Cordoba House

New Yorkers are anxiously exercised, unwilling to surrender to their mayor's and their city officials' approval of a project that will bring a 13-story, $100-million mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero. It seems astonishing that such lack of sensitivity could possibly occur - that the single most traumatizing, violent event to assail the United States in modern history on its own territory by a foreign extra-territorial group dedicated to religious violence - is to be capped by the presence of a house of worship belonging to the very religion from whence the violence emanated.

It is equally astonishing that the mega-municipality and its mayor have agreed that the building of the mosque should commence. Those who are strenuously opposing the installation of the mosque as planned, have even demanded that the backgrounds of those funding the project be investigated, and with fairly good reason. Since it has been revealed that one of the major funders that calls itself a charity for peace appears to be the facade of a terrorist organization. One in league with the Turkish 'peace' group IHH, both of which were involved in the funding and organization of the Turkish flotilla headed for Gaza which ended in disaster.

Last-ditch hearings are underway in an effort to convince the New York Landmark Preservation Commission to exert its influence in the prevention of the demolition of the existing building, the 152-year-old Cordova House, a warehouse, in whose place the huge Muslim mosque and community centre its organizers plan to build their monument to Muslim integration into American life, is to be established. Proving its adaptation to American values, its recognition of American sensibilities.

A wide range of opposition groups remains singularly unimpressed. In fact, they're downright angry, outraged and disappointed that their city council would submit to the proposal and allow it to become a reality. The property on Park Place sits a mere 600 feet from the area where 9/11's terrorists used two American passenger planes to explode into the two New York landmarks, the iconic Twin Towers.

Almost three thousand, five hundred people, including the first-responders, met their deaths attempting to come to the aid of its victims; those within the two towers, and the police officers and firefighters who attempted to bring order to chaos. The Cordova House roof had been severely damaged when one of the hijacked plane engines smashed through it, as it disintegrated.
Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch warned that one of the key figures in the Perdana Global Peace Organization, a key organizer of the Free Gaza Movement, and by extension a supporter of Hamas, also is the single-largest donor to the proposed mosque. Those who lost members of their families to the 9/11 attacks are justifiably furious that a mosque could even be considered to be built upon the site, and the fact that its backers have a background as supporters of terrorism simply makes their protest that more relevant, and the reality of the proposal that more horrible.

The executive director of "Stop the Islamization of America", at an earlier protest against the mosque's placement, characterized its presence there as "an insult and an affront to every single person that was killed on 9/11, to their families, to the first responders and every concerned American who cherishes liberty, democracy and freedom". One of the owners of the property at 45 Park Place, purchased in 2009, argues otherwise. That its presence there will serve to solidify good relations and understanding between American Muslims and their non-Muslim counterparts.

One of the property's owners, Sherif El-Gamal, stated that there had been no real interest prior to the present time for the Commission to rule the property had landmark status, as a unique historical/architectural structure. That he and the other owners should be free to proceed with their plans. The property, he stressed, was bought in 2009 for that very purpose and none other. "As a Muslim American and a businessman, I am proof of the American Dream", he said. As a Muslim American he felt it to be high time that New Yorkers became more intimately acquainted with Islam.

There was a void, an obvious need for Americans and New Yorkers specifically to learn about "Muslim heritage". For "being a Muslim and serving our fellow citizens goes hand in hand", he explained. That would be a hard sell at any time given the size of the building, but in view of precisely where this gargantuan mosque is being built, and the immense and close connection between the sentiments that the Koran expresses and the interpretation upon its surahs exhorting the faithful to jihad, impressing upon young Muslims the need to become martyrs in the cause of Islam in the very shadow of the most successful martyrdom attack, it is obscene.

The ironies that abound here, from the chutzpa of a Muslim group insisting it had the right to build a mosque to become a landmark presence within the United States to Islam precisely where vicious Islamic fanatics destroyed an earlier landmark presence that was wholly, indigenously American in nature, to the demolishing of a structure called Cordoba House, reminiscent of the Golden Age of Islam when the Caliphate of Cordoba, Spain, ruled from the 6th to the 13th Century, a past both honoured and mourned by Muslims.

The symbolism of Cordoba and the Caliphate, the global unrest within Islam which has created violent tendencies to massacre its own, and to reach out in bloodthirsty revenge against a civilizing modern Western world that left the unenlightened, medieval world of Islam behind, is simply too bizarre to be believed.