David Aikman: The Ground Zero Community Center is Not About Freedom of Religion
[Dr. David Aikman was a journalist with TIME Magazine for 23 years, and is now a professor of history at Patrick Henry College in Virginia. He has authored more than a dozen books, including "Jesus in Beijing" (Regnery, 2003), "Billy Graham: His Life and Influence" (Thomas Nelson, 2006) and "The Delusion of Disbelief" (Tyndale, 2008). His latest book, "The Mirage of Peace" (Regal), was released in September. Aikman is also the founder of Gegrapha, an international fellowship for Christians in the mainstream media.]
The controversy over the decision to permit the construction of a $100-million, 13-story Islamic mosque and community center within 600 feet of Ground Zero is a triumph of political correctness and posturing over respect for the feelings of murder victims and common sense. The Cordoba House, named after the city in Spain that was once the center of Spanish Islamic culture, is the dream project of Feisal Abdul Rauf, a Kuwaiti-born Arab-American imam of a New York City mosque who says he hopes to improve American understanding of Islam and the wider Muslim world.
Rauf, however, brings a lot of baggage into the discussion of any building project so close to the site of where some 3,000 Americans and foreigners died in a mass terrorist attack in 2001. In September 2001 he told an interviewer for the CBS TV program 60 Minutes that the U.S. was itself "an accessory to the crime that happened" because of its allegedly bad policies in the Muslim world. (Translation: it was the victims' own fault. On another occasion he even cast doubt on whether the 9/11 hijackers were Muslim at all, implying a sort of conspiracy view of the incident.)
This year, the imam refused to say whether he agreed with the State Department designation of Hamas, the brutal Palestinian Islamist group that for years has controlled Gaza, as "terrorist," even though its operatives threw Palestinian political opponents to their deaths from rooftops and organized the firing of thousands of rockets, for years on end, against the civilian inhabitants of towns and communities inside the borders of Israel. Baggage indeed....
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The controversy over the decision to permit the construction of a $100-million, 13-story Islamic mosque and community center within 600 feet of Ground Zero is a triumph of political correctness and posturing over respect for the feelings of murder victims and common sense. The Cordoba House, named after the city in Spain that was once the center of Spanish Islamic culture, is the dream project of Feisal Abdul Rauf, a Kuwaiti-born Arab-American imam of a New York City mosque who says he hopes to improve American understanding of Islam and the wider Muslim world.
Rauf, however, brings a lot of baggage into the discussion of any building project so close to the site of where some 3,000 Americans and foreigners died in a mass terrorist attack in 2001. In September 2001 he told an interviewer for the CBS TV program 60 Minutes that the U.S. was itself "an accessory to the crime that happened" because of its allegedly bad policies in the Muslim world. (Translation: it was the victims' own fault. On another occasion he even cast doubt on whether the 9/11 hijackers were Muslim at all, implying a sort of conspiracy view of the incident.)
This year, the imam refused to say whether he agreed with the State Department designation of Hamas, the brutal Palestinian Islamist group that for years has controlled Gaza, as "terrorist," even though its operatives threw Palestinian political opponents to their deaths from rooftops and organized the firing of thousands of rockets, for years on end, against the civilian inhabitants of towns and communities inside the borders of Israel. Baggage indeed....