BURKE: Political correctness gone mad at Ground Zero

We can have a Ground Zero Mosque, but not a memorial that actually memorializes 9/11

By Michael Burke

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The Washington Times

Illustration: WTC sphere

 

This Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks upon America, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will dedicate the massive, $600 million National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center. What Americans have not been told is that this “memorial” will remake Ground Zero so that it does not acknowledge 9/11.

Instead of acting as a constant reminder of the attacks, a symbol for us and future generations of the evil that struck, the death and destruction it caused and the heroism and sacrifice in response, the memorial will wipe out all evidence and memory of the attacks.

Replacing all reminders of the attacks will be two immense “voids” with gigantic subterranean waterfalls designed to express exclusively, as per architect Michael Arad, the continuing “absence in our lives caused by these deaths.”

About 500 trees will be planted upon the site. They are, we are told by memorial officials, “traditional symbols of the rejuvenation of life.” They also will eradicate all trace and memory of what stood there for 30 years and its destruction on Sept. 11.

The cause of “these deaths,” how these people came to be absent - that is, 9/11 - has been deemed irrelevant and even contrary to your memorial “experience.”
The memorial is not about that; it’s about you.

Cities and towns across America have humbly requested a segment of the twisted steel of the WTC to feature in their own modest Sept. 11 memorials. The only memorial where one is not welcome is the “national” memorial at Ground Zero. Those iconic remnants, exactly because they are iconic, are considered far too gauche for the jury of intellectuals and artists who chose the design.

The National September 11 Memorial at the WTC will not include the iconic WTC “Sphere” - again, exactly because it is iconic. “The Sphere” stood in the center of the WTC plaza for 30 years as a symbol of world peace. On 9/11, though badly damaged (a piece of one of the planes tore through it) it survived the attacks in place and was embraced by many Americans as a symbol of the nation’s strength and resiliency.
That is why it cannot be returned.

It sits at Battery Park, about a half-mile from Ground Zero, where it was installed March 11, 2002, the six-month anniversary of the attacks, as a “temporary” memorial. Battery Park is undergoing its own renovations, and “The Sphere” will have to moved.

One 9/11 anniversary at Ground Zero, Mr. Arad told me that returning “The Sphere” would be “didactic.” That is, it would tell us what to think.

Somehow disposing of it is not telling us what to think.

This is like banishing the USS Arizona from the USS Arizona Memorial.

The 9/11 memorial will not identify Christine Lee Hanson, who died with her parents when United Airlines Flight 175 was slammed into the South Tower, as being “age 2.” This might convince you that the American victims were “innocent” and the foreign terrorists “guilty.”
That would be telling us what to think.

Story Continues →

After suspension attorneys for Tulsa Police Captain plan to amend federal suit

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Paul Crockett / Staff

Tulsa Police car (file photo)

By Nicole Burgin

 

A Tulsa Police Captain at the center of a Tulsa mosque dispute is suspended and transferred after an internal investigation at the Tulsa Police Department.  Tulsa Police Captain Paul Fields is on a 2-week suspension without pay for violating two departmental policies.

"They, in fact, now have caused economic damages to him in his employment and his profession and we will be seeking to recover those as well," says Rob Muise with the Thomas More Law Center.  Muise is one of the attorneys representing Captain Fields.

read more: http://www.krmg.com/news/news/local/after-suspension-attorneys-tulsa-police-captain-pl/nCwM2/

Mosques as Barracks in America

Andrew Bostom |

The Islamic Center of Toledo Mosque and Minarets

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan represents the triumphant Janus-faced approach to the fundamentalist global “Islamic revival.” He and his pious forbears have now completed dismantling Turkey’s secular experiment, and achieved the full-throated re-Islamization of Turkish society, an insidious process begun already within the decade after Ataturk’s death, in 1938.  When currying favor with gullible Western audiences, Erdogan burbles disingenuous ecumenical platitudes about the “Alliance of Civilizations.” But in reality, this is an Islamization campaign promoted by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, notably Saudi Arabia, which rewarded Erdogan, for his role in the Alliance, specifically, as “services to Islam,” with the “King Faisal International Prize,” considered the “Nobel prize” of the Arab world. Regardless, Erdogan has always aroused his Muslim constituencies by brazenly appealing to their deep-seated jihadist sentiments as he did while mayor of Istanbul, in 1997, delivering a fiery speech that reminded the masses of these words from the  poem “The Soldier’s Prayer,” written (in 1912) by Turkish nationalist poet Ziya Gokalp:

