The Muslim sponsors of the 11-story, $100 million Cordoba House, to be built just blocks from ground zero, claim it will serve as a bridge between Islam and the West. But its construction is inciting a level of anger that can only serve to mute potential dialog and, most sense that its location is really meant as provocation and humiliation. On one side of the issue, supporting the mosque, are Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama and Hamas. On the other side, are 70% of the American people.
In a pitiful lament, a few weeks ago Bloomberg was nearly brought to tears, his voice cracking as he laid out every politically correct liberal justification for
allowing a mosque to be built near ground zero. Yet Bloomberg’s whining voice never waivers each September 11, when he joins in our new, somber national ritual to recite the names of the victims who perished when the Twin Towers collapsed at the hands of Islamic terrorists.
It clearly escapes Mayor Bloomberg’s sensitivities that our eyes are supposed to well up when we recall the violent deaths of our innocent, not when we imagine the violated rights of their murderers.
We wonder what’s next for New York. Will upscale boutiques on West Broadway and their poorer cousins on Canal Street be given a tax holiday for the sale of designer burkas? Will Mayor Bloomberg open up city-staffed clinics to perform clitorectomies on the city’s sexually active woman free of charge? The city offers family planning services for non-Muslims, so it’s only fair. Will Obama use the service as a model for the rest of the country, starting in Michigan? Showing respect for Islam and Sharia law it could be hailed as yet another way America is attempting to deepen the dialog with the Muslim world.
It is revealing, if not shocking, to see how much better average Americans understand the triumphant narrative that the construction of the mosque would unleash, than do our dumb and blind rulers. If our elites don’t read books about jihad, they could at least scan a few titles at the Conservative Book Club to better appreciate the nature of the war radical Islam is waging against the west.
Unlike the 1930s, we are blessed with many Winston Churchills and Billy Mitchells warning us of the perils of jihad and sharia, as those two giants tried to warn us about Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
The woman protesting the ground zero mosque holding up the sign reading “ Islam builds mosques at the sites of their conquests and victories,” understands more about the nature of jihad than Bloomberg, Obama and our entire state department combined.
Obama can give an absurd, distorted, historically preposterous speech in Cairo about imagined Muslim accomplishments but the sign that reads, “You can build a mosque at ground zero when we can build a synagogue in Mecca,” reveals a deeper understanding of the Judeo-Christian/Muslim “clash of civilizations” than do all the free speech bromides of our culturally sensitive president.
The outlines of the many victorious rants that will appear on a thousand jihadi web sites, or be heard as sermons in countless radical mosques are easy to sketch out:
“In a project whose success could come only if blessed by God, brave Muslim soldiers delivered great destruction to the financial and military centers of the mighty infidel, the United States of America on September 11, 2001. For nearly ten years since they have waged war on us, but grow weary from the long fight. Already they sue for peace and offer us tribute, the most significant being the granting of permission for us to build a new holy place, called Cordoba, just steps from the towers we destroyed. A grand mosque will be built there before the infidels erect any comparable edifice. God is great!”
We will garner no respect from the Muslim world for our so-called tolerance; instead we will be held in contempt for surrendering and bending to their will so completely. A building permit will not be seen as a grand gesture that reflects our openness and cultural confidence, but one that serves as a window into our decadence and weakness. Almost three quarters of ordinary Americans recognize this, but virtually no member of the ruling class does. In reality, Bloomberg and Obama have submitted and lay prostrate in dhimmitude, and most of us want no part of it.
Instead, what many Americans crave from our leaders during the ground-zero mosque debate is the kind of steely resolve displayed by Rudy Giuliani when he threw $10 million of blood money back into the faces of the Saudis a few days after the Twin Towers collapsed. It is almost impossible to imagine Mike Bloomberg making a comparable gesture.
We long for someone in American politics to rise to the commanding level of Geert Wilders of Holland. Someone who will say that building an Islamic center on the periphery of ground zero is desecration of the dead. This space is hallowed. It is a graveyard and a battlefield. Someone who will simply say: We will never let you build here.
