Mosque
at 9/11 Site Would be Jihad Victory Symbol in the USA
by
Shelomo Alfassa
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Published
on HNN under Historians' Take entitled: "Beware
the Cordoba Initiative"
New
York, NY (May 28, 2010) The world should know that the
‘Cordoba
Initiative,’ the New York City based organization
desiring to construct a massive Islamic house of prayer
at ‘Ground Zero,’ has posted on its website,
a peculiar and disingenuous statement indicating the desire
to bring back the atmosphere of, “interfaith tolerance
and respect that we have longed for since Muslims, Christians
and Jews lived together in harmony and prosperity eight
hundred years ago.”
I
point this out because contemporary scholarship has clearly
demonstrated that there was no ‘harmony’ or
‘prosperity’ for non-Muslims in Islamic Spain.
The Cordoba Initiative is attempting to revisit
some sort of mythical “tolerance and respect”
which never existed.
What
is irrefutable is that living under Islam, the non-Muslim
population was always mandated to submit to Islam, accept
discriminatory laws, and make payment of a mandatory Quranic
tax imposed upon every non-Muslim. For a period of about
800 years, most of Spain was ruled by Muslims and this
area was known as ‘Al-Andalus.’ Islamic
rule ended in 1492, when the city of Granada, the last
Muslim kingdom in Western Europe, capitulated to the Spanish
Catholics.
The
white flag is the flag of the Islamic Caliphate (world)
and
the black flag is known as the flag of Jihad. These flags
are used by all
Muslim groups seeking to put in place Islam as the dominate
religion of the world.
The
Cordoba Initiative is an organization whose very
name makes reference to what was, 1,000 years ago, one
of the world’s most advanced cities, Cordoba, Al-Andalus
(Spain). This was a city that was politically and religiously
dominated by Islam, and a city that was conquered by jihad
(holy war). Today, there are Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda
that have a dream of seeing a pan-Islamic world that
would extend from old Al-Andalus (Spain). This
is based upon Islam’s principle of dar-al-Islam,
which means a world where Islamic sovereignty prevails
over the citizenry. Dar-al-Islam is attained through
jihad and the media is replete with Al- Qaeda’s
calls for jihad and their claims to Al-Andalus
and its major cities such as Cordoba.
Clearly,
Islamic Cordoba was once a city where a number of intellectual
Muslims such as Averroes (Ibn-Rushd), influenced European
thought with Arab philosophy related to the scientific
teachings of Aristotle. In mathematics, the Arabs built
upon the foundations of Greek mathematicians. At one point
there were dozens of free schools in Cordoba for the education
of poor Arabs and at some point there existed some 600
mosques. However, even with all of this scholastic and
societal grandeur, the route to get to such a point of
magnificence was through violent warfare.
Not
only were successive battles for Spanish cities bloody,
but desiring more than Spain--the Arabs declared a jihad
against France, then crossed the Pyrenees, and in successive
swarms spread over the southern regions of the French
countryside, slaughtering the Christians by thousands,
and burning their churches to the ground before being
halted.
We
must remember that a practice associated with conquering
Islamic armies was the construction of a mosque at the
location where their triumphant battle was won. Thus,
this modern Islamic organization is seeking to build a
mosque at the site of 9/11 attack—an attack which
was carried out by 19 Muslim hijackers who considered
their mission holy war.
Insomuch,
it is this man's opinion that a Muslim house of prayer
that would be cemented in the ashes of catastrophe at
the foot of New York's lost Twin Towers would be a symbolic
victory flag for Muslims who seek the destruction of America.
Further, it is my honest opinion that no matter how the
construction of a mosque at ‘Ground Zero’ may
be perceived by well-meaning Americans, the construction
of a mosque on the spot where Al-Qaeda brought
jihad to the United States will unquestionably
represent victory to the worldwide forces of Radical Islam.
Shelomo
Alfassa is a scholar of Judaic life in Islamic and Christian
Spain and was
the former
U.S. Director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries
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