A Mosque is Not a Synagogue, Church or Hindu Temple

By Alan Caruba

Despite the fact that former President G.W. Bush said we are at war with “terrorism” and Obama says the U.S. is “not at war with Islam,” it is more than apparent to anyone paying attention that Islam is at war with America and has been for several decades.

Take, for example, Obama’s endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque—formerly called the Cordoba mosque to honor the Muslim conquest of Spain for seven centuries and then renamed Park 51 to mask its true intent.

During his most recent press conference, Obama compared a mosque to a synagogue, a church, or a Hindu temple. In doing so he ignored fourteen centuries of Muslim history in which, wherever they conquered, they went out of their way to build their mosques where former churches or temples existed. In India alone, they did this more than two thousand times to obliterate Hindu temples or shrines.

The Muslim conquest of what was then known as Palestine resulted in the Al Aqsa mosque on arguably the most holy site in Jewish history. Its gleaming golden dome dominates the skyline of Jerusalem to this day.

There is an important reason why the proposed mosque should not be built near Ground Zero and that is because mosques around the world are often places where hatred of unbelievers is preached and where attacks are planned.

Obama counts on American’s general ignorance of Islam and on the nation’s long tradition of tolerance. By contrast, in practice Islam has no tolerance of religions other than Islam.

A case in point is the way "Cordoba House" changed its name to Park 51 which is odd since the address of the location is 45–47 Park Place, but look to the Koran, the battle plan for Islamic conquest, to understand the new name for this project. Koran chapter 51, verses 45-47 suggests the real story:

51:45 And they were unable to arise, nor could they defend themselves.
51:46 And [We destroyed] the people of Noah before; indeed, they were a people defiantly disobedient.
51:47 And the heaven We constructed with strength, and indeed, We are [its] expander.

Obama, a former student of Islam when he was a boy living in Indonesia, has never made a secret of his affinity for Islam and, as his first actions following his inauguration revealed, he was intent on “building bridges” to Islam in the Middle East.

His first television interview was with Al Arabia and his first major international speech was in Cairo. Recently we learned that the director of NASA was given a new priority that has nothing to do with the exploration of space, but rather as “outreach” to Muslim nations.

Little wonder, then, that many Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, especially since his first endorsement of the Ground Zero mosque occurred in a speech given at a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan.

There have been more terrorist attacks and attempted attacks in the United States during Obama’s first year and a half in office than in the preceding Bush administration.

The Ground Zero mosque is intended to be a demonstration to Muslims throughout the world that they achieved a great victory with the destruction of the Twin Towers.

Does New York City and its boroughs need another mosque given the fact that over a hundred already exist? More to the point should New York sanction a mosque near ground regarded as hallowed by the deaths of the Twin Towers victims and first responders?

So, to repeat myself, a mosque is not a synagogue, is not a church, and is not a Hindu temple. Those places are devoted to faiths that do not preach that unbelievers should be slain or enslaved. Those places do not represent an international campaign of terrorism.

If Obama does not know that, someone should explain it to him.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The July 21, 2008 Cover of The New Yorker

I recall the outrage with which this cover was greeted, but it has turned out to be quite prescient, to the great distress of many New Yorkers and, of course, the rest of the nation.

Why are Liberals Blind to the Evil in the World?

By Alan Caruba

Why do so many Jews, located primarily in New York City, Los Angeles, and in Florida, mindlessly vote the Democrat Party line and thus support the Democrat destruction of the nation remains a mystery to me, but the same can be also said of Afro-Americans. Perhaps it is because both share a history of persecution and both are drawn to any message of hope and change.

Despite being a tiny minority, 0.2 of the world’s population, the Jews have produced some of the greatest minds of the modern era. They dominate the Nobel Prizes in science, medicine and physics. They have played a major role in American culture on Broadway, Hollywood, radio and television.

Politically, however, too many Jews who are seen as shapers of public opinion often appear to be blind to evil in the world. They cannot seem to recognize those who would kill them and their fellow countrymen. Unfairly, we expect Jews to be more moral, more just, more resistant to evil, but they are just like the rest of us, easily seduced by power, fearful of rejection.

Nine years after 9/11, less than a year since a Muslim major shot thirteen soldiers to death in Fort Hood, eight months past the failed Christmas bomber, and barely weeks after a failed attempt in Times Square to kill more innocent Americans, the former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, writing in the Huffington Post, lauds Mayor Mike Bloomberg for taking up “the fight to protect the legitimate rights of American Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero.”

