“It’s all pray and no play,” said the New York Post on Sunday. “The Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero that opened with great fanfare a year ago is now an empty space with no community programs. And while the developers behind Park51 insisted for two years that the project was more than a mosque, it now appears to be just that. Dozens of worshipers gather at the site on Park Place Friday for prayer services – but that’s the only activity in the building.”
The New York Post sounds surprised that the Ground Zero mosqueteers turned out to be liars. I’m not. It’s the modus operandi of mega-mosque builders. Sell it as one thing, but build a beachhead for Islamic supremacism.
Aren’t you glad we defeated that mega-monster? Don’t fall for the “they opened the mosque” – or the “community center” – lie. They were always praying in the Burlington Coat Factory building that was partially destroyed in the September 11 attacks, the same building that houses “Park51” now. Look at the story at my website AtlasShrugs.com back in December 2009, when I first took up the fight. They were praying there then. It was never about that. They pray everywhere. They pray in the streets at Ground Zero – facing Mecca, of course. So what else is new?
What we were fighting was the 15-story mega-mosque they had planned to build at Ground Zero. And we won. The rest is all propaganda.
And there has been plenty of propaganda. The New York Times kept pimping for the hustler who is the “developer” of Park51, Sharif El-Gamal, long after we exposed him as the fraud and two-bit gangster he is. El-Gamal thinks that beating people up is a great “stress reliever.” He threatened Muslims who think that the triumphal mosque is offensive. He is a deadbeat who didn’t pay his taxes – to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars. He defaulted on not one bank loan, but two. And he was evicted from his Soho properties offices. On top of all that, he lost in a series of lawsuits ConEd filed for back payment of rent. ConEd is trying to evict him.
The imam who had been closely associated with the project, Faisal Abdul Rauf, is another slick liar. As I revealed in August 2010, he is not at all as “moderate” as the media are so desperate to portray him. Speaking on July 12, 2005, at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre in Australia, Rauf delivered a few choice sound bites that belied his moderate image and raised questions about what the mega-mosque would really have stood for if it had gone up.
Here’s Rauf saying the U.S. is worse than al-Qaida:
“We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al- Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims. You may remember that the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was secretary of state and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it.”
No mention of the millions of victims of over a millennium of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilation and enslavement. No mention of the recent slaughter by Muslims of Christians, Hindus, Jews, non-believers in Indonesia, Thailand, Ethiopia, Somalia, Philippines, Lebanon, Israel, Russia and China.
Rauf’s words manifested no candor, no criticism of Islam or Muslim – in other words, none of the mutual respect and willingness to take responsibility we might expect from such a celebrated “moderate.”
And on the question of expunging Islamic texts of the mandates for violence and conquest that modern-day jihadists point to, Rauf said: “Islam does not need a reformation.”
Rauf also praised the worst extremists and inciters to genocide. In his address in Australia he said he had just come from a conference in Jordan featuring “over 170 leading Muslim scholars from almost every part of the Muslim world, including some of the most important names like Sheikh Tantawi of Egypt, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, who is the chief mufti of Egypt, the chief mufti of Jordan, the Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, who is a very, very well-known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world.”
The late Sheikh Tantawi several years ago endorsed suicide attacks against Israelis, as did Sheikh Qaradawi, who has praised Hitler and prayed to Allah to destroy the Jews. Sheikh Gomaa has defended Islam’s death penalty for apostasy and sanction for wife-beating, and has endorsed the jihad terror group Hezbollah.
Moderates?
Yet those who favored construction of a 15-story mega-mosque at Ground Zero said that those who opposed it were racists and bigots. It was absurd to suggest that the 70 percent of Americans who oppose the building of the mosque did so out of hatred of Muslims. Americans just didn’t want a victory mosque marking the site of the 9/11 attacks. They don’t want an insult to the 3,000 Americans who were murdered there by Islamic jihadists and for whom Ground Zero is a cemetery.
And Americans prevented that mosque from being built – no thanks to the enemedia, which is still claiming victory even as their narrative crashes to the ground all around them. There has been, and will not be, any media mea culpa.
