‘Ground Zero Mosque’ inflating Islamophobia

Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
20 August 2010


Residents in Temecula, Calif., protest against a mosque’s proposed worship center.

I have the feeling that like the Broadway Bomber, the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, the Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial and where it should be held, and other ‘false-flag’ events that building this new Mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is inflating the inherent Islamophobia of New Yorkers and America. And that ain’t good, for New York, Muslims, Americans and America, or the world.

I see more and more articles on the proposed mosque, the rabid Republicans taking fiery stands and the wimpy Democrats trying to show they’re just as “tough on terror” as their cohorts in Congress. One of the articles I found particularly noxious was the Money behind the Mosque from the unfair and unbalanced reporting of the New York Post and worldwide media mogul and Zionist, Rupert Murdoch, who is of Jewish decent on his mother’s side. She had the money that put her husband in the catbird seat of an Australian newspaper and Rupert followed in dad’s footsteps right to America and New York City.

The article started off in the typical pattern of understanding, yes, we Americans do have a constitutional right to pursue our religious beliefs as we wish. As the Post stated, “Yesterday’s unanimous vote by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission cleared the last municipal impediment to construction of a 13-story mosque and community center just blocks from Ground Zero.” By the way, this building was a tattered, former coat factory, an eyesore to the neighborhood.

Now comes the Post canoodling. “But important questions linger. The vote, which denied landmark protection for a building that must be demolished to make way for the mosque was hailed by Mayor Bloomberg and others as an affirmation of religious liberty of a peculiarly American sort. As, of course, it was.”

The “affirmation of religious liberty of a peculiarly American sort,” was a reference I suppose to our constitutional right to have these religious freedoms. “As, of course, it was.” And, of course, it is. Of course, here, here for religious freedom!

But on the other hand, the Post goes on to say, “Just imagine the city fathers of, say, Riyadh so graciously clearing the way for construction of a 13-story cathedral in the Saudi capital. As if.”

“As if” is irrelevant, in that Riyadh’s culture has its own very different laws and rules, which may seem harsh to Westerners. But then there is a supposedly civilized America involved in three brutal wars in Muslim countries, with Iraq decimated, and 50,000 troops still on board; Afghanistan under continuing fire, after 30 years of fighting wars, 10 of them against Russia, with a CIA sponsored Mujahedeen, recruited, trained, armed and paid for to do the US’s dirty work in toppling Russia; and now with random drone bombings proceeding in Pakistan, saber rattling against purported Taliban and “Al Qaeda” members, and real peace nowhere in sight in any locale. So why would we be surprised that a cathedral would not be welcomed in Riyadh? And for what reason, to further colonize the Middle East and the Central and Western Caucasus? As you can see, we’re working on a US-centric logic train. And the train is pulling out of the station now.

The Post says, “Indeed, such a notion renders risible [laughable] criticism of the sort leveled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, among others, before the vote. CAIR had denounced opponents of the projects as ‘bigots and extremists.’”

Toot, toot! Since the project has received such aggressive feedback, such as a Ground Zero construction worker trying to organize his fellow workers not to work on what will be the $100 million construction of this new building, which will house a mosque as well as a cafeteria, a swimming pool, and other facilities open to the public at large, as would a YMCA or YHMA, this would seem to be quite an overreaction. Not to mention some of the more vicious comments to follow, which certainly sound like they comes from “bigots and extremists.” So let’s move our logic train along to the ad hominem attack.

“That’s pretty rich, coming from an organization [CAIR] that in 2007 was named an unindicted co-conspirator in connection with a plot to support the terrorists of Hamas -- and that has seen several of its former officials and staffers convicted on terror-related charges.”

The plot, as mentioned, was an “unindicted co-conspirator” of what? A plot to support the terrorists of Hamas, which is the duly elected government of Palestine, which has been defending Gaza against the incursions and attacks of Israel, which in the larger historical picture has been engulfing and devouring Palestine for over 60 years, starting before the two-state solution went into effect in 1948, in Israel’s self-proclaimed “War of Independence,” which was a massive attack on Palestine that involved one of the largest forced migrations in modern history.


A Palestinian carries a barrel at the site of an abandoned house that was destroyed in an Israeli air strike in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip August 18, 2010.

