Plans for an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero moved forward as a city panel opened the way for developers to tear down a building that was struck by airplane debris on Sept. 11.
Even as the project’s backers celebrated the decision, a conservative advocacy group founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson announced it would challenge the panel’s vote in state court Wednesday.
Brett Joshpe, an attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice, said the group would file a petition alleging that the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission “acted arbitrarily and abused its discretion.”
The panel voted unanimously on Tuesday to deny landmark status to a building two blocks from the World Trade Center site that developers want to tear down and convert into an Islamic community center and mosque. The panel said the 152-year-old lower Manhattan building isn’t distinctive enough to be considered a landmark.
Oz Sultan, a spokesman for the developers, said they had no comment on the possible legal action by the ACLJ. But he said the developers were grateful for the decision by the landmarks panel.
“We’re very happy it’s moving forward,” he said.
The decision drew praise from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who stepped before cameras on Governor’s Island with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop shortly after the panel voted and called the mosque project a key test of Americans’ commitment to religious freedom.
“The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts,” said Bloomberg, a Republican-turned-independent. “But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves, and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans, if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.”
The vote was a setback for opponents of the mosque, who say it disrespects the memory of those killed at the hands of Islamic terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. Jeers and shouts of “Shame on you” could be heard after the panel’s vote.
The proposed mosque has emerged as a national political issue, with prominent Republicans from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich lining up against it. The Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s most prominent Jewish civil rights group, known for advocating religious freedom, shocked many groups when it spoke out against the mosque last week.
Former Rep. Rick Lazio, a Republican running for governor of New York, attended the commission meeting with a handful of opponents of the mosque, which is being developed by a group called the Cordoba Initiative. Lazio said the group’s imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, had refused to call the Palestinian group Hamas a terrorist organization.
Rauf also said in a “60 Minutes” interview televised shortly after Sept. 11 that “United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”
The Cordoba Initiative says on its website that its goal is to foster a better relationship between the Muslim world and the West.
“We believe it will be a place where the counter-momentum against extremism will begin,” the imam’s wife, Daisy Khan, told The Associated Press on Friday. “We are committed to peace.”
The commission’s decision not to designate the existing building as a landmark means that the developers can tear it down and start from scratch. If the building had been declared a landmark, they could have created a smaller mosque and community center there.
A partner in the project, SoHo Properties, bought the property for nearly $5 million. Early plans call for a 13-story, $100 million Islamic center with a swimming pool, basketball court, auditorium and culinary school besides the mosque. The center, called Park51, also would have a library, art studios and meditation rooms. A memorial will be dedicated to victims of the 9/11 attacks.
Sultan, who is the media relations director for Park51, said there was no timeline for starting demolition or construction, which is expected take 18 to 48 months.
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Associated Press writer Cristian Salazar contributed to this report.
Imam paid $4.85M for Ground Zero mosque – in CASH!
Where did imam Faisal, who called America and Christians the first terrorists and whose wife is on an advisory team for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, come up with $4.85 million in cash? And where will he get the $150 million to build an Islamic mecca planned two blocks from Ground Zero?
A reporter at Hudson New York has new information and asks, or says the people of New York should be asking, much tougher questions than the New York Times posed to the Islamic groups involved and the Mayor of NYC. Hat tip Gateway Pundit. Emphasis added.
Mosque At the World Trade Center: Muslim Renewal Or Insult Near Ground Zero | by Youssef M. Ibrahim
An identified group with unknown sponsors has purchased building steps away from where the World Trade Center once stood — to turn it into potentially one of the largest New York City mosques.
At the moment the building, the old Burlington Coat Factory, already serves as a mini-mosque: an iron grill lifts every Friday afternoon for a little known Imam leading prayers a few yards away from where Osama Bin Laden’s airborne Islamist bombers killed nearly 3000 people back in 2001.
The Imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, told the New York Times — which put the story on its front page Wednesday — that he has assembled several million dollars to turn it into ‘’an Islamic center near the city’s most hallowed piece of land that would stand as one of ground zero’s more unexpected and striking neighbors.’’
The 61-year-old Imam said he paid $4.85 million for it — in cash, records show. With 50,000 square feet of air rights and enough financing, he plans an ambitious project of $150 million, he said, akin to the Chautauqua Institution, the 92 Street Y or the Jewish Community Center.
