Opposing view on religious freedom: Stop the mosque
By Peter Gadiel
USA TODAY OPINION
July 21, 2010
Comments 168
The proposed mosque near the site of the 9/11 mass murder is a continuation of Islam's violent history, which promotes destroying prior cultures and building on the ruins.
The gullible, like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, swallow the lie that this latest memorial to the concept of “convert or die” is different because … well because its chief promoter, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, says it's different.
Rauf who tells U.S. media that funds for this atrocity will be raised in the United States but tells London's Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that donations will also come from Arab and Islamic countries.
Perhaps the same Saudis who financed the 9/11 terrorists and build schools around the world in non-Muslim countries to spread the most violent strain of Islam?
We don't know, because this Islamic holy man won't tell us. And Bloomberg doesn't even think we should ask.
It's said opposition to the mosque unfairly slanders Muslims who haven't committed terrorist acts. Tough. I've seen the mass celebrations in Muslim countries over 9/11 and still await anything more than whispered pro forma denunciations of terrorism by Muslim leaders.
After World War II, collective guilt was rightfully assigned to the people of Germany and Japan, even though not all were guilty of supporting terrorist governments. Muslims have given precious little reason to evade the same charge.
My German-born parents my Jewish father and Protestant mother subscribed to the idea of collective German guilt even though my Protestant relatives opposed and hated Hitler.
My father, who recognized the evil in Nazism early on, never forgave his sister Lotte, who refused to acknowledge the facts and who (as reported by her neighbors) waited docilely to be rounded up for shipment to the Auschwitz gas chambers. All his life, in sadness mixed with anger, he spoke of the millions who refused to see until it was too late.
Bloomberg and the other supporters of this mosque are spiritual heirs of Lotte and those millions of victims, seemingly ready to accept their fate. Those with a firmer grasp of history will oppose this mosque as a warning of what is to come.
Peter Gadiel, whose 23-year-old son, James, was killed on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center on 9/11, is president of 9/11 Families for a Secure America.
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