Opposition grows in Virginia to controversial NY Mosque
By Alan Moore | Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 | PoliticsAs Barack Obama injects his opinion into the controversial Mosque at the site of the World Trade Center, Virginia’s conservatives are lining up against what most certainly would become a shrine to radical Islamists all over the world.
Governor McDonnell recently came out against the Ground Zero Mosque:
“I strongly believe in religious liberty. It’s a tenet of America democracy,” McDonnell said. “I also believe it is an issue for people of New York to decide. If it were my decision, I would not put that center there. It is a site where nearly 3,000 people lost their lives and I certainly would not locate that center there if I had a voice.”
GOP congressional candidate Keith Fimian sought to draw a line in the sand against his liberal opponent, incumbent Gerry Connolly (D-11th) with the following statement:
“The debate about building a mosque near the World Trade Center site isn’t a question of law or religious freedom. It’s simply a question of respect and compassion for the victims of the World Trade Center attacks and their families,” Fimian said. “I urge Congressman Connolly to state his opposition to the proposed mosque near the World Trade Center site and encourage President Obama to do the same.”
“The families of the victims and the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of this mosque,” Fimian said. “I take the advocates of the mosque at their word that they are seeking to foster peace and understanding between Muslims and the United States, but surely they can understand the opposition from the families who lost loved ones on 9/11. Building this mosque elsewhere would truly demonstrate respect, sympathy and understanding for the victims and their families.”
“Freedom of religion is critical to our freedom and greatness as a nation, and Muslims make invaluable contributions to our nation every day,” Fimian said. “This decision isn’t about freedom of religion. It’s about showing common decency toward the families whose lives tragically changed forever on that September morning in 2001. I hope Congressman Connolly will join me in opposition to this project at the current site.”
5th district Republican Robert Hurt also is attempting to make an issue about the Mosque in his bid to unseat Rep. Perriello:
“Our president’s decision to endorse the building of a mosque so close to the site of a national tragedy that millions of Americans will remember for their entire lives is deeply troubling.
“This is another example that the White House and folks in Washington are totally out-of-touch with the people of America.
“Congressman Perriello needs to stand up to our president and tell him that he should be focused on creating jobs and cutting the out-of-control spending in Washington instead of gratuitously offending millions of Americans with his insensitive comments.
So I ask, where does our Congressman stand on this important issue?”
68% of the country is opposed to building the Mosque with controversial financial ties near the site of the World Trade Center.
If you buy the Obama argument that building this Mosque is a stand for religious freedom then you also have another powerful ally in your cause. Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar recently said that the Mosque “must be built.” With friends like those, who needs enemies?
The longer this Ground Zero Mosque fiasco drags on the worse it becomes for Democrats. If nothing more it will be a campaign trail talking point to show how liberals are indifferent towards the lives lost on 9/11/01.
Feel free to sign a petition to Michael Bloomberg voicing your displeasure.
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Alan Moore is a conservative activist and public relations expert in NoVA. Follow Alan on Twitter: @SecPress
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27 Responses to "Opposition grows in Virginia to controversial NY Mosque"
Well, so much for the far right upholding our constitution and bill of rights. I guess religious freedom is just for white, male, christians. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison must be rolling over in their graves. And Alan Moore can’t even read and understand the Governor’s quote, which in context was the exact same position as the President’s position. That is, in America, we guarantee religious freedom and the right to worship; the location of the buildings is subject to local zoning and land use regulations. Again, the hypocrisy of the right, which claims to support and uphold the constitution, borders on demagoguery.
And so much for the left giving a damn about the victims of 9/11. Mike, thanks for amplifying that point.
And so your point is that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should only be our guiding principles if it is popular at the time to follow them?
If you defend a mosque at ground zero, you should defend the Confederate Flag.
You can’t be selectively sensitive.
Ah yes, spoken like the king of wedge issues. I’ll take the view of the founding fathers and our constitution and Bill of Rights over your campaign tactics anyday.
