CRASH: The Mosquetteers Are Obvious Liars

I won't rehash here all that's been written on Cordoba House, or Ground Zero Mosque.  The bottom line for me is that the reasons for the mosque cum "cultural center" are manifest lies.  That is enough.

We WERE told (the story is mutating) that the Cordoba House was to be for "bridge-building" and "cultural exchange".  We now see that was never the purpose.

If that were your purpose for building something...anything...and you were met with a firestorm of opposition from people...the VERY people you claim to want to reach...who told you your project was an unwonted provocation and insult, what would you do? 

If you were offered meetings with the governor of the state, and the suggestion was made that another, less inflammatory site could be found with government help...and you purpose was REALLY to "build bridges"...what would you do?

Anyone with any integrity can answer those questions.  We all know the answer.  It requires no great leap of deductive logic to know, then, that the purpose given was a lie.

We've been told that by other Muslims:

The fact [is] 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.

And what of the liars who told their lies?  Victor Davis Hanson helps--

Then we come to Imam Rauf himself. To his liberal defenders, he is a sort of respectable Deepak Chopra who at respectable places like Aspen mouths pop platitudes of interfaith tolerance — so much so that our own State Department has employed him, apparently for quite some time, for goodwill gallivanting abroad. 

But to those in the Middle East, he is known equally well for doing what he can, as a Western liberal, to contextualize terrorism, bin Laden, and Islamic extremism within the tired Western postmodern tropes of cultural relativism: “The United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened” on 9/11; “In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the U.S.A.”; “The U.S. and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end”; “The issue of terrorism is a very complex question”; “The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians. But it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets” — blah, blah, blah, like all the thinkery that one hears in the faculty lounge.

I have heard the man daintily demur to label Hamas as the terrorists they certainly are.  That is a level of "moderation" that makes the man positively dangerous...and, again, a liar.

His Cordoba House, not being what he pretends it would be, would be...what?

Abroad, the message would, of course, be interpreted quite differently: To the radical Islamists, a mosque rising near Ground Zero well before a new World Trade Center is constructed is a message of Islamic triumphalism — in the long tradition of minarets on the conquered Santa Sophia in Istanbul, the eighth-century Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem rising on the site of the destroyed Jewish Second Temple, and the great mosque at Cordoba retrofitted from the gutted Christian Church of St. Vincent. Again, there are thousands of sites in New York where another mosque could be built; but without the Ground Zero resonance, the irony would be lost. 

Then we come to the funding of the supposed $100 million, 13-story Islamic center (“mosque” has become a right-wing defamation for a complex devoted to contemplation and meditation). Mr. Rauf is not engaged in a nationwide fundraising drive of the sort Americans are used to for preserving iconic ships or refurbishing the Statue of Liberty. Instead, he is apparently counting on petrodollars from the Middle East. Given the authoritarian, and religiously intolerant, regimes in most of the Gulf sheikdoms, one can assume that donations will not be predicated on Imam Rauf’s supposed efforts at an Islamic Reformation. Otherwise, what better place to start than Saudi Arabia? 

The mutating story has now become the canard that this is a much-needed place of worship for a growing Muslim population, under-served by existing mosques.  Bull.  Everyone with a brain knows what this is, and that "a simple place of worship" could be anywhere.  But for the promoters of this Islamist Arch 'd Triumph, nowhere else will do.

I do not object to a mosque in the Lower East Side.  Actually, I'd welcome it, if that is all it is.  What I object to is an Islamist operational headquarters and iconic monument being built within sight of the place where victims' remains are today being pulled out of the rubble of the Twin Towers.