hallowed ground” of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club — will prove eventful all the same. And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location.
Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.
So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?
You’d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan “surge” would not act against their own professed interests. But they couldn’t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country. The ginned-up rage over the “ground zero mosque” was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad — a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated — but by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.
We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”
As well Ingraham might. Rauf is no terrorist. He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, at the Manhattan synagogue B’nai Jeshurun. Pearl’s father was in attendance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Christians and Jews. Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool.
In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).
These patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon. Their sudden concern for ground zero is suspect to those of us who actually live in New York. All but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders just last month. Though many of these ground-zero watchdogs partied at the 2004 G.O.P. convention in New York exploiting 9/11, none of them protested that a fellow Republican, the former New York governor George Pataki, so bollixed up the management of the World Trade Center site that nine years on it still lacks any finished buildings, let alone a permanent memorial.
The Fox patron saint Sarah Palin calls Park51 a “stab in the heart” of Americans who “still have that lingering pain from 9/11.” But her only previous engagement with the 9/11 site was when she used it as a political backdrop for taking her first questions from reporters nearly a month after being named to the G.O.P. ticket. (She was so eager to grab her ground zero photo op that she defied John McCain’s just-announced “suspension” of their campaign.) Her disingenuous piety has been topped only by Bernie Kerik, who smuggled a Twitter message out of prison to register his rage at the ground zero desecration. As my colleague Clyde Haberman reminded us, such was Kerik’s previous reverence for the burial ground of 9/11 that he appropriated an apartment overlooking the site (and designated for recovery workers) for an extramarital affair.
At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified “reports” that Park51 has “money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.” As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.
Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51. But it’s an irresistible target in our current election year because it revives the most insidious anti-Obama narrative of the many Fox promoted in the previous election year: Obama the closet Muslim and secret madrassa alumnus. In the much discussed latest Pew poll, a record number of Americans (nearing 20 percent) said that our Christian president practices Islam. And they do not see that as a good thing. Existing or proposed American mosques hundreds and even thousands of miles from ground zero, from Tennessee to Wisconsin to California, are now under siege.
After 9/11, President Bush praised Islam as a religion of peace and asked for tolerance for Muslims not necessarily because he was a humanitarian or knew much about Islam but because national security demanded it. An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s “next video script has just written itself,” as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it — but not just for that reason. America’s Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven’s sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?
In the latest CNN poll, American opposition is at an all-time high to both the ostensibly concluded war in Iraq (69 percent) and the endless one in Afghanistan (62 percent). Now, when the very same politicians and pundits who urge infinite patience for Afghanistan slime Muslims as Nazis, they will have to explain that they are not talking about Hamid Karzai or his corrupt narco-thug government or the questionably loyal Afghan armed forces our own forces are asked to entrust with their lives. The hawks will have to make the case that American troops should make the ultimate sacrifice to build a Nazi — Afghan, I mean — nation and that economically depressed taxpayers should keep paying for it. Good luck with that.
Poor General Petraeus. Over the last week he has been ubiquitous in the major newspapers and on television as he pursues a publicity tour to pitch the war he’s inherited. But have you heard any buzz about what he had to say? Any debate? Any anything? No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.
It’s poignant, really. Even as America’s most venerable soldier returned from the front to valiantly assume the role of Willy Loman, the product he was selling was being discredited and discontinued by his own self-proclaimed allies at home.
1) the center is not a mosque. it is a muslim sponsored ymca, a community center that everyone in nyc can use.
2) the building was bought at a cheap price for a reason–no one wanted to build there. if it is built, no one will be able to see it. why? because southern manhattan is full of larger buildings, not to mention the fact it is planned to look like a community center, not the faisal or badshah mosques.
3) the plan does contain a memorial to the 9/11 victims.
4) this plan was considered quite ‘productive’ only a year ago when even a right wing host of fox news thought it was a great idea. the ‘productivity’ of the gesture is in it being an ‘american-muslim’ center, to serve the needs of both muslims who are frequently in downtown manhattan and the general nyc community of american citizens.
5) if this center is inappropriate, then please answer why the issue with this muslim-sponsored building project is not the only one to protested against? why are protests going on across the united states, from sea to shining sea?
6) mayor bloomberg is taking a principled position. he is not a bleeding heart liberal. let’s not confuse canda’s multicultural norms and landscape with that of the united states. in fact he has was voicing support for israel across the media during the gaza war while ‘bleeding heart liberals’ were crying foul. to call him a ‘bleeding heart liberal’ demonstrates an inadequate understanding of american political culture.
7) you know you get a lapdance at one of the few stripclubs nearby the ‘sacred ground’ that somehow extends two full nyc-size blocks north of the northern end of the ground-zero.
The very idea that we should not build a mosque because some (vested) interests don’t like is beyond ridiculous. Same people are calling for not allowing any more mosques ANYWHERE in America. Would Qizilbash support that too? Next step will be asking all mosques in America be closed/destroyed. What about that Talib Sahib? Is that kosher as well? Oh by the way, a Florida mosque just got bombed. Should we be quiet — like the mainstream media in US — because doing otherwise would be counterproductive as well? What a silly argument.
Some links to clear up the lies:
First of all, there IS NO Ground Zero Mosque
This whole controversy is a distraction:
Grayson slams mosque ‘distraction’: Talk about admin that ‘let’ 9/11 happen instead
It is a bl**dy joke:
The ‘Mosque’ Affair: An American Comedy
Ground Zero Mosque Imam Is Globalist Stooge who Helped FBI With Counterterrorism Efforts
9/11 Heroes Blast Obama: Forget The Mosque, We’re Dying
Ground Zero Mosque Opposition Funded by Israel’s PR Agency
GORDON DUFF: THE GROUND ZERO MOSQUE LIES
A Saudi Funded 100 Million Dollar Mosque near Ground
Zero!I found this very idea a bit non convincing.
Look, US is predominently Christian Country(98%),
though the constitution says it has no State Religion,
but practically speaking its Christianity. For last
500 years they built their nation through sweat and
blood. The Muslims, Hindus, Buddihsts or Bahais…all
arrived there in last 50 years, as carpet baggers,
took the benifit of an open society and liberal
educaton and flourished.
Ground Zero is a sensitive issue.3,000 people perished
there,its almost like Ahmednezad to deny the fact that
Holocast never happened!It hurts and make people more
adamant.
There are thousands of Christians and people from
other religions in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
countries…why deny their basic right to build
Churches, Synagogues and Temples there…isn’t
that apartheid?Are’t these Islamic countries member
of UN and signed the Charter of UN!
There are 50 plus mosques in New York alone,why
another…while there are already two(yes they are
full fledged Mosques) blocks away from Ground Zero.
Hamas and Lashkar leadrship is going Ga Ga over Ground
Zero mosque…but a rational Muslim should think
otherwise. Don;t we know how US people use the
word’Pakis’, how in France , Belgium, Holland and
other Europenan countries became overtly anti-Islam!
You can’t build a Mosque in Rural France without
being vandalised or burnt.After the Hamburg arrests,
German secret police is monitoring every activity
insides all Mosques in Germany!
Let people of New York decide…not just an immagrnt
Egyptian and his Saudi financers!
In the name of megalomania we don’t want a perpetual clash of civilzatons…which would be counter productive.
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