NYC Ground Zero Mosque

[Nightflyer]

The speech friday was all everyone was talking about today. It seems he backed off a bit but it won't help him out much. I belive this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. lol. He lacks being a chip off the old block.


Night

[dadof18x'er]

Originally Posted by Serpent6x6

"Freedom of religion might provide the right to build the mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero, but common sense and respect for those who lost their lives and loved ones gives sensible reason to build the mosque someplace else."

Common sense isn't very common.

a muslim point of view....not much about freedom of religion..http://www.ottawacitizen.com/sports/...303/story.html

[T-Rock]

Ground Zero Mosque is Part of Ideological War
D.L. Adams Aug 16th 2010

Alternative history is a popular genre in American fiction and film. What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Hitler got the Bomb before we did? What if the American Revolution had failed? These kinds of speculative, leading questions can also help us understand current events.

What if, during the height of the Cold War, President Eisenhower had been found to be a Communist? What if President Kennedy was a Stalinist? The answer to these questions is obvious: impeachment.

The United States fought a protracted decades-long ideological war against Communism. The entire population of the country was involved in this effort; the horrors, injustice, and brutality of Communism were commonly known as was the obvious superiority of our own democratic system in comparison to it.

Those few who publicly discuss the threat of Islam are often described as bigots or paranoids even after 9/11, Fort Hood, and thousands of successful and interdicted jihad attacks. The jihad forces fight a growing ideological war against the United States and the West but we do not respond in kind.

“Paranoid” is the word often used to describe such bell-ringers and critics but, as the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.

Ignorance about Islam is far more prevalent and the fact that it should be so even ten years on from 9/11 is a devastating indictment of our culture, political and religious leadership, education system, and our connection with what we hold dear and true.

In the third Lord of the Rings movie Gandalf asks the steward of Gondor, “As steward, you are charged with the defense of this city. Where are Gondor’s armies?” We should ask the same question, where are the armies of the United States?

They fight two wars to prop up two Islamic states whose foundational legal code is Islam itself. The constitutions of Iraq (Article 2) and Afghanistan (Articles 1 and 2) affirm this. This means that the United States supports two Sharia law countries with the blood of our best and extraordinary amounts of national treasure even as our own economy falls.

There can be no more obviously antithetical system of laws than Islamic Sharia to that of our Constitution. American support of Sharia law is nothing short of tragic and self-destructive.

President Obama’s announcement of support for the Ground Zero mosque should come as no surprise. His fawning speech last year in Cairo, his bowing to the Saudi King, and his comments regarding “Arab and Pakistani Americans” in his autohagiography “Audacity of Hope” (p.261), “that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.” “Them” in the quote refers to Arab and Pakistani Americans (adherents of Islam). Obama’s support of the Ground Zero mosque is in keeping with his previous statements and actions.

9/11 and Fort Hood, subsequent jihad attacks, ongoing jihad against Israel and other democracies is the context in which we live. The motivator for jihad is Islamic doctrine.

The mosque at Ground Zero has nothing whatever to do with religious tolerance or religious freedoms as the president suggested in his recent Ramadan White House remarks. The mosque at Ground Zero is the newest phase in an endless ideological war against the United States and non-Muslims everywhere.

Where do we go from here now that our Commander in Chief publicly supports an oppositional and hostile ideology whose purpose is our destruction?

Had Eisenhower or JFK publicly supported Communism during the Cold War the result would have been impeachment. We are now engaged in an ideological war more important than the Cold War, and we are not fighting.

Source > http://bigpeace.com/dladams/2010/08/...eological-war/

[Gypsy]

There are some interesting comments at that link...especially the one from tomtom200.

[T-Rock]

There are some interesting comments at that link...especially the one from tomtom200.

Interesting…it seems people are becoming more aware of "The Madinan Way"

“If introducing Islam into America promotes religious freedom, then why is there no religious freedom in the Muslim world” ?


w4.0 THE FINALITY OF THE PROPHET’S MESSAGE

(2) Previously revealed religions were valid in their own eras, as is attested to by many verses in the Holy Koran, but were abrogated by the universal message of Islam, as equally attested to by many verses of the Koran. Both points are worthy of attention from English-speaking Muslims, who are occasionally exposed to erroneous theories advanced by some teachers and Koran translators affirming these religions’ validity but denying or not mentioning their abrogation, or that it is unbelief (KUFR - Kafiroon) to hold that the remnant cults now bearing the names of formerly valid religions, such as “Christianity” or “Judaism,” are acceptable to Allah Most High after He has sent the final messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace) to the entire world (dis: o8.7(20).
(Reliance of the Traveller)

----------------------------

ETA > the scrubbed web pages from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's Cordoba Initiative have been found....