Around a million people were expelled from their homes at gunpoint, civilians were massacred, and hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called “Ethnic cleansing.” And that is exactly what it was, as painfully detailed in Jewish historian Ilan Pappe’s landmark book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Toot, toot! Something is rotten in Palestine, which is today the largest outdoor concentration camp, and a miniscule part of Israel, which has claimed the lion’s share of Palestine’s land. But let us return now to our logic train, now that we have established another point of historical view for the observation of passing current events.

The Post writes, “Fact is, the project has drawn opposition from a lot of level-headed folks -- most particularly families of 9/11 victims.”

In all due respect for my Jewish friends who lost relatives, as for those Muslims families that lost family members, and others, these 9/11 victim families, these people remain in the anguish of grief, depression, anger, and a whole range of emotions that adjoin the sudden, violent loss of loved ones. Even my dear friend, Bob Mcilvaine, who lost a son in 9/11, can hardly get through a few paragraphs of describing the incident without choking up, having tears coming to his eyes, and flat curse out the “sons of bitches” responsible for 9/11, whom he doesn’t happen to think were Muslims. Bob has devoted his life to going around the world and crusading for 9/11 Truth, that is, what really happened that day and who was behind it. He is a noble man, who will tell you up front, he can’t always reign in his emotions. In fact, here is a YouTube of Bob, speaking with Manny Badillo, who lost his uncle, Thomas J. Sgroi who was vice president of IT for Marsh & McLennan, and carries his grief on his lapel as well. This was taped at a meeting for 9/11 Victim families.



Let me also add my friend Ellen Mariani, whose husband perished on Flight 175, and who sued the government both for wrongful death and then presented a RICO suit for the entire Bush Administration, both of which were denied because “they might endanger national security,” the blanket statement for truth-covering.

Appropriate anger remains with Mrs. Mariani since the Victims Compensation Fund considers her not qualified for any kind of compensation because she would not at first accept the “hush money.” Yet, in the denial of two trials, the VCF has not shown any financial award to compensate her, but has tied her and her attorney in legal knots, whose unmitigated violations and fraudulent actions fill a stack of legal briefs, and act as a form of ongoing punishment for her daring to seek justice. God forbid!

That said, let’s get back on the New York Post logic train again, which once more exhorts the rights of Muslim Americans, but then makes a strange leap . . .



“Let’s be clear: Muslim Americans have a right to worship where they please. And that includes a site in the shadow of Ground Zero, if they so insist. Clearly, though, this is a complicated issue. The 9/11 mass murder, after all, was committed in the name of Islam.”

Oh really. That is what I know the government tells us and the 9/11 Commission of Omission, but not what millions of others in the US and around the world believe. As to the facts for instance, WTC Lessee Larry Silverstein and his partners raised the insurance benefit on the WTC on July 24, 2001, just six weeks before 9/11 to $3.6 billion. That was higher than the $3.2 billion paid for the 99-year lease, payable at $100 million per year.

Silverstein and Partners also managed to include insurance liability if airliners hijacked by terrorists hit the buildings. How incredibly prescient of them was that? Also, when exactly that happened and the two towers were hit within seven minutes, they demanded to be paid for two separate incidents, $7.2 billion dollars.

The insurance companies refused. And a suit lingered for years, until then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in 2007 brokered a deal for receipt of $4.56 billion. As to Mr. Silverstein’s 47-story building, Tower 7, which no airliner hit, he received some $500 million for it. It fell at 5:20 PM on 9/11, after Silverstein said on TV at 3 PM that “there had been so much pain and suffering, that ‘we’ decided to ‘pull it,’” which is jargon for an internal demolition, which cannot be set up in less than two hours, but would take weeks, months, to set up so that the steel-framed building came down in 6.5 seconds into its own footprint, not unlike Towers 1 and 2 did, falling within 10 to 12 seconds at the speed of gravity in freefall into their own footprints, indicating similar, pre-planned internal demolitions.



Some 1200 architects and engineers support this notion, members of Architects and Engineers for ae911truth, headed up by architect Richard Gage.

To continue, on the more dubious NY Post logic train, we arrive at this comment, “Moreover, as Dan Senor of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in The Wall Street Journal, whatever the project’s stated goals, ‘in the minds of many who are swayed by the most radical interpretations of Islam . . . it will be celebrated as a Muslim monument erected on the site of a great Muslim ‘military’ victory.” And “ . . . that’s why the question of who precisely will pay to build the $100 million project is so compelling.

