Mosque Controversy near Ground Zero

Q. Why is Mayor Mike Bloomberg such a tin-eared elitist schmuck ?

Andy McCarthy: http://article.nationalreview.com/439002/more-moderate-muslims/andrew-c-mccarthy

If Mayor Michael Bloomberg ever decides to stop buying his way around New York City’s term-limit law, he’d be a perfect fit at the State Department.

Hizzoner was not content with having embarrassed himself by predicting that the attempted bombing of Times Square — the heart of a city that has been a jihadist target for 17 years — would prove to be the work of a disgruntled right-winger upset over the health-care bill. Bloomberg has now treated us to a cri de coeur in favor of the Ground Zero mosque. Funding sources for this project, originally known as the “Cordoba Initiative” in honor of the caliphate that conquered Spain, remain unknown. What is known is that the gigantic Islamic center would be located near the crater where Islamist terrorists killed more than 2,700 Americans while destroying the World Trade Center.

Mayor Bloomberg is clearly ready for prime time in the State Department’s production division: It was only last year that our foreign service used your tax dollars to broadcast, on its website, a little movie called “Eid in America.” Eid, the occasion for this exercise in cinematic hagiography, is the feast that ends what our government takes pains to call “the holy month of Ramadan” and commemorates with gala dinners around Washington. The star of the video was the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center — and accompanying mosque — in Falls Church, Va.

[much more; read the whole thing]


NY Post : Mosque Nanny

It’s one thing for Mayor Bloomberg to play nanny and hector New Yorkers about smoking and trans fats, as he never stops doing. But it’s quite another for him to grab the flag and start scolding foes of that planned mosque near Ground Zero, as he did Friday.

The mayor was way, way out of line.

“A handful of people ought to be ashamed of themselves,” he huffed.

Well, we know one person who should be ashamed: him.

Bloomberg got downright apocalyptic, calling the controversy “[as] important [a] test of the separation of church and state . . . as we may see in our lifetimes.”

“Do you really want every time they pass the basket in your church, and you throw a buck in, they run over and say, ‘OK, now, you know, where do you come from?’ ” Hizzoner asked.
Of course not. But that misses the point by a mile — and he well knows it.

The notion that the mosque controversy is a battle over religious freedom is utterly bogus. And it glosses over New Yorkers’ entirely legitimate concerns.

Nor is there a question of whether the mosque should be forced to reveal the sources of its funding — though its failure to do so certainly heightens suspicions.

Let’s face it: The majority of New Yorkers who oppose the project have every right to do so — unless Mayor Religious Freedom doesn’t believe in freedom of speech, or freedom of opinion.
And New Yorkers have every right to be curious about this project, especially.

The mosque’s leader, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, claims to seek “interfaith understanding” — but just how “moderate” is it to launch a project he knows will inflame passions? Plus, he reportedly has ties to radical Islamists and refuses to label Hamas a terrorist group.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has been dedicated to spreading the Wahhabi ideology that spawned al Qaeda — and 9/11. If Saudi money is meant to make this mosque part of that cause, don’t New Yorkers (of all people!) have a right to know?

We don’t begrudge Bloomberg his opinion, of course — wrong as we think it is. But he has no right to begrudge others of theirs. And surely no right to insult them.

Give it a rest, Mr. Mayor.http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/mosque_nanny_m5JtsJMGHTZ1RVUjganFML#ixzz0w3cbclCX


A Muslim victim of 9/11: Build your mosque somewhere else http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080603006.html

Christopher Caldwell: A mosque that wrecks bridges.