Koch cites George Washington’s letter in 1790 to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island. It is a virtual poem to tolerance and a condemnation of bigotry, but the opposition to the building of a mosque near Ground Zero is not bigotry. It is the common, ancient recognition that some places are hallowed by the deaths of soldiers or by the innocent victims of evil.

The field at Gettysburg is hallowed ground. The former Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, is hallowed ground. In Sudan’s Darfur region today where genocide against Christians and animists continues will be hallowed ground.

So eager is Mayor Koch to defend the obscenity of a mosque rising where Muslims killed 2,700 people in the name of Allah, he writes, “We Jews also have our share of thieves, predators, child molesters, Ponzi-schemers, traitors and profiteers. Muslims have their share of great world accomplishments…”

This is so pathetic words cannot describe his surrender of any sense of moral outrage or the pretense of moral equivalency.

At least Mayor Koch was able to acknowledge that Muslims “also have their share of crazies, tyrants, homophobes, those holding hostile and irrational attitudes toward women, vilification of Jews, Christians, Hindus and other so-called infidels.”

It was not Jews who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl for the crime of being a Jew. The Jews do not murder Christian missionaries providing medical services as Afghan Taliban did a week ago.

Violations of the most fundamental human rights are simply not in the Jewish DNA. Having been slaves in Egypt, they celebrate freedom on Passover every year. Having reclaimed a synagogue from the Assyrians, they celebrate Hanukah every year. They
celebrate Purim to remember how Queen Esther saved her fellow Jews.

Koch mimics the Muslims who slander Israelis with being Nazis when they defend themselves against suicide bombers and thousands of rockets from Gaza. If the Muslims do bad things, Koch believes he must cite Jews as capable of the same, but self-defense is understood worldwide as a duty.

It is the Israelis who have protected the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, built over one of the most sacred sites of Judaism, the Temple Mount. Christian Arabs and Bahai adherents from Iran found sanctuary in Israel, having had to flee Middle Eastern nations as their Jewish neighbors did.

There is no moral equivalency with Muslim acts of terror. They are part of a campaign to impose Islam on the world. In that quest, Muslims have murdered Muslims as well as unbelievers.

It is a familiar liberal failing to refuse to recognize evil, to name it, and to denounce it.

Americans are right to condemn the insult and the arrogance of claiming to build a mosque dedicated to brotherhood when Islam does not recognize any other religion as valid or of having a right to exist.

And yet, any yet, Mayor Koch ended his convoluted, meandering comments on the prospect of a Ground Zero mosque saying, “I believe we are locked in battle with fanatical Islam and will be for the foreseeable future.” He’s right, but you don’t have to be a fanatic to believe what Muslims believe. You need only read the Koran.

The history of Islam is a history of conquest and a resurgent Islam is on the march everywhere again.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Find Someplace Else to Pray

Selling Mayor Bloomberg the Brooklyn Bridge

One of my favorite bloggers is Burt Prelutsky. A veteran Hollywood comedy writer, he despises liberals and has even written a book about it. This week he holds forth on the popularity gap between Republicans and Democrats, but added the following at the end of his commentary:

"Finally, I’m annoyed but not surprised that New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is on board for the 13-story mosque to be built adjacent to Ground Zero. But when you realize that New Yorkers keep re-electing this yutz, even allowing him to break the rule regarding term limits so that they could elect him a third time, I say they deserve to be forced to suck it up and live with the grotesque monument to Islamic barbarism.

Bloomberg, like most liberals, likes to think of himself as sensitive, wise, ecumenical, open-minded and compassionate, when in fact he is a world-class boob who just happens to be rich, and he richly deserves to be played for a sucker by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his fascistic cronies in CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), the public relations arm of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Next week, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Rauf has sold Bloomberg a controlling interest in the Brooklyn Bridge."

The Price of Submission

Saying No! to a Ground Zero Mosque

By Alan Caruba

In the August 3rd edition of The Wall Street Journal, in the Greater New York section, the lead article was “9/11 Memorial Pledged as Part of Mosque Plan.”

There already is a 9/11 memorial. It is called Ground Zero and will be incorporated into whatever structure that eventually gets built on the site.

If one continued to read the story, however, you had to jump to page A21 where side-by-side with the mosque story was one titled, “Verdict in JFK Bomb Plot”, subtitled “Jury Finds Two Guilty in Conspiracy Charges for Plan to Ignite Fuel Tanks.”

The two men found guilty were Abdul Kadir and Russell Defreitas. A third defendant, Kareem Ibrahim, was ill and didn’t go to trial with them and a fourth, Abdel Nur, took a plea deal and faces up to 15 years in prison. At no time in the body of the article is there any mention that these men are Muslims though that fact was critical to their plot.