The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the faithful our army.

read more: http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2011/06/05/mosques-as-barracks-in-america/

Muslims want second mosque in Sofia

 

byThe Sofia Echo staff

Photo: Reuters

The leadership of Sofia's mosque have said that the temple is now too small to hold the capital's Muslim community during Friday prayers and that the authorities should authorise construction of a second mosque.

In order to avoid future tension with other residents, and to prevent rallies such as that staged by Ataka members on May 20, they have also vowed to "reconsider" their policy of allowing worshippers to pray outside, hoping to reduce obstruction to pedestrians during prayer time.

They have also promised to reduce the sound on loudspeakers to the "bare minimum" so that the noise does not disturb the surrounding area.

read more: http://www.sofiaecho.com/2011/05/27/1096358_muslims-want-second-mosque-in-sofia

May Christians Preach Outside a Philadelphia Mosque?

 

by David J. Rusin
American Thinker
May 1, 2011

http://www.islamist-watch.org/6929/may-christians-preach-outside-a-philadelphia

Law enforcement scrutiny, detainment by police, and a court date to answer trumped-up charges: these are the consequences of preaching Christianity to Muslims not only throughout much of the Islamic world, but sometimes even in America as well.

The most infamous example occurred last June, when four missionaries from Acts 17 Apologetics were arrested and charged with breach of peace while they calmly discussed their faith with Muslims at the Arab International Festival in Dearborn, Michigan. Armed with self-recorded video showing that they had acted in a civil fashion, the Christians were vindicated by a jury several months later.

An important but virtually unnoticed Philadelphia case from 2010 bears striking similarities to the one in Dearborn, including police shutting down religious speech directed toward Muslims and a prosecutor filing charges patently at odds with video evidence. Islamist Watch attended the trial, which offered a unique window into the battle to protect First Amendment rights in an era of hypersensitivity.

On the evening of July 3, Michael Marcavage of Repent America — a Philadelphia Christian group known for its strong stances on hot-button social issues such as abortion and homosexuality — was driving with two visitors, Kenneth Fleck and Mike Stockwell. The men say that they spotted Masjid Al-Jamia, a fortress-like mosque located near the University of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia, and spontaneously decided to pull over and preach on the public sidewalk out front.

This much was not in dispute: They began with a hymn and took turns reading Gospel passages. However, a bicycle-bound guard working for AlliedBarton, a private security firm contracted to patrol the streets close to campus, soon approached the evangelists, who by then had drawn a boisterous crowd of a dozen or more Muslims, some visibly upset with the call to Christianity.

According to Marcavage and his cohorts, the guard told them that they could not preach there and had to depart. They refused, prompting him to radio for the university police. Officers arrived and found the Christians continuing to preach, the Muslims arguing with them, and Marcavage filming — which, the missionaries later explained, had been done to protect themselves against false accusations, a tactic employed wisely in Dearborn. A policeman asked the evangelists to step back from the crowd and lower their voices, while Officer Nicole Michel demanded that Marcavage put down the camera, allegedly grabbing him by the arm.

When the dust settled, Marcavage and Fleck were in custody facing two counts: one for "creat[ing] a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose of the actor," under the state's disorderly conduct statute, and another for "obstructing highways and other public passages," namely a mosque door opening out onto the sidewalk. The men pleaded not guilty. Stockwell was neither arrested nor charged.

Defense attorney C. Scott Shields invoked the First Amendment throughout the four-hour trial of November 12, which did not involve a jury. He began by petitioning for dismissal on the basis that federal and Pennsylvania courts regularly have backed the right to express controversial views in public spaces — and a sidewalk in an urban area like West Philadelphia, he said, is the "quintessential public forum." Citing Terminiello v. Chicago, Shields noted that police cannot enforce a "heckler's veto" by suppressing speech that sparks anger and unrest. Judge Charles Hayden rejected the motion and ordered testimony to commence on the two charges, each of which would be exposed as paper thin.

