What is the purpose of this mosque and Islamic center, the name of which, Cordoba House, is taken from a city that became the Moorish capital after Catholic Spain was conquered and came under Islamic rule for eight centuries before the Reconquista of 1492?
How would Muslims in the Middle East react to the building of a Crusader House in the Holy Land, funded by the Vatican and built around a chapel dedicated to Pope Urban II?
Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is fronting for the project, says its purpose is healing, reconciliation, harmony. Taking him at his word, why would Imam Feisal ferociously persist when the mosque was clearly enraging the families of the fallen of 9/11 and dividing, not uniting, New York and the country.
Nor has Imam Feisal been transparent about where he will come up with the $100 million for Cordoba House, or who is behind this, or what is the need for a 13-story mosque and community center so near where the twin towers stood.
As Claudia Rosett of Forbes has learned, Imam Feisal has been running the Cordoba Initiative, a charitable foundation whose total contributions over the five years ending in 2008 came to $100,000.
Yet he plans a 13-story mosque and community center that will, he says, employ 150 full-time and 500 part-time workers.
Mayor Bloomberg's statement also reflects a naivete about why bin Laden and al-Qaida sent those terrorists to wound our country and kill as many of us as they could in the most dramatic way they could.
Al-Qaida did not attack us because we have a free press and freedom of assembly. They sent terrorists to smash and burn the symbols of U.S. power -- the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Capitol -- because they hate our policies and, above all, our presence in the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. They wish to purify their region of the infidel, establish a caliphate and live under sharia.
To them, we are the new Crusaders, the new Romans, and by wounding and enraging us, they sucked us into a war on their terrain.
And those firemen, police and rescue workers did not run into those burning buildings to defend constitutional rights, but, acting out of bravery and love, to save their fellow men.
And as our God, the one true God, said, "Greater love than this hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friend."
Tell them to put their mosque somewhere else, Mike.