Ground Zero Mosque

Germany's foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, offered the following justification for not traveling with his gay partner to Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries: "We want to encourage the idea of tolerance around the world but we don't want to achieve the opposite either by acting imprudently."

Claudia Rosett discovers that Feisal Abdul Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan, will be going to the Middle East on a State Department trip to perform "public diplomacy." Of course, Rauf, the organizer behind the Ground Zero mosque, is currently on his own controversial State Department funded trip to perform "public diplomacy."

Via the Corner, Anti-war Republican Ron Paul has issued a statement saying that the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque "is all about hate and Islamaphobia."

According to Paul, opposition to the mosque is driven by "the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it. They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars." Paul says:

Ground Zero, New York City

Despite rainfall, thousands turned out to protest the proposed Ground Zero mosque, half a block away from where the Islamic cultural center would sit:

Many of the protesters held signs, remembering those who were murdered on 9/11.

Ground Zero, New York City

At Sunday's Ground Zero mosque protest, I spoke to one man who had been with the counter-protesters, Joey “Boots” Bassolino, immediately after the police pulled him out from the crowd. What happened, I asked? “There was a guy standing up, a Pakistani guy, who had identified himself as a Pakistani, and he said: ‘We’re not going to sit there and back these Zionist Jews,’” Bassolino recounted, still clearly a little shaken up.

"Ike’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer." That was Russell Kirk’s succinct response to the claim by John Birchers in the 1950s that President Eisenhower was a Communist.

Recovery summer, opposition to Arizona’s immigration law, negative campaigning, and intervention in the Ground Zero mosque dispute—call them Obama’s Four Disasters. As policy, they’re questionable. As political exercises, they’re losers. As clues about Obama, they’re evidence he’s lost his political knack.

The AP and New York Times have decided to avoid using the term the "Ground Zero mosque." Why? Well, because the proposed 'Islamic cultural center' is not just a mosque (though it would contain a mosque) and because it's not right at Ground Zero (but a whole two blocks from Ground Zero).

When Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahhar threw his support behind the Ground Zero mosque, it became clear that what started as a political controversy is also a national security issue.

Ground Zero mosque backers can legally build the proposed mosque mere blocks from the worst attack from Islamist terrorists in this nation's history. That's not in dispute.

Yesterday Howard Dean came out against the Ground Zero mosque and, for his trouble, was criticized for throwing in his lot with Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Assorted Evil Monsters, et al. Today, Dean's own grassroots organization has come out against him.

Lee Smith considers the concept and implications of sharia in his latest column for Tablet:

With a recent CNN poll showing that 68 percent of Americans oppose the plan to build a mosque in lower Manhattan, close to Ground Zero, it is difficult not to conclude that Americans have begun to take a referendum, not necessarily on their Muslim neighbors, but more generally on what they see as the problems posed by Islam to U.S. liberal democracy. In Washington, Newt Gingrich put a name to it in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute when he identified the problem as “sharia,” or what is commonly translated as Islamic law.