The assertion that Marcavage and Fleck had blocked a mosque door was the first to fall apart. Amid conflicting eyewitness accounts of their position on the 15-foot-wide sidewalk (see a Google Street View panorama here), including multiple claims that they had stood just two feet from a door, the defense unveiled its coup de grace: video subpoenaed from the masjid's surveillance camera showing that the men had stayed closer to the curb than the building. As Fleck mentioned later, blocking an entrance would have been counterproductive because the preachers had wanted Muslims to come out and hear their message. At the trial's conclusion, Assistant District Attorney Joseph McCool withdrew the charge of obstructing a public passage, presumably due to the accusation having been rendered untenable.

His attempt to prove disorderly conduct did not fare much better, even though the judge allowed the charges to be expanded midway through the proceedings to include two other subsections of the statute: "engag[ing] in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior" and "mak[ing] unreasonable noise."

The case grew weaker with each witness. Nobody had seen the preachers behave violently or make any threats. Officer Michel, who was quite hostile on the stand, even admitted that the Christians had been detained, in part, for their own safety. Asked whether they had created a hazard by disrupting traffic on busy Walnut Street, her partner explained that the flow of cars had indeed been affected — but by agitated Muslims running across the road. Furthermore, no evidence was presented to demonstrate excessive noise.

Two Muslims testified. A young man, the sole mosque attendee called by the prosecutor, claimed that the evangelists had stirred up the crowd by describing Islam as a "hate religion," but a female witness contradicted him, revealing that she had heard only statements such as "Jesus is the way." The defense called a Muslim of its own, a man responsible for security at the mosque that evening. Having exited the building while the Christians were outside, he saw no reason to take any action and continued on to a nearby store.

The trial's most unsettling twist came when Stockwell, the third minister, testified to overhearing Officer Michel express concern about Marcavage's footage, with the implication being that it might undermine the police account and exonerate the preachers. The defense then attempted to enter into evidence the video returned to the men upon their release, which they insisted university police officers had tried to erase by recording over it with the lens cap on. The judge refused, ruling that the prosecution had not had sufficient opportunity for review.

The defense did not need it, however, given the preponderance of reasonable doubt already accumulated. Judge Hayden acquitted the men of the remaining charges.

"This case was all about Marcavage and Fleck's speech," defense attorney Shields said afterward. "If they had been outside of the mosque talking about anything other than Jesus Christ, they would never have been arrested." Indeed, based on the actions of security officers, the prosecutor's decision to go to trial with flimsy evidence, and his courtroom focus on how Muslims were aggravated by the Christians' message, it is no great leap to suspect that deference to Islamic sensibilities helped shape the saga from beginning to end.
Who ultimately benefited from this needless episode? Islamists pushing the media-enabled calumny that Philadelphia Muslims are besieged by discrimination.

Preying on the contemporaneous public debate about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) appears to have convinced at least one Philadelphia news outlet, CBS 3 television, that the above incident was another manifestation of "Islamophobia." In a segment from early September, now featured on the CAIR-PA YouTube page, reporter Ben Simmoneau stated, "At least three times now in the last month, worshippers here at the Jamia mosque at the corner of 43rd and Walnut have been greeted by protesters as they tried to attend prayers. At one point, they say, those protesters even tried to block the door of this mosque." The claims set the stage for a puff piece about CAIR.

"Block the door" presumably refers to the now-discredited accusations against Marcavage and Fleck, but the journalist got the timeframe wrong — their arrests occurred two months prior to his report — and as demonstrated in testimony, it was not a protest. And what of the other two incidents cited? Islamist Watch contacted local police seeking evidence but uncovered nothing in their records. As for the source of these dubious allegations, a text version of Simmoneau's story contains an intriguing clue: a quote from Rugiatu Conteh, CAIR-PA's outreach director, who claims to have been at the mosque during one of the three supposed "protests," but who did not show up to tell her tale in court.

