Tag Archives: Ground Zero

Hamas leader agrees with Obama on Ground Zero mosque

Remember how Obama backed the mosque at Ground Zero? Well, guess who else backs the mosque? HAMAS.

Story here in the NY Post. (H/T Memeorandum)

Excerpt:

A leader of the Hamas terror group yesterday jumped into the emotional debate on the plan to construct a mosque near Ground Zero — insisting Muslims “have to build” it there.

“We have to build everywhere,” said Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas and the organization’s chief on the Gaza Strip.

“In every area we have, [as] Muslim[s], we have to pray, and this mosque is the only site of prayer,” he said on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on WABC.

“We have to build the mosque, as you are allowed to build the church and Israelis are building their holy places.”

Hamas, he added, “is representing the vast majority of the Arabic and Islamic world — especially the Islamic side.”

Presumably, Osama Bin Laden and Hezbollah also agree with Obama and the terrorist leader on the mosque.

If you think my headline is bad, look at the Washington Post story.

Why the name “Cordoba House”?

Michael Lame explains. (H/T Hyscience)

Excerpt:

Another key to understanding Imam Rauf’s thinking is his use of the name Cordoba. His non-profit group is called the Cordoba Initiative and, until very recently, the mosque project was called Cordoba House. In order to emphasize “the community center aspect of the project rather than religion,” that name has now been changed to Park51, a more hip, New York style name that offers no associations to another place and time (except perhaps to Studio 54, which I’m sure is unintentional). Cordoba House, by contrast, summons up a host of images and historical references for those familiar with Islamic, Spanish, or medieval history and culture.

[…] Imam Rauf’s book, What’s Right with Islam: a New Vision for Muslims and the West, narrows the pertinent time frame, explaining that the Cordoba Initiative is “named after the period between roughly 800 and 1200 CE, when the Cordoba Caliphate ruled much of today’s Spain.”

[…]Yale professor Maria Rosa Menocal, in The Ornament of the World: how Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain, further whittled down the time period in question regarding Cordoba’s heyday: “From about the mid-eighth century until about the year 1000 this was an Islamic polity, centered in Cordoba, which at its height, in the mid-tenth century, declared itself the center of the Islamic world.”

[…]In considering the “Old Cordoba”, however, one should not forget that Cordovan tolerance was predicated on Islamic rule. Jews and Christians, once they accepted their status as dhimmi, protected albeit subservient peoples, could participate in the intellectual, artistic, and economic life of the broader community.

That’s what this is about: Islamic rule.

Charles Krauthammer makes the conservative case against the Ground-Zero Mosque in the liberal Washington Post.

Barack Obama, sharia law, stealth jihad and the 9/11 mosque

Story here from defense analyst Frank Gaffney.

Excerpt:

At a White House celebration of Ramadan tonight in the company of representatives of several of the Nation’s most prominent Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, President Obama announced his strong support for one of their most immediate objectives: the construction of a mega-mosque and “cultural center” at Ground Zero.  In so doing, he publicly embraced the greatest tar-baby of his presidency.

Obama actually wants Americans to not just tolerate the 9/11 mosque – but to respect it.

Gone too is the option of continuing to conceal an extraordinary fact: the Obama administration is endorsing not only this “local matter,” but explicitly endorsing the agenda of the imam behind it – Feisal Abdul Rauf.  Rauf is the Muslim Brother, who together with his wife Daisy Khan (a.k.a. Daisy Kahn for tax purposes, at least) runs the tellingly named “Cordoba Initiative.”   He is believed to be on a taxpayer-underwritten junket and/or fund-raising tour of the Middle East, courtesy of the State Department, which insists that he is a “moderate” in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. Interestingly, the President’s rhetoric – like that of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other apologists for and boosters of the GZM – tracks perfectly with the Muslim Brotherhood line about why we need to allow what Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin has correctly described as an “Islamist victory arch”  close by some of America’s most hallowed ground.  It is, we are told, all about “religious freedom” and “tolerance.”

Actually, it is all about submission to shariah – arguably the most intolerant of theo-political-legal codes, ironically particularly when it comes to respect for freedom of religion.  Rauf’s mosque complex and the shariah ideology/doctrine that animates it – the same program that animated the jihadists who destroyed the World Trade Center and many of its occupants on 9/11 – has everything to do with power, not faith.

The rest of Gaffney’s first article has profiles of some of the people who attended the dinner, like these:

Ingrid Mattson heads the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the country, the Islamic Society of North America.  ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator in the biggest terrorism financing trial in the nation’s history and was identified as a Brotherhood “associated or friendly” group in documents introduced as evidence uncontested in that Holy Land Foundation prosecution.  Ms. Mattson now presides over the selection, training and certification of Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military and prison system – interestingly, a job formerly in the hands of Muslim Brother Abdurahman Alamoudi, the founder and first head of the American Muslim Council, who is currently serving a 23-year sentence on terrorism charges.

Salam Al-Marayati is president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).  In 1999, then-House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt withdrew his nomination of Al-Marayati to a leadership position on the National Commission on Terrorism when it became public that Al-Marayati claimed that the terrorist group, Hezbollah, was a legitimate organization and has the right to attack the Israeli Army.

I note that Gaffney has a follow-up post with the response from the families of 9/11 victims.