Twin Mosques to Replace the Twin Towers? Piss Auf, Rauf!

The other week, John Turley-Ewert of the National Post said on the Michael Coren Show that he thought it was a grand idea to build a mosque at Ground Zero. I can't remember his exact words--the very suggestion so gobsmacked me that part of my brain (the part that can retain quotes) must have shut down. I believe it had something to do with "sending a good message," or some such balderdash. Whatever the rationale, with all due resect to JT-E, I must vehemently disagree--and so does Robert Spencer. Spencer says that the type of message that "the placement of mosques" has traditionally sent since the faith got off the ground--i.e. that Islam is numero uno--is more than a little inappropriate and would, in fact, send the wrong message:

...Muslims built the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in order to proclaim Islam’s superiority to Judaism. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus was built over the Church of St. John the Baptist, and the Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople was converted into a mosque, to express the superiority of Islam over Christianity. Historian Sita Ram Goel has estimated that over 2,000 mosques in India were built on the sites of Hindu temples for the same reason.

But the Ground Zero mosque, or mosques, won’t be another example of that Islamic supremacism, will they? After all, the mosque initiative’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has said that the building of the mosque by the World Trade Center site was intended to make “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

The group behind the 15 story Islamic Center sent a statement to Mike Huckabee’s show on Fox News (declining an opportunity to meet my colleague, Pamela Geller, to discuss the mosque issue), claiming that the planned mosque was “a project to honor those who were harmed on September 11. It is a project to proclaim our patriotism to this country and to stand side-by-side all men and women of peace.”

And Ground Zero is not a holy site, so the symbolism of Islam conquering and replacing other religions isn’t there—or is it?

The Twin Towers, after all, were the symbol of America’s economic power. Placing a mosque by the site of their destruction (at the hands of Islamic jihadists) symbolizes the taming of that power. Abdul Rauf has placed the blame for 9/11 not on jihadists at all, but on the U.S. and the West, saying that they “must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end.” Statements like that call into question just who the mosque organizers have in mind when they say the mosque is intended to honor “those who were harmed on September 11.”...

It would be a far bigger "honor" to the "harmed" (a word that gives you a clue about where Rauf is coming from, since the victims weren't "harmed," they were brutally murdered) if a mosque or two isn't built over the site of their incineration; mosques at the scene of their crime against humanity would, in reality, tend to "honor" the crime's perpetrators, not their victims--something that Abdul, who sounds like quite the slippery Islamist, must know. If twin mosques are allowed to replace the Twin Towers, it would be a shanda--a scandal, an embarrassment, a disgrace. If you agree with that assessment, and live in NYC and environs, you can protest the construction at a Stop Islamization of America rally to be held in lower Manhattan on June 6. I'm sure you can figure out why that particular date was selected. It's one which holds a great deal of significance for infidels who believe in, love, and are willing to fight for their freedom. I'm not sure what, if any, meaning it holds for the likes of Abdul Rauf.