Ground Zero Mosque Rally

The rally to protest the mosque planned as a trophy marking a Muslim victory and beach head in infidel country was a lively affair. And yes I truly believe that the Imam and his friends planning this Islamic YMCA mean it as nothing of the sort. You don’t have to go any further than the name they gave it “Cordoba House”. If you are unaware, Cordoba was the capital of the furthest invasion of the First Caliphate into western territory in Southern Spain. They called their conquest Al Andalus and from 711 to 1492 they ruled there. Naming the Ground Zero mosque “Cordoba House” is not particularly subtle and once the controversy and outrage spun up they quickly shifted gears and now use the posh “Park 51” moniker. Well I’m not buying it, and neither were the 1500+ who gathered to make their displeasure known.

The crowd was heavy with NY firefighters, police and a strong contingent of motorcyclists who had just completed a 900+ mile ride from the site of the flight 93 crash in Pennsylvania to the Pentagon and then arriving at Ground Zero just before the rally this Sunday. There were also many folks who lost friends and families right there in the attacks on 9/11. There was a very touching moment when Tim Brown, a firefighter who survived the collapse of building three asked everyone who had lost someone to raise their hands and the air was thick with them.

The speakers were pretty universal in the thought that this mosque was not planned as a bridge to anything but insult. Frank Gaffney, President of the Center for Security Policy and a Big Peace editor explained that there are two types of jihad, the violent kind represented by that giant communal grave behind the stage and the stealth kind represented by the proposal to put a mosque on the site of that horrific terrorist act. He also noted that after they conquered Cordoba, they built a mosque right on top of what had been a Catholic church.

Many of the speakers pointed out how disrespectful of the dead it was to even contemplate building it. None were claiming the Imam and his collaborators were responsible for 9/11, but the last words of the hijackers were Arabic cries of Allahu Akbar, God is Great, and the god they were talking about is the Muslim one. Deb Burlingame, whose brother Chic was a retired Navy fighter jock and the pilot of the plane that hit the Pentagon, poignantly recounted how supporters were dragging the families who lost loved ones through the grieving process again with their actions. The rally ended with all of the participants marching the short distance to the gaping maw of Ground Zero in respectful silence.