The Ground Zero Mosque - First You Bomb and Then You Occupy

Did you know that downtown Manhattan has a huge Muslim population. That's right, a Muslim population so huge that it can only be serviced by a 100 million dollar mosque to be constructed in a 13 story building.

With that kind of project, you would have to assume that there's a local Muslim community in the tens of thousands that need to be served by a Muslim center. In fact there is no such community. The existing local mosques, including a nondescript metal door stamped Masjid, 5 blocks from Ground Zero, mainly cater to vendors selling burned meat from stores and carts, the "Halal Mafia" who insist on sending waves of foul smelling black smoke everywhere in their vicinity and are known to violently assault other vendors who want to do business in their vicinity.

Then there are the employees of closeout and discount stores selling everything from items bought up from stores that have gone out of business to used clothes and pirated movies in the vicinity of City Hall. These are being gentrified out of business as the neighborhood continues attracting a better class of businesses. Also the majority of those who work there are women. There are a few Muslims working at financial firms on Wall Street, but they are a minority, and they are also not neighborhood residents.

Unlike Park Slope or Boerum Hill or that ugly part of Midwood lined with rundown shops selling phone cards and cheap beads, Lower Manhattan is not home to a large Muslim community. No one seriously claims that it is. Manhattan's storefront mosques are largely used by Pakistani and Afghan Muslims who work nearby but who actually live in Brooklyn, Queens or New Jersey. None of this is seriously in dispute.

Imam Feisal himself admits in an interview that the majority of the worshipers at his mosque in Tribeca are not local members of the community.

The people who come here for jum'a [prayer] come from within the New York tri-state area. Of course, the majority work around here, but a number of them come from Uptown, Brooklyn or New Jersey , specifically to participate in the Friday prayer here and to hear my sermon.

Feisal doesn't even mention any actual Lower Manhattan residents attending his mosque. Only Muslims who work in the area and some who travel just to hear him preach. Which means that contrary to what Feisal told the Community Board, his proposed mosque is not similar to local Jewish and Christian community centers which serve local Jewish and Christian populations. Instead this will be a mosque that may serve something like a 100-200 commuting Muslims at a cost of approximately 1 million dollars per Muslim.

The question then is who is this Ground Zero mosque actually for? If there aren't thousands of Muslim families in need of a 100 million dollar Mosque/Islamic cultural center-- why is it actually being built?

The number of mosques in New York City has increased dramatically in a generation, going from under 10 in 1970 to over a 100 in 2001, including 17 in Manhattan. That number is much higher today and many of the mosques have gone from storefront operations to occupying large buildings and using outreach programs to find converts. Those mosques have also begun to muscle in on local businesses, trying to shut down nearby bars. This establishes the mosque as not just a building where Muslims enter and do what they do, but as a foothold for controlling and remaking entire neighborhoods on a street by street basis.

A number of Manhattan liquor stores have already lost their licenses as the New York Muslim brethren of the Taliban use the municipal bureaucracy to drive them out of business, and if they can't do it legally, then they use threats and intimidation. These are not isolated incidents. Like the Minnesota Muslim cabbies who refused to transport passengers carrying alcohol and instead tried to impose two lines, one for those obedient to Sharia and one for the infidels, or the Target cashiers who refused to scan pork products, this is about imposing Islamic law on Americans.

Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Erdogan once wrote, "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers." Erdogan's vision of Islam is the same as that of the Saudis, which awarded him the "King Faisal International Prize for Service to Islam". And it is Saudi money that is behind the Islamist groups in the US such as CAIR which serve as the public face of Muslims in America.

What does building an Islamic "barracks" near Ground Zero really mean? What does taking over a building that was made defunct by the 9/11 attacks, buying up property for a fraction of their real price in a neighborhood whose commercial property values were destroyed by Islamic terrorism... in order to build one of those "barracks" really say? It's the next phase of the invasion. First you bomb and then you occupy.

After Al Queda "cleared the ground" in the attacks of September 11. This not only killed 3,000 people, but it also poisoned large numbers of rescue workers and damaged a number of nearby buildings, such as the Deutsche Bank building and the old Burlington Coat factory building-- which the proposed Mosque is taking over. And thanks to the massacre and devastation staged by their co-religionists, the 18 million dollar building was instead sold to a Muslim company for under 5 million dollars.

Quite a discount, wouldn't you say? Kill 3,000 infidels and you get to buy the building that your co-religionists devalued at less than a third of the price. Now that is what real Sharia economics looks like.

But occupation forces do this all the time. When the US occupied Germany, it used the IG Farben building, formerly the keystone of the Nazi industrial war machine as its military government headquarters. When the US occupied Baghdad, it took over and used Saddam's palaces as ops centers. First you bomb, then you occupy the headquarters of the enemy. The proposed mosque will be built on property that was hit by Muslim terrorism. Now it will serve as the staging ground for the next phase of the invasion.

As I have demonstrated, this proposed mosque is not meant to serve local Muslims. For one thing there are hardly any. For another thing, Imam Feisal has repeatedly emphasized that the mosque will be an educational and cultural center in order to promote Islam. It will have a swimming pool, a restaurant, a theater, a basketball court and all the trappings of Jewish and Christian community centers-- which makes perfect sense since it is really only aimed at Jews and Christians (and any other assorted infidels that may wander in). Its real model however is that of the Scientology centers which seek to lure in people so that they will join up. And this is just the beginning.

