The Zero at Ground Mosque

When I first read about the plan to build a mosque almost next door to the site of the September 11 attack on America, I expected -- perhaps too cynically -- that it was a done deal before the cornerstone was put in place. Not despite it being almost at Ground Zero, but because of it. (Oh, pardon me, Associated Press, you in your unfathomable wisdom have decreed that your writers must not call it Ground Zero, but instead Ground Man-Caused Disaster or something. Good luck with that.)

This is, after all, New York. Immigration worshiping New York. Mega-liberal New York. Home to Jewish fools who would rather support their sworn enemies than give the slightest comfort to the hillbilly mobs of trans-Hudson America.

Opponents would grumble, I reckoned, but they would be drowned out by lectures from civil rights absolutists insisting that Proposition Nation U.S. derives its only legitimacy from being tolerant of the intolerant, "reaching out" to the followers of a totalitarian politico-religious system.

Actually, it might have played more or less that way. We'll never know now. President Obama, or "Zero" as his more benign critics call him, took the occasion of a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to announce his backing for the mosque. (Typically, he tried to hedge the next day, then corrected his earlier correction. It was too late. The cat was among the pigeons.)

My reading of what has happened since is as follows. For many Americans, smaller resentments and doubts about Pres. Zero that had been collecting for the past year and a half crystallized. As a people we are generally willing to give our head of state a good deal of respect, however much we dislike him or disagree with him. It was possible to see the useless, borrowed $787 billion stimulus package as a well-meaning mistake. Ditto the force-fed passage of the disastrous Obamacare legislation. Likewise a lot of sharp-elbows, Chicago-style politics. Maybe there was an excuse for bad mouthing his own country in progressive Cairo.

But for most of us, this was too much, period, tout court, full stop, that's-all-she-wrote.

Of course, the whole complex web of globalists and leftists are not ceding any ground, except Ground Zero, and that to Muslims. It's like the weeks after September 11 all over again. Remember the op-eds telling us that unless we [insert the writer's prescription for dhimmitude here], Al Qaeda will have won? To put it more honestly than they did, unless we agree to lose further, Al Qaeda wins.

Nine years later, we're told by the mosque-eteers that we must allow this thing to be built because it will show we have no hard feelings. We're permitted to show a little sensitivity about the site, and its planned opening on September 11, 2011, but that's all. As a columnist for the McClatchy syndicate -- according to its logo line, it has registered "Truth to Power" as an official, legally protected slogan -- says:

... It was predictable that some New Yorkers who lost loved ones on 9/11 would object to building a Muslim institution so near the site of their tragedy. They're entitled to their feelings, and a cultural center that hopes to bridge gaps among Muslims, Christians and Jews needs to take those feelings into account. But they're not entitled to make their feelings a basis for discriminatory government action.

Normally, any charge of "discrimination" (a death-ray word, like "racist") is enough to make the target keel over. Not, apparently, this time.

Quite possibly without intending to, our hapless president has created an absolute standoff. A Zero-sum game (pun intended). Sarajevo. Fort Sumter. I hope I'm exaggerating; we'll see.

Unfortunately, as usual, the mosque opponents are fighting the right battle with the wrong weapons. Stupidly, they've made it all about distance from Ground Zero. If only the Muslims would understand our feelings, as we understand theirs, and realize why we're touchy about the location.

Two blocks isn't far enough. If they built it three blocks away, that would be 50 percent better. Four blocks, 100 percent improvement. Now we're getting somewhere. Let us reason together. Why don't we ring up the Sheik of Araby and ask him to buy the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue in mid-town, raze it, and slap the mosque down there? Everybody wins.

After all, the cry "Allahu Akbar!" is already heard in prayers at the Pentagon, where that unfortunate accident occurred a few years ago when a plane went off course.

For the umpteenth time: I don't want to root around like a truffle hound looking for "moderate" Islam. I don't want to reform Islam. I have no time for converting Muslims, updating their politico-religious system, winning their hearts and minds. They're welcome to believe their beliefs and practice their practices, in their own historical turf, even territory that they took by military force. But they must not be allowed to colonize the United States and gradually expand their influence and pressure, culminating in sharia law, as is happening in Britain.

We should put an end to these idiotic arguments about mosques, prayer mats, foot baths, dogs in taxicabs, halal meals for "American" soldiers, and all the rest. The only way to do that is to end Muslim immigration and convince the Muslims already here to leave, even if we have to pay them.

If we do not, I fear the whole country will become -- one way or another -- Ground Zero. Because there are still enough of us who refuse to let it become Ground Mosque.