So now, a CFR member tells us, the most radical interpreters of radical Islam will celebrate this Ground Zero Mosque as a Muslim monument erected on the site of a great Muslim ‘military victory,” which in and of itself is an enormous breach of unresolved fact and an even larger insult to the Muslim community at large, inflaming its uninformed opposition with further misguided rage.



Also, its implication is that dark forces are bankrolling the $100 million project. Yet is it equaling compelling as the multi-billions in US aid to Israel’s war machine, which include 300 to 400 nuclear warheads at its nuclear reactor in Dimona in the Negev desert, originally constructed with the help of the French is 1956. What’s more, hundreds of millions of dollars from private Jewish organizations are donated to Israel every year. Yet, no one dares impugn the motives or individuals who donate this money, or even the US, the biggest of bankers, for fear of being called “an anti-Semite.” Yet, the New York Post can hop on its strange logic-train and arrive at this conclusion . . .

“At first, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf insisted the funds would be raised entirely from the Muslim-American community. But then he told an Arabic-language newspaper in Britain that funding would also come from Arab countries. And it should be noted that Rauf’s father was the long-time director of the Islamic Center of New York, which built the mosque on Third Avenue and 96th Street -- a project funded primarily by the governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations. Now, the Saudis openly fund mosques abroad, spreading the radical Wahhabi strain of Islam, as a means of pacifying their own home-grown radicals. So it would be particularly troubling if Rauf’s funding comes from abroad -- particularly from Riyadh.”

So now the Post is demonizing Muslim contributors to the Islamic Center of New York, which built the beautiful mosque on Third Avenue and 96th Street. And now, the Post mentions the “the Saudis openly fund mosques abroad, spreading the radical Wahhabism strain of Islam as a mean of pacifying their own homegrown radicals.”

Yet the Israel-leaning Jewish Americans can contribute as much as they like to their Zionist friends abroad. Those contributors include Murdoch, Larry Silverstein, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Pearle,. Dov Zakheim, Judge Alvin Hellerstein, and dozens of others in government and industry. Yet they are not to be considered as our homegrown radical “neocons,” patronizing an agenda from the think tank PNAC, The Project for the New American Century, which included the necessity for an inciting incident like a new “Pearl Harbor” (9/11), to incite the peaceful citizens of America to embark on a world march for hegemony, starting with Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden was supposed to have conducted the operation from a cave.


This film goes in detail through the untold history of The Project for the New American Century with tons of archival footage and connects it right into the present.

Yet, bin Laden has not been found since. In fact, the CIA recently announced that the video tape in which bin Laden admitted to committing the crime of 9/11 was a fake, with a look-almost-alike bin Laden, who was fatter, wore gold (a Muslim no-no), and whose voice, according to voice morphology testing, was not the same as the real Osama bin Laden. In fact, David Ray Griffith, the US’s most prominent 9/11 scholar, detailed extensively in his book Osama bin Laden -- Dead or Alive, that bin laden died in late December 2001, and was buried in Pakistan, according to Pakistani newspapers.

Also, the FBI removed bin laden from its site as the Most Wanted individual for the crime of 9/11 several years ago. There was not enough evidence, they claimed. And the US Army lost track of him when they had him cornered in Tora Bora years ago. Is it possible that his value as a poster boy for “Muslim wrong-doing” was obviously greater than catching the real man, originally employed by the CIA for its Afghanistan jihad?

Bin laden had also been suffering from a severe kidney condition, which brought him into the American Hospital at Dubai in August of 2001 for kidney dialysis. There he met with his CIA handler, probably to discuss matters of the Afghanistan Mujahedeen against the “Russian atheists,” for which he had been recruited, as were many Muslim men by the CIA, which also funded, armed and trained these men for warfare against the Soviet Union, which lasted for ten years, with the Soviets routed in defeat. Yet, we have personally picked up that deadly torch since 2001 with no victory in sight.

Similarly, the 19 Muslim “hijackers” of 9/11, 15 of whom were Saudis (which land we have never attacked given its copious oil) were pulled from photograph files only days after 9/11 and shown as the perpetrators. Shortly after the public swallowed it all, FBI Chief Robert Mueller said we couldn’t be absolutely sure these were the “hijackers.” In fact, eight of them were reported living in Middle Eastern countries, obviously victims of identity theft. So, there you have a thumbnail version of the situation.