If building bridges, why not Hindu, Christian, or Zoroastrian Finance ?

pdf > http://bigpeace.com/files/2010/08/ht...ex-project.pdf

Jawa > http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/203619.php

Big Peace > http://bigpeace.com/cbrim/2010/08/17...w-the-shariah/

[akv]

With deference to LOTR fans, Gandalf or other wizards, orcs, etc...

Despite the very real and greater threat of Soviet military might and possibility of nuclear holocaust neither President mentioned by Mr. Adams's piece, Eisenhower or Kennedy banned the American Communist Party, or infringed upon their constitutional protections to assemble etc. I suspect this was done more out of respect for our nations Bill of Rights than any communist sympathies. We managed to survive this threat with credit to our military and economic strength, yet the role of our national congruency reinforced by adherence to our Constitution and freedoms played no small part. The American example stood in stark contrast to Soviet experience for all the world to see.

Ironically, the late Senator McCarthy did more damage to America with his paranoid Communist witch hunts. Should we still be suspicious of anyone raised under the Iron Curtain? While it's likely prudent to remain suspicious of Putin and his thugs, how many of us distrust Poles, East Germans, or Hungarians these days? Instead we see them as just people, good and bad, who were forced to endure a brutal totalitarian regime, frankly just as the Iraqi's and Afghans more recently endured Saddam Hussein and the Taliban respectively.

No one is disputing the presence of AQ terrorist cells or subversives both home and abroad, when we ID such types bust/terminate them, but lets not forget the notion unlike any of the despotic regimes we despise in America, here you are innocent until proven guilty, and we should not turn on our own simply out of fear. The Left does not hold a monopoly on silver tongued rascals who manipulate people by playing to their fears...

[Richard]

A hard heart has a false tongue.
- Ambrose Bierce

And so it goes...

Richard

[T-Rock]

I actually agree with you akv. Nevertheless, the inflexible approach of the builders to offers to move, and the scurrying of Cockroaches that goes on when the light shines in, reinforce my views - An honorable intention doesn't mind when the light shines...

Build 10,000 Mosques, just not in that location...

[AngelsSix]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/m...IByZa5xZ0rCmpJ

Sorry if this was already posted...I just thought it was an interesting aside.

[Richard]

An interesting perspective.

Richard

Ground Zero: Exaggerating the Jihadist Threat
Time, 18 Aug 2010

Should Muslims be allowed to build a mosque at Ground Zero? Merely posing the question is an act of deliberate distortion. As its defenders point out, the Community Center at Park51 will occupy not a solitary inch of the 16-block site on which the Twin Towers stood. Once built, the center will indeed house a mosque, "open and accessible to all" — but also a swimming pool, basketball court, auditorium, library, day-care facility, restaurant and cooking school. The center is being built by a private organization on land it legally owns. Twenty-nine out of 30 Lower Manhattan community-board members voted to approve it. By every legal standard, the case for allowing Park51 to be built is, in the words of conservative UCLA constitutional-law professor Eugene Volokh, "open and shut."

But the question isn't going away. President Obama's statement on Aug. 13 endorsing "the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan" has unleashed another storm of partisan bloviation. Obama is "pandering to radical Islam," says Newt Gingrich; John Boehner finds Obama's comments "deeply troubling." On this issue, the President's critics have public opinion on their side: nearly 70% of Americans in a CNN–Opinion Research Corporation poll say they oppose a Ground Zero mosque.

Many opponents of the Park51 project claim that the mosque itself isn't the problem; it's the idea of building it so close to the World Trade Center. Such misgivings have some validity. But the heat the mosque controversy has generated, on both the left and right, is unhealthy, misplaced and ultimately self-defeating. It reflects our tendency to exaggerate the real threat posed by Islamic extremism and what America should do about it. And nine years after 9/11, the fight over the mosque near Ground Zero shows how obsessed we remain with an enemy that may no longer exist.

The mosque's critics and champions both say their goal is to counter radical Islam. In his Aug. 3 speech defending the Park51 project, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that "we would play into our enemies' hands" if we were to deny American Muslims the right to build a mosque where they choose. "To cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists," Bloomberg said. New York Congressman Jerrod Nadler, a mosque supporter, says, "Everybody's liberty is at stake here." The mosque's opponents make the same argument in reverse. Gingrich has called the Cordoba Initiative part of "an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization." Building the mosque, in the words of one conservative columnist, would be "a symbolic monument to the triumph of Islamism in the United States."

The prevalence of such rhetoric on both sides of the mosque debate makes it seem as if the struggle against global jihadism hangs in the balance. The truth is that Osama bin Laden and his ilk face much bigger problems. The story of the past decade in the Muslim world is that of the widespread rejection — or "refudiation," to borrow a phrase — of terrorism. A study by the Pew Research Center earlier this year found that support in Muslim countries for suicide bombings has fallen precipitously from post-9/11 levels. One-third of Pakistanis believed terrorism was justified in 2002; now just 8% do. For all our anxiety about the rise of religious extremism, no government in the Arab world has been toppled by forces sympathetic to al-Qaeda since 2001. And though some militant Muslims surely wish us harm, their ability to actually inflict it has eroded; it has been more than five years since the last successful al-Qaeda attack in the West.

