Over 100 Mosques in NYC. What's Another?

By Ezra Levant on July 28, 2010 


Monument to jihad


I’ve got this great idea: Let’s open a shooting range next to the L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

What, too soon after the Montreal Massacre?

Well how about a museum, overlooking Pearl Harbor, dedicated to the military accomplishments of Japanese Emperor Hirohito?

Too tasteless?

OK. How about a 13-story, $100-million mosque at Ground Zero in New York City, on the rubble of a building that was damaged on 9/11? And let’s have it run by a Muslim radical who believes America had it coming. And let’s give the mosque a jihadist name: Cordoba House, named after the capital of the Muslim conquest of Spain centuries ago. And let’s make it a headquarters for Dawah, the Arabic word for promoting sharia law.

Alas, this is no joke. And the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, couldn’t be happier.

Then again, Bloomberg has trouble separating wishful liberal thinking from reality.

When a car bomb was discovered in Times Square this spring, Bloomberg announced his suspicions on national TV: “Somebody with a political agenda, that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.”

Actually, it was a Pakistani trained terrorist named Faisal Shahzad.

The driving force of the mosque is a radical imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf.

Just weeks after 9/11 he told 60 Minutes that America had it coming—U.S. policies were to blame, and Americans were “an accessory to the crime.”

That’s like telling a rape victim it’s her fault for wearing a skirt.

Rauf helped organize the recent terrorist flotilla that set sail for Gaza. He refuses to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization. But he has no trouble condemning “Christians in World War II” for bombing civilians in Hiroshima.

Rauf won’t even admit that Islamic terroristswere responsible for 9/11 itself. He told a New York radio station that’s just the “general perception.”

Rauf has been working on his plans for Ground Zero for a while. He published a book called A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Da’wah in the Heart of America Post-9/11. It’s about expropriating the symbol of the crumbling U.S.—that can’t even build a memorial to 9/11 after nine years, let alone rebuild the towers — and contrasting it with a gleaming new tower of Saudi-style propaganda.

But even America-hating radicals have the right to build mosques in America, even at Ground Zero. That’s what makes America different from Saudi Arabia, where non-Muslims aren’t allowed to set foot in Mecca, let alone build a church.

But does the Saudi government have the right to build at Ground Zero? According to the Washington Times, the Cordoba Initiative has assets of just $20,000 and total revenues since 2004 have been $100,000. How do you get from there to $100 million?

Rauf won’t say, but hints at outside funding.

Saudi Arabia has a religious foreign ministry, called the Muslim World League. It gave $7 million to build Toronto’s Islamic Centre, and more to mosques in Calgary and Montreal.

Are they the source? There are 100 mosques in New York City. But the Ground Zero mosque isn’t really a mosque. It’s a jihadist headquarters. And if the secret $100 million is from Saudi Arabia, it’s not even a mosque at all—it’s a clandestine embassy for the country from which 15 out of 19 9/11 terrorists came.