As to Israel, we need briefly to discuss the Five Dancing Israelis, who worked for Daniel Suter and his Urban Moving Systems company in New Jersey. On 9/11, a white company van was seen with five man dressed in Arab clothing dancing about as the twin towers were falling, directly across the Hudson River. One man stood on the roof of the van flicking his cigarette lighter, the smoke of the towers behind him, as another man shot video of the action.

Irate individuals who witnessed them called the police, who arrived, searched their vans with K-9s sniffing for explosives, traces of which were found. Also, some $1,800 in cash was found in the van, plus maps of the NYC subways, bridges and tunnels. When the police then FBI arrested these men, they claimed they were our friends not our enemies.


Five Dancing Israelis

Yet, after 72 days of arrest, they were released to Israel, where they appeared on a TV show, claiming that they were there to “document the event.” How could they have known there was an event to document if they weren’t involved in it? Their video was not exactly a home movie.

There was a second white Urban Moving Systems van found off an exit ramp of the George Washington Bridge, also with traces of explosives in it, cash, and maps of the NYC subways, bridges and tunnels. Still, a third white UMS van was found on King Street between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, only minutes from the Holland Tunnel. Only this one had painted on its panels a scene of a jetliner crashing into one of the Twin Trade Towers. It also had two more Arab-looking gents who were not Arabs, but Israelis, wrested to the ground by police and arrested. Nothing was heard of them after. Presumably, they were returned safe and sound to Israel as well.

Actually, on that no-fly day of 9/11, even before a number of Saudi Royals were flown out of the country, there was an El-Al flight that had taken off for Israel. Perhaps Daniel Suter was onboard or on an earlier flight. It begs the question why did that plane full of people have to get to Israel so fast on that day?

These are just a few of the highlights from the Israel as putative suspect reel.

Now, back to our last return to the New York Post logic train, asking about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, “[e]specially given his own disturbing ties to figures like Hossein Mahallati, Iran’s former UN ambassador and an unabashed supporter of Hamas.”


Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, executive director of the Cordoba Initiative, arrives at a Muharraq, Bahrain, mosque where he led midday prayers Friday, Aug. 20, 2010, and spoke briefly with worshipers.

Let’s be clear, Hamas, for many of the reasons mentioned already, is the duly elected government of Palestine. If it engages in warfare with Israel, it is to protect its own dwindling number of people. And I, as an American of Christian birth, also refuse to label Hamas a terrorist organization, particularly in the face of 60 plus years of Zionist terrorism in Palestine against the indigenous population.

The technique has always been to label the Arabs the terrorists, even as the Zionists blew up the King George hotel, killing hundreds of Brits and others, who were the remaining force of occupation at the time, who soon packed up and left. Thus, where the logic train finally arrives is at the self-righteous purity of Zionist Israel’s actions . . .

“Not to mention Rauf’s own pointed refusal to label Hamas a terrorist organization -- and his statement, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that ‘United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.’” After all, they were just that, as has been described in this piece and have been in books, DVDs and films at great length. But let’s get back to the NY Post illogic train . . .

“Which is why he [Rauf] and those behind the mosque project owe it to all New Yorkers to make their plans and -- especially -- their finances fully transparent, now that they’ve effectively been given a green light to build?

“If, as he says, he means to be a force for reconciliation, Rauf must begin by demonstrating to New Yorkers that he has no ties to those who support global terrorism -- either ideologically or financially.”

Yet, will the Israeli Zionist government declare their innocence in acts of terrorism against the Palestinians, the British, the French, and even the Americans, including the sinking of the US Liberty, an intelligence ship on the high seas in international waters bombed by Israeli war planes and its Navy, and whose sailors were then strafed over a period of nine hours by said planes, leaving 37 dead and 174 wounded Americans.



These are not the acts of friends, but of enemies it would seem, who from 1976 to 1996 also sold billions in arms and nuclear weapons to the post-Nazi, anti-apartheid government of South Africa, and who still function as arms and nuclear arms dealers to the world, to uphold their own personal form of terror.

Nor will I paint the many Jewish friends I have who are among the most decent people I know with this same brush. This is an appeal to protect the innocent in all cases as well as to condemn the guilty. And it is the innocent who must be considered here, too, in the building of the Ground Zero Mosque, given the inflated and misled feelings of self-styled, often ignorant patriots. We don’t want to turn Ground Zero or New York into another self-righteous but racist Selma, Alabama.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His new book, “State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on” is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on American and world politics as an Associate Editor of Online Journal.

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