The eclipse of al-Qaeda has come about largely through revulsion at the jihadists' indiscriminate slaughter of fellow Muslims, from Indonesia to Iraq. And yet we have failed to notice. A Gallup poll taken in June found that Americans still believe terrorism is a bigger threat to the future well-being of the country than health care costs, unemployment and illegal immigration. (Only the federal debt was deemed an issue of equal seriousness.) America's post-9/11 obsession with terrorism, the belief that we are locked in an epic ideological struggle with radical Islam, has stretched our resources to the limit and distracted us from higher-order priorities. National myopia poses a bigger challenge to the U.S.'s long-term stability than terrorism ever will.

What does this mean for the mosque near Ground Zero? However the dispute is ultimately resolved, its impact on the "threat" posed by radical Islam will be negligible. That's because the threat is receding on its own. Allowing a place of worship to be built in lower Manhattan will constitute neither an American triumph nor a defeat. It will simply tell the world that this nation, wisely, has decided to move on.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...011400,00.html

[T-Rock]

What does this mean for the mosque near Ground Zero?…It will simply tell the world that this nation, wisely, has decided to move on…

…into a total state of complacency, a slumbering acquiescence, in a similar fashion as the people of Germany, during the rise of National Socialism...

[SF-TX]

August 18, 2010
Muslim opponent of mosque reports threat
By Brian Lilley, Parliamentary Bureau


OTTAWA - She spoke out against the Ground Zero mosque, now a Canadian Muslim

woman says she is being threatened. Raheel Raza, a founding member of the Muslim Canadian Congress, calls the idea of a mosque within 300 metres of Ground Zero “a deliberate provocation.”

Last week Raza joined Maureen Basnicki a Canadian widow of 9-11 in attending a meeting about the mosque in New York City.

“They were very arrogant. They didn’t answer questions,” Raza told QMI Agency.

The meeting was hosted by Daisy Khan, the wife of the Imam promoting the mosque and Sharif El Gamal, the man whose property firm owns the land the mosque is to be built on.

Raza says she asked questions about who was financing the building, estimated to cost $100 million, and whether any of the money would come from countries other than the United States. There has been much speculation that the mosque is being funded through Saudi Arabian sources but at the Manhattan meeting Raza said there were no answers.

On Monday, back in Toronto, Raza says she received a call on her cellphone from a man who identified as Sharif El Gamal. “His tone was intimidating,” said Raza. “He accused me of 'jumping into’ the meeting he called and then said 'May Allah protect you.’ I was shocked and hung up.”

Raza says she took the phone call as a clear threat against her.

“Why would I need Allah’s protection?” asked Raza.

Raza says El Gamal's tone was threatening and she took the phone call as a clear threat against her, and not as it is sometimes used, as a casual phrase meaning goodbye. Contacted at his New York office El Gamal initially didn’t have much to say. “I’m confused by your phone call,” he said before hanging up.

Contacted a second time El Gamal said “There was no phone call made by anybody” before again hanging up the phone to abruptly end the call.

Raza insists there was a call, “I saved the number on my cell.” The number on Raza’s cellphone matches that of El Gamal’s Soho Properties offices in New York.

The proposal to build a mosque so close to Ground Zero has become a hot political topic in the United States.

Mauren Basnicki, who lost her husband Ken in the attacks on the World Trade Center, told QMI Agency she originally had an open mind about the mosque being built so close to the site of the 9-11 attacks, now she is against it.

“We all believe in religious tolerance. I don’t think for one minute that this is about religious tolerance,” said Basnicki.

Speaking with QMI Agency from her home in Collingwood, Ont., Basnicki says many might be afraid to speak out for fear of being branded as bigoted but to her the location is just insensitive and she’d like to see it move.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2.../15054001.html

[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by T-Rock

…a slumbering acquiescence, in a similar fashion as the people of Germany, during the rise of National Socialism...

FYI, your references to Nazism fly in the face of decades of historiographical debate over the nature, rise, and fall of National Socialism.

[Gypsy]

What does this mean for the mosque near Ground Zero? However the dispute is ultimately resolved, its impact on the "threat" posed by radical Islam will be negligible. That's because the threat is receding on its own. Allowing a place of worship to be built in lower Manhattan will constitute neither an American triumph nor a defeat. It will simply tell the world that this nation, wisely, has decided to move on.

Move on?

Move on? Really?

I don't think so.

[Nightflyer]

Originally Posted by Gypsy

Move on?

Move on? Really?

I don't think so.

Gypsy- Well said, that's a fact. We need to stay in the fight and hold our ground. You know the nation is pissed off when Harry Reed backs off and wants to join the fight.


Night