Hence, as with the Dearborn trial, one must not celebrate the acquittals too much. Charges never should have been brought before a judge in the first place, significant resources had to be drained to defend the missionaries, and Islamists successfully exploited the overblown incident to advance their own agenda.
Yes, the First Amendment still protects Christians preaching to Muslims. But as the Philadelphia case and recent controversies prove, exercising free speech rights amid hypersensitivity toward Islam does not come without costs.

David J. Rusin is director of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

WikiLeaks: Montreal mosque 'is a top Al Qaeda recruiting zone'

By Daily Mail Reporter
A mosque in Montreal has been ranked in the world’s top nine Al Qaeda recruiting zones and linked to a terror cell planning attacks on Los Angeles airport, new released documents claim.


The WikiLeaks files, written by U.S. military chiefs, list the Al Sunnah Al Nabawiah mosque among nine houses of prayer worldwide considered as a place ‘Al Qaeda members were recruited, facilitated or trained’.

The leaked ‘Matrix of Threat’ documents, designed in the early days of the Guantanamo detention centre to assist intelligence officials, rank the Canadian mosque alongside sites in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1381033/WikiLeaks-Montreal-mosque-Al-Qaeda-recruiting-zone.html#ixzz1L89EEQuh

Mosque denied in residential NJ neighborhood, legal jihad ensues

Posted on April 28, 2011 by creeping

 

An update on this previous post, via Mosque in Zone Fight – WSJ.com.

An Islamic group sued Bridgewater, N.J., for religious discrimination after the town changed zoning rules to block a mosque from opening in a residential neighborhood.

The Al Falah Center wanted to convert a former banquet hall located on a quiet side street into a mosque, day-care facility and community center for a diverse group of Muslim Americans who have been trying to find a home for the center more than a decade, according to the lawsuit filed on Tuesday in federal court in New Jersey.

But when the plans were making their way through the municipal channels, hundreds turned up to oppose the mosque. Though residents said their concerns were about traffic and other mundane quality-of-life issues, some people questioned where the group’s funding was coming from, and whether it had ties to terrorist organizations.

On March 14, the town agreed to limit houses of worship to certain main roads and other selected roads, including all areas where current churches and temples—including for Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish congregations—were already located. Al Falah said the town deliberately jimmied with the process, pushing their planning-board application hearing until after the town changed the law, to block the mosque.

“This conduct is discriminatory and imposes a substantial burden on plaintiffs’ right to the free exercise of their religion in violation of federal and state constitutional and statutory requirements,” the lawsuit said.

An attorney for the town, Bill Savo, said he hadn’t yet seen the complaint. “The town always has a history of acting in good faith,” he said. “We believe we acted appropriately.”

The flare-up over the Bridgewater mosque came in the wake of other efforts around the country to block or close mosques, including the so-called Ground Zero mosque in New York.

But the underlying tone of the debate was different in Bridgewater. Residents said they were supportive of mosques in the town—just not on Mountain Top Road, a small, winding street, without sidewalks, where some of the many trees come practically up to the asphalt.

“We have every religion in Bridgewater you can think of, many religions represented,” Mr. Savo said. “It’s just a concern about traffic-safety issues.”

Attorneys from the Brennan Center at New York University and the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund are among those representing Al Falah. Representatives from the Brennan Center said members of Al Falah declined to be interviewed about the issue.

Gitmo files: Britain and its mosques a global center of terror

Posted on April 27, 2011 by creeping

 

via ABU HAMZA’S MOSQUE NAMED AS GLOBAL CENTRE OF TERROR

VILE hate preachers helped turn Britain into the hub of al-Qaida’s global terror network.

Secret Guantanamo Bay files have identified UK-based extremists Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada as key recruiters.

American officials believe they were responsible for radicalising dozens of young men before sending them off to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The secret documents have disclosed how radical clerics turned London into a global terror blackspot after claiming asylum and living off state benefits.

Secret documents weren’t need to disclose this information – it was widely reported including in a book titled Londonistan


read more: http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/gitmo-files-britain-and-its-mosques-a-global-center-of-terror/