“From a programmatic point of view, this has never been done before,” Feisal added. “If we do this right, we want to franchise this concept, and build other Cordoba Houses like this in other American cities, and cities around the globe.”

Like McDonalds, except for Islam. One billion served. Or is that really one billion serving.

Remember those mosque barracks again? The barracks train the faithful in the way of Islam. And since the days of Mohammed, the way of Islam has been Jihad. And converts to Islam have proven to be extremely reliable terrorists.

The name Cordoba House is a popular one among Muslims operating in the West, because gullible Westerners can be convinced that it's about looking back to a golden age of tolerance between Muslims, Christians and Jews in Spain. In reality however, the use of Cordoba references the Muslim domination of Christians and Jews under the Caliphate of Cordoba which invaded and occupied Spain and parts of France.

The mission of Feisal's Cordoba Initiative; "to achieve a tipping point in Muslim-West relations within the next decade, bringing back the atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and respect that we have longed for since Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony and prosperity eight hundred years ago"... can be read in one of two ways.

There is the gullible Westerner reading, which is thrilled by the idea of everyone living in peace. And then there is the informed reading which understands that in the Muslim cultural worldview, co-existence and harmony is the product of living under Islamic law. In the Muslim reading of history, there was general tolerance and prosperity under Islam, which can only be restored when the "tipping point" of a global Caliphate is reached and everyone once again is living happily under Islam. Just like in the good old days of Al Andalus and the Cordoba Caliphate.

Is this what Imam Feisal means? Let's consider his explanation of what the Cordoba Initiative is named for.

During its peak in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Cordoba was the most enlightened, pluralistic and tolerant society on earth, one where Muslims and Jews enjoyed a special relationship. My own organisation, the Cordoba Initiative, draws upon this legacy to once again shift Jewish-Muslim relations towards collaboration around our common values and interests

This of course sounds perfectly innocuous to Western ears. Except that one minor detail has been left out. The 10th and 11th centuries were the period of the Cordoba Caliphate. This "special relationship" that Imam Feisal is speaking about consisted of Jews living under Muslim rule and being tolerated by Muslim rulers.

What did this wonderful "special relationship" in Cordoba really look like?

In 1011 in Cordoba, Spain, under Muslim rule, there were pogroms in which, according to various estimates, from hundreds to thousands were murdered.

Meanwhile last month, before wowing gullible Community Board members, Imam Feisal was busy whitewashing Sudan's election where Sudan's El Bashir, who had presided over the genocide of Animists and Christians, was reelected by a sizable majority. The actual election was hopelessly corrupt. How bad was it really? So bad that even the Carter Center panned it. And the Carter Center had previously endorsed Chavez's and Hamas' elections. But that didn't stop Imam Feisal from giving it the green light in numerous articles posted on his Cordoba Initiative site and on Al Jazeera, urging "constructive engagement" with the genocidal Sudanese regime.

Because Cordoba can be anywhere. Anywhere at all that Muslims rule over non-Muslims. So long as Islamic law rules. And what's a little genocide between "believers"?  And speaking of Islamic law, another project of the Cordoba Initiative, is the Shariah Index which measures the "Islamicity" of a state that determines how well the country complies with Islamic law. And that is where we are now. The next phase of the invasion. Occupation.

Imam Feisal has already said that terrorism won't end until the West acknowledges the harm it's done to Muslims. This of course is always the starting point at which the cycle of appeasement begins with terrorists. Acknowledge the harm you've done to us. Stop drawing cartoons of Mohammed. Give over some of your civil rights, your women's rights and your rights period. Accept the Medina Charter under which all conflicts are to be resolved by Islamic law. Submit.

The Ground Zero mosque is an obscenity and an abomination. It is no better than raising the Swastika over Auschwitz. Like the Crescent of Embrace, it symbolizes the Islamic dominance even over the graves of its victims. It is a despicable crime against the living and the dead, against the memory of an atrocity, by those who have profited from it.

The Prophet Elijah's rebuke to Ahab, "Have you murdered and also inherited?" would ring in the ears of any civilized person who sees such a terrible thing done. Who watches as the religion of the murderers seeks to erect a monument to its own self-glorification over the incinerated bodies of its victims. Not victims who happened to be killed by people who just happened to be Muslims. But who were murdered in the name of Islam. So that, in the words of the Koran, Islam may be, "victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist". (Koran 61:9) 

So where will the next Times Square bomber come from? Perhaps he will be an ordinary American college student who stops by to look over Ground Zero and is puzzled over the beliefs of those who did this. And so he takes a free tour at the nearby Cordoba House. He is given the heavily whitewashed version of Islam, and he accepts it. He stops by whenever he's in the area and eventually he converts to Islam. As he goes through the stages, he's given more and more of the real beliefs of Islam. And by now he accepts those too. Soon he has no more use for the watered down preaching of Imam Feisal, who has served his purpose by bringing him and so many others through the door. Instead he grows a beard and begins attending a real mosque. Where they talk about the resistance in Palestine and Chechnya and Iraq. Where the Believers are really doing their part to make the world a better place by forcing everyone to live under Islamic law.

Three years later he is standing in front of a Manhattan bar wearing a heavy vest. Underneath it is a bomb. He enters the bar, and cries out, "Allah Akbar." Two years later, the burned remains of the bar finally find a buyer at a fraction of its original price. There is an Imam who wants to open a mosque there.

(Spanish Language Translation at REFLEXIONES SOBRE MEDIO ORIENTE Y EL MUNDO)