Mike,
Guess what, even if they choose to participate, children cant pray in school. As well in so many places God is not even supposed to be mentioned. But in the case of this mosque, it is not right to ask them to build is some where else? The constituttion guarantees religous freedom, not a place to build a church oe mosque….Why is it that so many want to give foreigners and illegals more give that we do our own citizens….If this were a true church or mosque that was not radicle and wanting to rub our noses in it, they would have no problem building some where else….
Mike,
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/17/ground-zero-church-archdiocese-says-officials-forgot/
You want to lecture them on the constitution and the bill of rights?
This will be a great test of the labor unions in New York and the laborers and suppliers who belong to them. If they don’t participate, then it won’t get built. If they do participate in building what is turning into another “Obamination”, then there will be additional fallout both politically and in the rank and file union members which will include police and firemen who lost so much in 9/11.
Imam 911 call… “Our Holy Ground Zero Mosque is on fire!” Dispatcher “Sir, can you please wait while I put you on hold?…. all units are busy responding to other calls, God Willing.”
If they want to build a mosque I say let em build it. It is pretty classless for them to do it there but didn’t the terrorists attack us cause they hate our freedom? Is it a victory for terrorists if they strip some of our religious freedom by forcing our government to act?
The citizens should protest the building of the mosque. If the government comes in and does it, the terrorists strike another victory, make us look hypocritical and further erode our liberties like the PATRIOT act did.
I’d like to see where these 3 congressional candidates in Virginia Beach stand on this issue, it has become a hot potato.
One- I certainly hope that someone will ask the three candidates at the Great Debate tomorrow night how they stand on this issue. They have a day to figure out their answer.
Two- Do any of you really think that the New York Mafia will allow a Victory Shrine to be built by Terrorist Organizations near The World Trade Center???
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bearing Drift and Old Virginia, Malone Labe. Malone Labe said: http://bit.ly/9VIt7T Opposition in VA grows to Trade Center Mosque. Connolly #VA11 strangely quiet. #tcot #vagop [...]
[...] economy, did some idiot thinking “we gotta change the subject” hope that a mosque at Ground Zero would do the [...]
66% of Americans opposed the Iraq War in 2006. Glad the GOP forced a withdrawal of troops because of public opinion.
“I certainly hope that someone will ask the three candidates at the Great Debate tomorrow night how they stand on this issue.”
There are a lot of more important issues pressing our nation’s attention than whether or not to build a building. “unbelievable”
Mr. Moore: Your facts are wrong. First, the facility is not a mosque, it is an Islamic Community Center that will have, as one small part of it, a mosque. Second, it is not “at the site of the World Trade Center.” It is two blocks away from the World Trade Center site. The area is a commercial area; there is nothing hallowed or sacred about it.
Mr. Kirwin: You write: “If you defend a mosque at ground zero, you should defend the Confederate Flag. You can’t be selectively sensitive.”
I completely agree. Of course, logic dictates that the inverse of your argument must also be true, namely, if you defend the Confederate Flag, then you should defend a mosque at Ground Zero (leaving aside the aforementioned factual errors that it is not a mosque and not at Ground Zero, of course).
Any way, you are taking a principled stance, and I applaud it. What’s next for you? A post defending the Islamic Community Center at Blue Virginia?
Try to build a Christian Church in the Muslim country. Hey Infidel you may get your head cut off. religion of what god ?
@ Ray
… Welcome to the United States of America. Have you read the Constitution lately?
The bruised sensibilities of the opponents of the project (or their desire to continue the hysterical bed-wetting and fearmongering they’ve engaged in since 9/11) doesn’t override the First Amendment.
Want to honor the 9/11 families? Bring them Osama Bin Laden’s head on a stick. The failure to do so is the biggest stain on BOTH the Bush and Obama administrations.
How to Win the Clash of Civilizations By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the “Clash of Civilizations,” particularly the clash between Islam and the West.
Huntington’s argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.
The balance of power among these civilizations, he argued, is shifting. The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations—especially China—are economically ascendant. Huntington also said that a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with each other and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization.
The West’s universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China. Thus the survival of the West depends on Americans, Europeans and other Westerners reaffirming their shared civilization as unique—and uniting to defend it against challenges from non-Western civilizations.
