The virality of information in this galloping technological age was brought
home to me the other day, when I received an email tip about a Bill Kelly
article in the Washington Times. Titled Mystery WTC Mosque Protest Photos
Causing Internet Stir, the article featured a slideshow of photographs I
made of the June 6 protest at ground zero in New York City. Odds are you have
never heard of that huge historic rally because of a nearly complete media
blackout on the event.
I sent an email to Mr. Kelly to thank him for publishing my photography,
which he had encountered as a viral email. To my surprise, a Washington Times
editor responded. She invited me to the Communities section to write a regular
column.
Mr. Kelly, who is a political satirist, wrote in his column: “Sometimes a
subject is so serious that even we need to take a step back and let the story
tell itself. This is one of those times. … Despite public opinion, the
mainstream media has virtually ignored the protests against the WTC mosque.
According to internet reports, not one major TV network or camera crew covered
this recent protest. … Uncredited photos of the New York protests have surfaced,
bypassing the mainstream media’s unbalanced reporting, and have since caused a
stir on the internet. Few words are necessary. The photos of the mystery
photographer speak louder than any words ever could.”
Pamela Geller organizer of June 6 rally
holds photo of plane parts
Kelly wrote those words on August 12, more than two months after the
“feminist AynRandian” blogger and human-rights activist Pamela Geller led a massive rally at Ground Zero in New York. The purpose of that
rally was to draw attention to grassroots opposition aimed at the proposed
mega-mosque headed by the controversial Imam Feisal Rauf. This past week, the
story that the dominant liberal establishment media tried to keep from you has
gone international and become one of the defining issues of recent times.
With a recent Rasmussen poll showing 62% of Americans are against the 13
story mosque, Geller’s efforts to inform public opinion have been more than
vindicated as mainstream. The 38% who support Rauf’s plans include the Democrat
leadership, the elite mainstream media and the radical 1960s left, who together
have formed an arrogant, chauvinistic machine, pushing the mosque project and
vilifying those who oppose it.
Imam Feisal Rauf is the man who heads the Cordoba
Initiative. He plans to build a Sharia-promoting Islamic complex and mosque 560
feet from where 9/11 terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center
towers.
New Yorkers and the American public are becoming aware that there are many
Islamic groups like Rauf’s who claim to be moderate, but are fronts for the
Muslim Brotherhood. Imam Rauf is a radical extremist cleric who plays to the
sensitivities and ignorance of those who live in the liberal/left media and
academic bubble. They fall over each other praising him and attacking anyone who
questions his motives. Time magazine online, in the space of two weeks, ran four
articles characterizing anyone opposed to the mosque as being racist bigots.
As a Canadian, I can point with a sense of relief to an article in the Ottawa
Citizen by Ms. Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress. The
article is titled: Mischief in Manhattan – We Muslims know the Ground Zero
mosque is meant as a deliberate provocation. Their words tell us what true
moderate moslems sound like:
“Let’s not forget that a mosque is an exclusive place of worship for Muslims
and not an inviting community centre. Most Americans are wary of mosques due to
the hard core rhetoric that is used in pulpits. And rightly so. As Muslims we
are dismayed that our co-religionists have such little consideration for their
fellow citizens and wish to rub salt in their wounds and pretend they are
applying a balm to sooth the pain.”
“As for those teary-eyed, bleeding-heart liberals such as New York mayor
Michael Bloomberg and much of the media, who are blind to the Islamist agenda in
North America, we understand their goodwill. Unfortunately for us, their stand
is based on ignorance and guilt, and they will never in their lives have to face
the tyranny of Islamism that targets, kills and maims Muslims worldwide, and is
using liberalism itself to destroy liberal secular democratic societies from
within.” - Ottawa Citizen
Does Time magazine rate authentic moderate muslims, like these Asian
immigrants to Canada, as racist bigots also? What Raza and Fatah show us is that
the Koran can be interpreted in a mild, nonpolitical way. The bad news is that
the most powerful trend in Islam is the Muslim Brotherhood’s political Islam,
which controls every aspect of adherents’ lives with Sharia Law. They aim to dominate the West and are active in
ninety countries, where they promote a doctrine of both violent jihad and
stealth jihad. Violent jihad is the terrorism we see throughout the world today.
Stealth jihad is, in part, the manipulation of the press and the government in
order to topple a target society or a nation from within.
A 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document obtained by the FBI outlined their
strategy: “[members] must understand that their work in America is a kind of
grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within
and ’sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the
believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over
all other religions.”
Imam Rauf defends Wahhabism, calls for Sharia law in America, and the
elimination of the state of Israel (one state final solution). He also has
defended Bin Laden by claiming that America made him into the terrorist that he
is. He apologizes for radical Islam and justifies acts of violence by blaming
the United States and the West in general, and never blames terrorists for
waging war against western countries. What he does is blame the U.S. for
aggression against Islam. He couches a lot of his rhetoric in soft new-age
speak, yet one of Rauf’s partners in the Cordoba Initiative is Jamal Barzinji, one of
the founders of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood in America. Barzinji founded
Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, which incubated numerous
terrorist plots, including the 9/11 attacks and the Fort Hood murders.
