A Mosque at 9/11 'Ground Zero'?

Imagine the American response in 1950 if the Japanese government sought to erect a shrine to its World War II Emperor in Pearl Harbor, right next to the sunken wreckage of the USS Arizona.

Would “outrage” be strong enough to describe the response?

Now fast forward to 2010.

Less than nine years after the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history, an imam who blames America for the 9/11 attack wants to construct a 13 story, $100 million dollar mosque and Islamic center 600 feet from “Ground Zero.”

And he wants to unveil it to the world on September 11, 2011 – the ten year anniversary of the greatest jihadist atrocity ever perpetrated against America on its own soil.

News and blog sites across the country are heating up over this. ACT! for America, the nation’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to combating radical Islam and global jihad, today launched a national petition opposing the mosque, which says in part:

We are opposed to the grotesque symbolism represented by the building of this mosque at “ground zero…” We are deeply disturbed by the insensitivity to the families of the victims of the 9/11 jihadist attack exhibited by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his supporters.

As a measure of the public’s outrage , over 5,000 people had signed the petition in the first three hours.

Families of the victims of 9/11 are stunned by the news that this mosque is proceeding ahead. It does not appear to be the mosque per se, but the audacity of those pushing for it to be located on what one firefighter survivor described as “sacred ground,” that is striking a nerve.

Debra Burlingame, the sister of the American Airlines pilot whose jet was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon, is the founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America. In a recent Fox News interview she said:

“The idea that you would establish a religious institution that embraces the very Shariah Law that terrorists point to as their justification for what they did … to build that where almost 3,000 people died, that is an obscenity to me.”

The views of the imam of the proposed mosque are also roiling the waters. Madeline Brooks, an ACT! for America chapter leader in Manhattan, wrote the following recently in American Thinker:

During a recent Friday sermon, this writer did due diligence as a mosque monitor and heard Rauf deny that Muslims perpetrated 9/11. In an interview with CNN shortly after 9/11, Rauf said, “U.S. policies were an accessory to the crime that happened. We [the U.S.] have been an accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. Osama bin Laden was made in the USA.” Elsewhere, Rauf has stated that terrorism will end only when the West acknowledges the harm it has done to Muslims. And that it was Christians who started mass attacks on civilians.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that if it’s legal to put a mosque at this site, then it should be allowed. But “legal” and “right” are not necessarily the same thing.

For years Americans have been lectured to by Islamist leaders and their enablers and supporters about how Americans must be more sensitive to the needs, customs, and sensibilities of Muslims.

But one would be hard-pressed to find something more insensitive than the placement of a mosque, whose imam supports Islamic sharia law, right next to the worst Islamic jihadist attack on American soil in history.

The fact that the imam behind this mosque claims locating the mosque here is intended to heal the wounds of 9/11 reveals either moral obtuseness or disingenuousness.

The Muslim world is all about symbolism. To the militant Islamist in Saudi Arabia, a mosque at ground zero would represent the ultimate in humiliation of the infidel.

To the families of the victims of 9/11, it is the ultimate slap in the face.