Hamas ‘leader’: Ground Zero mosque “must be built”
This NY Post report is sure to give the Obama administration one more headache over its muddled response to the Ground Zero mosque controversy:
A leader of the Hamas terror group yesterday jumped into the emotional debate on the plan to construct a mosque near Ground Zero — insisting Muslims “have to build” it there.
“We have to build everywhere,” said Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas and the organization’s chief on the Gaza Strip.
“In every area we have, [as] Muslim[s], we have to pray, and this mosque is the only site of prayer,” he said on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on WABC.
“We have to build the mosque, as you are allowed to build the church and Israelis are building their holy places.”
Hamas, he added, “is representing the vast majority of the Arabic and Islamic world — especially the Islamic side.”
[…]
Zahar said Muslims around the world, including those who live in this country, are united in a common cause.
“First of all, we have to address that we are different as people, as a nation, totally different,” he said.
“We already are living under the tradition of Islam.
“Islam is controlling every source of our life as regard to marriage, divorce, our commercial relationships,” Zahar said.
“Even the Islamic people or the Muslims in your country, they are living now in the tradition of Islam. They are fasting; they are praying.”
And in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing.
It should be noted the Ground Zero mosque imam himself has refused to condemn Hamas:
Hamas first came up in the mosque debate earlier this summer when Abdul Rauf refused to describe the group as a terrorist organization — despite the State Department listing that identifies it as such.
Tom Brown, a chief opponent of the mosque, said: “This is what we’ve been saying . . . Imam Rauf is a radical Muslim who will not call Hamas a terror group.”
A retired firefighter who was a first responder on 9/11, Brown lost 100 of his FDNY friends at the Twin Towers.
“How much evidence do we need that this guy is a radical Muslim?” he asked.
“If Rauf really were a bridge builder and an interfaith guy and all the things he professes to be, he wouldn’t be doing this to people.”
Abdul Rauf raised eyebrows last week when he departed on a State Department-sponsored goodwill mission to the Middle East, despite concerns that the trip may be helping him with the mosque’s $100 million fund-raising goal.
The Obama administration insisted the trip, reportedly with stops in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar, was strictly to improve understanding about Muslim communities in the United States.
But a London-based Arabic-language newspaper that interviewed Abdul Rauf reported that he said he would also collect money from Muslim and Arab nations around the world — raising the possibility that the American government is helping him build contacts in oil-rich states.
That sure is nice to know.
So, let’s recap: 3000 innocents were killed by radical Islamic terrorists on American soil on 9/11. A vast majority of the murders took place at the WTC, now known as Ground Zero. 9 years after the attacks, a developer group – standing shoulder to shoulder to shoulder with a radical imam who has blamed America not only for the attacks but who also blamed America for ‘creating’ OBL … and who is also in favor of stealth campaigns to implement sharia law in the US – gets approval to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. Not only is this radical imam the face of the movement to build this mosque, but he’s also a PAID point man for the Obama administration on “building bridges” overseas between Islamists and America. 70% of the American people oppose building this mosque so close to Ground Zero, yet this imam will be funded by our State Dept. to not only allegedly “spread good will” in Islamic countries overseas, but to raise money – presumably to help with the Ground Zero mosque development.
Among other things.
And instead of looking like a leader on the issue, our President comes off as an arrogant, insensitive fop, insinuating that all opposition to the building of the Ground Zero mosque is based on “bigotry” and “religious intolerance,” thereby painting himself and the mosque supporters in the best possible light, while hanging the rest of us out to dry. He then tries to “clarify” his remarks the next day by saying that his speech should not be construed as being a statement on the “wisdom” of putting a mosque so close to Ground Zero.
This story sure keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?