Mosque near WTC site no way to build understanding

By Jay Ambrose

A poll shows most registered voters in New York City oppose building a mosque some 600 feet from where Muslims leveled the World Trade Center, killing 2,752 people, on September 11, 2001. Says Time magazine, anyone of an anti-mosque persuasion is ignorant and bigoted. Take that, New Yorkers, and now take a knee to the midsection and a karate chop to the neck.

One of the blows comes from the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who says mosque opponents ``ought to be ashamed of themselves," and the other comes from the Obama administration, which plans to send Feisal Abdul Rauf to the Middle East to preach how we can all be buddies and, one newspaper suggests, to raise money for his Ground Zero project.

Rauf, of course, is the Muslim provocateur-cleric proposing the mosque as part of a $100 million community center, and now he is going to be a U.S. emissary, a cheerleader nixing a clash of civilizations.

There are a few things to be said here, starting with three points on Rauf's side.

First, we have freedom of religion in this country. The government should not stop any project only because it includes a mosque.

Next, while radical, American-hating members of the Islamic faith committed the random slaughter of 9/11, the faith itself has adherents of many interpretive stripes, including those who abhor what happened

Third, Rauf does seem to endorse basic principles of American governance and has indeed worked for mutual understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims

And yet, for all of that, Rauf picked a site for Islamic worship virtually next door to the scene of an infamous, nation-rattling event meant to further Islam and to proclaim hatred for anyone not Islamic. He calls himself a "bridge builder," but would have to have been as insensitive as a piece of the resulting rubble to believe this site would somehow help get us across a great divide.

People _ including relatives of the murdered ― have been screaming their resistance. If Rauf wants love all around the table, how about saying he'll pick another site, and if he doesn't, might we safely conclude he is more interested in what Newt Gingrich described as an act of ``Islamic triumphalism?"

Rauf has other bizarre ways of reaching out to non-Muslim America, such as telling one reporter that Muslims don't wage war by killing civilians, whereas American Christians did that very thing in World War II.

Obviously, as any familiarity with the news informs us, Muslims kill innocent civilians all the time, as in the recent murder of 10 humanitarians in Afghanistan for the sin of being Christian or the suicide bombings of fellow Muslims in Iraq.

He has also said that ``U.S. policies were an accessory to the crime that happened" on Sept. 11. His take is that America has done a lot of "damage" to Muslims and has to apologize for terrorism to end. Check out Daniel Pipes, a scholar who points out that terrorists seldom lodge specific complaints. Their purpose is creation of a universal caliphate under Sharia law.

And as The New York Times international columnist Thomas Friedman has written, we've done more than a little for Muslims already, such as fighting to free them in Kosovo, Bosnia and Kuwait. So after 9/11, what did we hear from Arab-Muslim countries getting our aid? Either applause for the terrorists or the allegation that it was the CIA that did the deed, Friedman observes.

Maybe it's irrelevant, but one thing else you learn by poking around articles about Rauf is that his organization ― the Cordoba Initiative ― takes its name from the city of Cordoba in Spain. It was captured by the Muslims early in the eighth century as part of an effort to conquer Europe. Imagine for a minute that a Christian organization aiming for better relations with Muslims called itself the Crusades Initiative. I bet some Muslims would find that relevant.

Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.