Ground Zero Mosque, why such an opposition?

Will anyone forget 9/11?

Georgie Anne Geyer: Ground Zero Mosque is a bad idea

Source: News-Herald

WASHINGTON — It's recognized by most of us that America is trying to untangle its difficult relationships with Islam everywhere. The plans of some Muslim groups to build a 13-story Ground Zero Mosque only two blocks from the "sacred ground" of 9/11 are complicating that undertaking even further.

On the one hand — the traditional American side — one finds a kind of rage at such an idea. On the other hand — the Islamic-American side, if that term does indeed constitute a coherent group — one finds an arrogant, "we have the right" attitude hardly befitting a group that is asking for privilege.

So who is right, if anybody? We'd better seriously consider these questions, because the conflict over the mosque — and several others in the Greater New York area — is going to be front page news for a long time.

First, the wrenching context: We all know what happened on 9/11, of course, and we are well informed about the perpetrators of the massacre. But who exactly are the Muslims who blithely want to build so close and so high that they can look down on this tragic American cemetery?

One organization is the Cordoba Initiative, which has a good reputation as an Islamic group that wants to meet with Christians in an atmosphere reminiscent of an Islamic "Y." (It is named after the liberal Islamic caliphate in Cordoba, Spain, ruling from the eighth to the 15th centuries, which respected Christians and Jews — a good sign.)

But no one has revealed where the $100 million for the mosque has come from, who is behind the idea, or who are the people leading the entire project.

Two other mosques, in Brooklyn and Staten Island, are being planned by the Muslim American Society, a Virginia-based non-profit group that has been linked to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood — which should give one pause for thought. The Brotherhood's most prominent member, the late religious philosopher Sayyid Qutb, famously called for using jihad to overthrow political structures across the Muslim world.

Anyone familiar with Islam in this confused epoch knows how difficult it is to quantify either groups or ideas within the religion. For starters, you can find Shiites blowing up Sufi mosques, Sunnis fighting Shiites, and al-Qaida killing Awakening Sunnis. We struggle to find moderate groups to work with. Moreover, even American-born Muslim boys are now taking up the violent jihad cause and attacking the United States.

The so-named "spokesman" and "founder" for the Ground Zero Mosque initiative, interviewed on CNN, was far from courteously trying to convince other Americans of his group's good intentions. He was arrogant, smug and derisive of non-Muslim Americans. One came away from his interview feeling that he really wanted to, as the kids rather eloquently say, stick it to us.

Given these chasms of information — and the attitude of the Muslims involved — one can only be against this Ground Zero Mosque. The unequivocal fact is that the grounds where so many died so terribly is no place at this moment of history for any mosque.

Elsewhere, yes! At Ground Zero, no! ...[ Read More!]

A comment from JihadWatch.org from Hugh | July 25, 2010 8:36 AM | Reply

"Keep in mind that there are few Christian churches, much less Jewish synagogues or other religious temples, anywhere in the Islamic world. Until Muslims are willing to provide for others, in countries where they are dominant, what they so arrogantly demand for themselves in the West, it would be the height of folly to allow such a dramatic and intrusive development as the Ground Zero Mosque." [emphasis mine]