By CRISTIAN SALAZAR
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK — It is “unethical, insensitive and inhumane” to oppose the planned mosque near ground zero, more than 50 leading Muslim organizations said Wednesday as they cast the intense debate as a symptom of religious intolerance in America.
The imam behind the project, meanwhile, was preparing to return to the U.S. after a taxpayer-funded good will tour to the Mideast, where he said the debate is about much more than “a piece of real estate.” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf sidestepped questions about whether he would consider moving the $100 million mosque and Islamic community center farther from where Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center. Instead, he stressed the need to embrace religious and political freedoms in the United States.
Leaders of the Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York, an Islamic leadership council that represents a broad spectrum of Muslims in the city, gathered on the steps of City Hall to issue a statement calling for a stop to religious intolerance and affirming the right of the center’s developers to build two blocks north of the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
“We support the right of our Muslim brothers who wish to build that center there,” said Imam Al Amin Abdul Latif, president of the Majlis Ash-Shura. “However, the bigger issue and the broader issue is the issue of ethnic and religious hatred being spread by groups trying to stop the building of mosques and Islamic institutions across the country.”
This is the first time that the council as a body has spoken out on the weeks-old debate over the proposed center.
“When the issue became hotter and hotter, and people made more statements against the mosques, then we decided to get involved in it,” said Syed Sajid Husain, secretary general of the council. He said the process of bringing together the leaders to agree on a statement also took a handful of meetings.
Leaders of the council said they were calling attention to what they claimed was an anti-Islamic climate, and that the development of a center near ground zero is simply one example.
They also cited a suspicious fire that damaged construction equipment at the site of a future mosque in Tennessee that is being investigated by the FBI, and the successful opposition to the proposed conversion of a property owned by a Catholic Church into a mosque and community center on Staten Island, a New York City borough off the southern tip of Manhattan.
Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor of New York who has opposed the mosque in lower Manhattan, has said criticism is “not an issue of religion.” Like many critics, he has said it is an issue of being sensitive to the families of 9/11 victims and transparency regarding the center’s funding.
A Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday showed 71 percent of New Yorkers want the developers to voluntarily move the project.
Islamic leaders on Wednesday said they would support a move to another location, if that’s what the imam and his supporters choose to do. But they emphasized that Muslims also were killed in the terrorist attacks and were first responders.
“We declare unethical, insensitive and inhumane, the notion that our co-religionists are not entitled to the respect of a place of worship according to their faith, near the location where men and women of our religion worked, lived and died — just like other people,” the group’s statement said in part.
The group is not associated with the planned Islamic center but is representative of a significant number of New York Muslim leaders.
Rauf has been on a U.S. State Department-sponsored interfaith tour of the Middle East for several weeks and is currently in the United Arab Emirates, said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, speaking to reporters in Washington, D.C. Rauf was expected to return to the U.S. on Thursday.
The imam told a group that included professors and policy researchers in Dubai on Tuesday that the dispute over the mosque “has expanded beyond a piece of real estate and expanded to Islam in America and what it means for America.”
Rauf is named as a director of a recently formed nonprofit organization spearheading efforts to raise money for the project, along with a core group of developers that own the property where the center would be established. The developers say they are negotiating with the city to reduce and pay back over $225,000 in back taxes owed on the property.
Early plans for the Islamic center near ground zero call for a swimming pool, a Sept. 11 memorial open to the public and a prayer space.
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Associated Press Writers Matthew Lee in Washington, D.C., and Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
These are the moderate Muslims they said we don’t need to worry about Date: 9/1/2010 by Bryan Fischer
"Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi was the poster child of a “moderate” Muslim. He just came to America, according to friends and relatives, for a better life and to take care of his family. Character references were in abundant supply, as we were told how honest he was and how harmless he was. Why, he worked at a convenience store in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. How dangerous could he be? He wouldn’t hurt a fly, we were told.
In other words, he is the poster child of the Muslims we’re told represent most Muslims in America, the ones that are on the side of freedom and pose no threat to our national security.
The Associated Press, by the way, never gets around to mentioning his religious affiliation at all. And in their original story, the AP didn’t even give the names of the two suspects involved until the fifth or sixth paragraph, likely because their names are clearly Arabic. Nope, no bias in the out-of-the-mainstream media here that I can detect at all.
Well, all was fine with al Soofi until he boarded a plane in Birmingham, Alabama with luggage that contained a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle, multiple cell phones and watches taped together, and a knife and box cutter.
Inexplicably, the people who are supposed to keep us safe in the air, the TSA, spotted the stuff in his suitcase, examined it, and decided there was nothing to worry about here, move along. He was allowed to board the plane and continue his journey.
It wasn’t until he sent his bag on ahead to Washington, D.C. while he changed his itinerary at the last minute and got on a plane for Amsterdam that officials got concerned. They had to call the plane with his bag on it back to the gate. In other words, they were perfectly willing to let the plane take off with this suspicious luggage as long as he was on board, as if suicide bombers don’t exist and the Christmas Day bomber who tried to blow up his underwear and 270 passengers was just a figment of our collective imagination.
Now if I or any member of my family was on that plane from Birmingham to Chicago, and I found out that they let al Soofi and his luggage on board knowing it contained a cell phone taped to a bottle of liquid and a knife and a box cutter, I’d be absolutely furious right about now.
Our vigilant protectors at Homeland Security have already decided this wasn’t a dry run for a terrorist attack, as if everybody tapes cell phones to bottles of liquid when they fly.
The president’s spokesman confessed that the two men arrested in Amsterdam - al Soofi and another man by the name of Hezam al Murisi - are not on anybody’s watch list, which is up to about 20,000 names by now. Al Murisi only changed his destination to a different continent at the very last minute - which people do every day, of course - and so naturally did nothing that should arouse anyone’s suspicion.
And security officials assure us that they apparently are not a part of any terror network, as if the presence of rogue jihadists among us such as these two shouldn’t alarm anybody.
All that means is that we have no way of knowing which Muslim is going to be the source of the next terrorist threat.
What officials don’t realize is the fact al Soofi apparently acted on his own makes the case against the theory that there are any truly moderate Muslims in America crumble like a cheap Bedouin tent in a mild breeze.
In other words, al Soofi was a classic moderate Muslim, someone we’re told is not a threat to anyone, not a part of any terrorist cell, is a follower of the religion of peace and a man who only wants to contribute to America and realize the American dream.
Now it looks like he was trying to figure out a way to blow 300 of us to kingdom come.
The bottom line is this: if we can’t even trust “moderate” Muslims, which members of the Islamic persuasion can we trust? If a convenience store clerk in Tuscaloosa can go jihadi on us with no warning, how many other Muslims like him do we have to worry about?
The constant, constant danger is that a “moderate” Muslim may suddenly begin to take his religion seriously and get about the business of blasting some of us infidels to our final reward as his god and his religion teaches him to do. If a guy like al Soofi can’t be trusted, then no “moderate” Muslim in America can be trusted. We have to be cautious with them all".
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