The Ground Zero Mosque's Dubious Champions

By now, a growing number of Americans have heard about the 13-story, $100 million megamosque planned for the immediate proximity of Ground Zero, thanks in part to recent appeals by Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, the Southern Baptists’ Richard Land and a powerful ad by the Center for Security Policy.

Not surprisingly, most of them don’t like the idea one bit. And the more they learn about the imam behind the “Cordoba House” and his agenda, the more they are going to oppose his initiative.

According to a new national poll by Rasmussen, those who are aware of the proposed mosque at Ground Zero oppose it by a 54 to 20 percent margin. This is an even more dramatic degree of opposition than that established earlier this month by a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in New York City which found 52% to 31% opposed.

It seems a safe bet that these numbers will become more pronounced over time as Americans learn that the driving force behind the Ground Zero Mosque, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, adheres to the same intolerant, supremacist agenda as did the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. The authorities of Islam call it “Shariah.”

It turns out that there is no difference between Rauf’s agenda and al Qaeda’s; they both want to bring Shariah to America. They apparently disagree only on the techniques by which that is to be accomplished.

For al Qaeda and its ilk, the preferred means is through terrifying violence. For the likes of Rauf, it is through dawa – the “stealth jihad” of proselytization, recruitment and indoctrination that enable the penetration of Western societies and the conduct of aggressive influence operations to create beachheads for Shariah and, ultimately, its triumph. The latter is best described by the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission statement: “…Eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

That Shariah-dictated stealth jihadist program would appear to be consistent with Imam Rauf’s agenda according to a preeminent Islamic scholar, Andrew Bostom. Bostom published an op.ed. in the New York Post yesterday in which he cites a landmark study issued in August 2007 by the New York Police Department (NYPD) entitled “Radicalization in the West – The Homegrown Threat.”

Bostom specifically warned New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly that, “Imam Feisal Rauf, the central figure in the coterie planning a huge mosque just off Ground Zero, is a full-throated champion of the very same Muslim theologians and jurists [among them prominent figures in the Saudi Arabian application of Shariah known as Wahhabism] identified in a landmark NYPD report as central to promoting the Islamic religious bigotry that fuels modern jihad terrorism.” He added: “The report noted that Saudi ‘Wahhabi’ scholars feed the jihadist ideology, legitimizing an ‘extreme intolerance’ toward non-Muslims, especially Jews, Christians and Hindus. In particular, the [NYPD] analysts noted that the ‘journey’ of radicalization that produces homegrown jihadis often begins in a Wahhabi mosque.”

In short, the Muslim Brotherhood’s stealth jihad aimed at furthering Shariah’s penetration of the West not only complements the violent jihadists’ efforts – it feeds into them.

There is arguably no better example of the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations in America than the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). It has been identified by the federal government as a Brotherhood front associated with its Palestinian franchise, the designated terrorist organization Hamas. CAIR was also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in American history.

The Center for Security Policy has, moreover, amply documented at a Center-sponsored web site, www.CAIRObservatory.org, that CAIR should be investigated as an unregistered Foreign Agent. As such, it is an organization that has failed to disclose that it is predominantly supported by and serves the interests of foreign governments, organizations and/or individuals.

As long as CAIR remains an unregistered Foreign Agent, its myriad influence operations are a violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). This is the federal statute that was employed to remove Russian agents of influence from the United States in recent weeks. Infractions under FARA can result in both civil and criminal penalties. And the Center has called to the attention of both victims of CAIR’s influence operations and the authorities at least 15 different instances when such infractions appear to have occurred in the past few months.

Given CAIR’s role and the vision of an America ruled by Shariah that it shares with Imam Rauf, it should come as no surprise that the organization’s spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, has come to the defense of the Ground Zero mosque. In a typically intemperate screed released on July 22^nd Hooper assailed Palin, Gingrich and yours truly charging “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

The bad news is that, heretofore, such Muslim Brotherhood name-calling has successfully discouraged many in public office, the media, academia and others walks of life from understanding, let alone challenging, what the Brothers call the “civilizational-jihadist process.”

The good news is that the debate over the Ground Zero mosque is providing a “teachable moment” that is encouraging more and more Americans to become knowledgeable about Shariah and the threat it poses to all of us. And the more that happens, the more certain it becomes that Cordoba House won’t be allowed to mutate some of this country’s most hallowed ground into a beachhead for Shariah.