It was noted that “the men tried to get help from al Qaeda operative Adnan Shukrijumah who was recently indicted in federal court in a plot to attack the New York City subway system with suicide bombers.”

How many Muslim plots to kill thousands of New Yorkers does it take before the plotters are identified as Muslims?

The reason why there should be no mosque built where the debris and dust of the Twin Towers showered down on the very spot is obvious to any American. It would be an obscenity.

It is obscene to wish to build a mosque within sight of where 2,700 people lost their lives in an act of Islamic terrorism, an act of war, a jihad.

How this simple fact escapes the notice of Mayor Mike Bloomberg defies understanding, but this same Mayor originally thought the failed Times Square bomb could have been placed by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.”

No, it could not be “anything”! Of the many plots hatched since 9/11, it is likely that 99.9% have been by Muslims, whether native born or immigrants.



This is not about tolerance. In New York, every Friday in several locations through the city where there are mosques that cannot accommodate all who wish to enter for prayers, the overflow fills the surrounding streets between 2 PM and 4 PM. They block traffic in ways no other group of religionists would ever be permitted. It is surreal.

There is something especially abhorrent about Mayor Bloomberg’s dazzling ignorance because as a Jew he seems to have not absorbed the lessons of history and, in particular, the Holocaust that killed six million Jews and five million Christians; nuns and priests, Lutherans, gypsies, and others swept up by the Nazi death machine.

Hannah Arendt attended the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi charged with rounding up and killing Europe’s Jews. Her book, “Eichmann and the Holocaust”, was published in 1963 and enshrined the phrase, “the banality of evil” in our modern lexicon.

For Arendt, Eichmann was a “new type of criminal, who commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong.” Not so new because the crimes of Islam against all who are not Islamic (and some who are thanks to the Shiite-Sunni schism) are very old and fill the headlines of today’s newspapers.

The Muslims who flew commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did not think they were doing wrong. They were doing what the Koran and almost every imam with the breath to preach told them to do; they were killing infidels.

This is why a mosque within steps of Ground Zero is so inherently wrong. It says that the intended victims of Islamic domination are simply too blind to envision their fate, too fearful to confront evil, too ready to get on the next train to Auschwitz.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Protest the Media Ignored

On June 16th in downtown New York, close to "Ground Zero" where the Twin Towers once stood, a protest attended by an estimated 5,000 people went virtually unreported by the New York and national media.

Here are just two photos from the event.

The proposal to build a huge mosque within walking distance of Ground Zero is an insult to all Americans.

Some things cannot and should not be tolerated.

-- Alan Caruba

The Disgrace of Ground Zero

By Alan Caruba

9/11/2009 took a large psychic toll on Americans.

I am no exception. By early evening, I found myself profoundly angry watching the Mayor of New York explain why Ground Zero is still essentially a hole in the ground eight years after the destruction of the Twin Towers.

This nation fought and won World War Two in four years’ time and in two separate theatres of war in the Pacific and in Europe. By the time it was over, the major cities of Germany and Japan were rubble and both armies and civilians were among the dead because the only way to convince an enemy to stop waging war is to destroy their will to continue.

History tells us this over and over again. It is the reason the Romans laid siege to Masada.

We have been in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. What we’ve been doing there is more a police action than a war.

That’s why the Korean War is officially called a United Nations police action, not a war. We settled for a stalemate.

When there were riots in Los Angeles and Newark that was a police action using the military. What we are asking our troops to do these days in far off, dangerous places is not a war.

We have reached a point where the present administration will not even call it a war. It doesn’t get more pathetic than that.

So, as I looked at that hole in the ground in lower Manhattan, I wondered why, if the owner of that vast property, the developer, had been able to completely rebuild other structures and rent them out, why the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had been unable or unwilling to rebuild the Twin Towers?

They have the blueprints!

What better way to tell America’s enemies, the fanatical al Qaeda—the spear point of the Islamic Jihad—that they could not and would not defeat us?

In World War Two we knew who the enemy was. We named them and we created a great war machine to utterly destroy them.

More than a half century later, our government will not say “terrorists”, cannot say “Islamists,” and all the while, the center of the Islamic Revolution, Iran, relentlessly works to acquire its own nuclear weapons.

There is a proper place for several “ground zeros” and they are the known sites where Iran is refining the fissionable material for nuclear weapons and building missiles.

Meanwhile, why must I watch interviews in front of a hole in the ground that is eight years old?

Ground Zero is an American disgrace.