Rauf is seen by liberals today as something of an all-knowing, spellbinding
spiritualist who even quotes John Lennon at times. When he speaks, the press
and even some Christian clerics and rabbis go gaga and proclaim him as a great
example of enlightened moderate Islam. He knows the gullible left, and spoon
feeds them interfaith pablum talk which they lap up while ignoring all his
other statements excusing terrorists.
The Wall Street Journals Bret Stevens pointed out that the elite liberal
media couldn’t tell an ax murderer from a moderate muslim if their lives depended on
it.
Imam Rauf originally named the proposed Islamic center/mosque Cordoba House.
That name has historic significance for Islamists. It refers to Cordoba, Spain,
which was occupied by muslim invaders for three centuries. After 800 hundred of
years of war, Spanish armies forced the muslims out of Spain in 1492. While
occupying Cordoba, the Islamic conquerers built an architectural wonder of a
mosque over that city’s main Catholic church. Muslims have vowed ever since
their expulsion to retake Spain, claiming that it is their rightful Islamic
land. Once muslim, forever muslim.
The greatest domed church ever built in Christendom, the Hagia Sofia in
Constantinople, was converted into a mosque after the fall of that city
to muslim forces in 1453. In India, countless Hindu temples were razed and their
stones used by muslim invaders to build mosques which still dominate ancient
Hindu holy sites today.
To be fair, one must acknowledge that this is exactly what Constantine the
Great and later Roman emperors did, after considerable bloodletting, when they
replaced pagan temples with Christian churches. The Spanish in the New World
also built many churches on the sites of Mayan, Aztec and Inca temples. This is
one aspect of supercessionism. Supercessionism has no place in the modern world,
and should be seen for what it is: an ancient pretext for conquest that should
be banished to the dustbin of history.
But modern Islamists don’t see it that way. In 1999, in Nazareth there was an
attempt to build a huge mosque directly beside the Church of the Annunciation.
Muslims bought up adjacent land, and with Israel’s approval, began building a
mosque whose minarets would tower over the Catholic church. This caused an
uproar from Christians worldwide and led Israel to rescind construction
permission in 2002. In the Nazareth case most Islamic leaders were also against
the project.
In 2008, the English people were shocked to learn that land had been
purchased to build Europe’s largest mosque adjacent to the 2012 Olympic Stadium
in London. Public opposition against the proposed mosque was so great that
planners “missed some deadlines” and finally “let the idea die”. This brings us
to the Burlington Coat Factory, site of the proposed Ground Zero
mega-mosque.
The Burlington Coat Factory was purchased by the Cordoba Initiative at a
bargain price. Its value plummeted from 19 million to less than 5 million when
it was rendered uninhabitable by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2001. A huge
chunk of airplane landing gear (see Geller with photo above) crashed through the
roof and straight down through several of the upper floors of the building. The
entire area was coated by a layer of DNA-laden dust and debris, which was
several feet deep on some streets. In fact, Imam Rauf’s book What’s Right with
Islam is What’s Right with America, was first released in Malaysia under the
ghoulish title A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble.
Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, the director-general of Al-Arabiya TV, wrote that
the Ground Zero Mosque will become “a monument to those who committed the crime
… I do not think that the majority of Muslims want to build a monument or a
place of worship that tomorrow may become a source of pride for the terrorists
and their Muslim followers…” Washington Times
Rauf’s building, even in ruins, is now an active mosque with 400 to 500 men
attending worship services on Fridays. Imam Rauf will not say where the
funding will come from and has refused to rule out Saudi or Iranian money. 80% of mosques in
the U.S. are controlled by Wahhabis. The deeds are held by NAIT (The Islamic
Association of Islamic Trusts) which is a Saudi funded Fannie Mae for mosque
building. That’s the reality and it’s those types of mosques that attract and
produce terrorists. Two years ago this month the NYPD issued a report warning that Wahhabi mosques in America were
incubators for “homegrown” Islamic radicals.
Separation of church (mosque) and state in America should be applied to
foreign states like Saudi Arabia also. This comes at a time when it has been
disclosed that the U. S, State Dept. is spending 26 million dollars renovating mosques in a dozens of countries.
This photograph shows that, at last, redevelopment is underway at Ground
Zero. The Cordoba House site on a street to the left of this photo. It is closer
to me than the trees on the other side of the pit in this image. St. Paul’s
chapel can be seen nestled amongst the trees of the ancient graveyard. Built in
1766, it is the oldest continuously occupied building in New York City. It
remained undamaged as the Twin Towers collapsed just at the graveyard’s wrought
iron gate. When built, it was surrounded by farmland and orchards and considered
a remote “country church” to serve parishioners living on the edge of
town. (Bigot Alert: El Marco is neither Christian or Jewish)
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