The origins of such monies are unexplained; neither are the countries or entity advancing such huge donations. Most US mosques, including many in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx are funded directly or indirectly by Saudi Arabia the country to which 15 of the 19 hijackers who bombed the World Trade Center belonged. The UAE, Qatar and Iran are other major sponsors across the USA.
The money trail is an important question that must be answered by the Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with more than a bland comment by one of his spokesmen, Andrew Brent, who quipped to the Times, “If it’s legal, the building owners have a right to do what they want.”
At the moment, the location is not designated a mosque, but rather an overflow prayer space for another mosque, Al Farah, at 245 West Broadway in TriBeCa, where Imam Feisal is the spiritual leader. Call this creeping annexation. On 9/11, the Burlington building, with 80 employees in its basement, is where a piece of a plane plunged through the roof, from either Flight 11 or Flight 175 crashing into the south tower at 9:03 a.m..
One of the investors for future oncoming funds is listed as the Cordoba Initiative, defined as an ‘’interfaith group’’ – and founded by Imam Feisal. Cordoba is the name militant Muslims often invoke when they recall the glory of Muslim empire in the centuries they occupied Spain.
As a former New York Times and Wall Street Journal correspondent, and as a New York Sun columnist who covered Islamic Fundamentalism extensively overseas and in the USA, I find the facts oddly lacking. The story as reported fails to answer, and avoid asking, so many pertinent questions.
The source of money matters as a significant part of the hundreds of mosques being built and already erected in this country double up as cultural Islamic centers for distributing literature– Islamist propaganda in fact—from Bay Ridge Brooklyn to Detroit, and for schooling growing Muslim minorities. They house Imams of unknown origin and education, many of whom do not speak a word of English but preach in Arabic and Urdu — radical messages, it often turns out.
As a reporter familiar with the Arab communities of the USA, I doubt the faithful fork out all that money for mega mosques, and if they did, the mayor’s office should prove it, not merely accept someone’s say so. It is an established fact that a significant percentage of the mosques built in the USA in the past two decades are receiving a disproportionate amount of their funds not only from the Saudis, but also the UAE, Qatar and Iran — all problematic Islamists activist nations. The government just discontinued work on a major Iranian-funded mosque and center in New York City, which had operated under the radar since the days of the good old Shah of Iran under the auspices of the Pahlavi Foundation, and has been owned since 1979 by the Mullahs of Iran.
The context here is that 15 of the 19 perpetrators of the attacks — on the very site where this new mosque shall rise — came from Saudi Arabia.
We saw how, in the case of Major Nidal Hasan of Ft. Hood, it turned out that three of the original participants in 9/11 had listened to the same preacher Major Hasan listened to: a man with a radical violent Islamic website now operating out of Yemen to radicalize American Muslims. In such a context,knowing more about the Imam overseeing a potential multimillion mosque at the World Trade Center site is essential to the story. Nearly 3,000 people were deliberately killed there – and the New York Times is papering over what is about to be built on the site in a nice, beatific pseudo-profile of the Imam overseeing the mosque? Limiting access to this Imam to some nice quotes, showing him nattily dressed in a suit, and describing him merely as a Sufi, is vacuous, crafted and couched in public relations spin to obscure rather than explain. ‘’What happened that day was not Islam’’ is all that the Times quotes the Imam saying — a rather lame comment given the enormity of his ambition and the iconic status of where he wants to put his mosque.
The mayor’s office should tell us more.
Just as importantly, who Is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf ? And what is his background? Given that much Islamist radicalism originated in mosques at the hands of imams in virtually all the terrorist attacks in America and Europe — as we found over and over again – the omission of this information is a glaring mishap.
All we get learn about the Imam in the Times story about him is some anodyne, rather anemic, focus on a man of peace. No real searching. Mayor Bloomberg’s folks need to tell us what are the Imam’s origins, where he was schooled, whether he is an immigrant, a visitor, of which country is he a citizen, and what is his philosophy, among other relevant questions.
Merely describing the man as a Sufi ‘’who follows a path of Islam focused more on spiritual wisdom than on strict ritual,’’ is far too little . After every terrorist atrocity, any number of Sufi and Muslims savants ritually come out with the hackneyed saying: ‘’Islam is a religion of peace and brotherhood.’’ Accumulated as they are, these statements are added a heap of nothing for those tens of thousands of Muslims killed by other Muslims in suicide and other bombings from Pakistan to Iraq every day.
One would hope for a follow-up story or stories, and that New York City and its citizens at least ask harder questions, rather than submit to being mislead in the interest of political correctness.
(don’t hold your breath)
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