Huntington’s model, especially after the fall of Communism, was not popular. The fashionable idea was put forward in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History,” in which he wrote that all states would converge on a single institutional standard of liberal capitalist democracy and never go to war with each other. The equivalent neoconservative rosy scenario was a “unipolar” world of unrivalled American hegemony. Either way, we were headed for One World.
President Obama, in his own way, is a One Worlder. In his 2009 Cairo speech, he called for a new era of understanding between America and the Muslim world. It would be a world based on “mutual respect, and . . . upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles.”
The president’s hope was that moderate Muslims would eagerly accept this invitation to be friends. The extremist minority—nonstate actors like al Qaeda—could then be picked off with drones.
Of course, this hasn’t gone according to plan. And a perfect illustration of the futility of this approach, and the superiority of the Huntingtonian model, is the recent behavior of Turkey.
According to the One World view, Turkey is an island of Muslim moderation in a sea of extremism. Successive American presidents have urged the EU to accept Turkey as a member on this assumption. But the illusion of Turkey as the West’s moderate friend in the Muslim world has been shattered.
A year ago Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan congratulated Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election after he blatantly stole the presidency. Then Turkey joined forces with Brazil to try to dilute the American-led effort to tighten U.N. sanctions aimed at stopping Iran’s nuclear arms program. Most recently, Turkey sponsored the “aid flotilla” designed to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza and to hand Hamas a public relations victory.
True, there remain secularists in Istanbul who revere the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey. But they have no hold over the key government ministries, and their grip over the army is slipping. Today the talk in Istanbul is quite openly about an “Ottoman alternative,” which harks back to the days when the Sultan ruled over an empire that stretched from North Africa to the Caucasus.
If Turkey can no longer be relied on to move towards the West, who in the Muslim world can be? All the Arab countries except Iraq—a precarious democracy created by the United States—are ruled by despots of various stripes. And all the opposition groups that have any meaningful support among the local populations are run by Islamist outfits like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, Islamist movements are demanding the expansion of Shariah law. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s time is running out. Should the U.S. support the installation of his son? If so, the rest of the Muslim world will soon be accusing the Obama administration of double standards—if elections for Iraq, why not for Egypt? Analysts have observed that in free and fair elections, a Muslim Brotherhood victory cannot be ruled out.
Algeria? Somalia? Sudan? It is hard to think of a single predominantly Muslim country that is behaving according to the One World script.
The greatest advantage of Huntington’s civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. And it helps us to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historic rivalries between Arabs, Turks and Persians for leadership of the Islamic world.
But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.
Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington’s most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.
Ms. Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is the author of “Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations,” which has just been published by Free Press.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703426004575338471355710184.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
It was just a matter of time… union members and building material suppliers are starting to weigh in about their support of the Mosque:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/08/20/2010-08-20_we_wont_build_it_hardhats_say_no_way_they_will_work_on_wtc_mosque.html
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry, that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right, that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them: Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
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Huh?
Brother Nemo has a way with words. I think that I agree with him, but I’m just a simple country boy.
@James Hawkins,
Country boy or not, you have got to agree Nemo has a serious problem with the lack of paragraph breaks and periods.
That was one long sentence.
Two sentences actually, but the first was quite something.
I am wondering who actually wrote that.
Sounds like Ben Franklin or another founder of this country to me.
Excellent argument for separation of Church and State.
In Colombia there is no separation of Church and State, since Colombia is a Catholic Country. So I have seen how it works the other way.
Since I am not Catholic, the almost only problem for me is that I can not marry in a Church. That and sometimes on my Sunday morning walks, this group of Colombian Grandmothers will make me go to Mass with them. NEVER argue with a Grandmother.
Brother Nemo is as sneaky as the Chinese Communists.
Next to the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson took greatest pride in his authorship of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which, as his friend James Madison said, “extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”
Religious Freedom
“Almighty God hath created the mind free…”
http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/enlight/religi.htm
its a victory mosque that is the problem you simpleminded liberals!
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