Mosque retreat will feed extremism, warns NY imam

USANEWSNY DESK:The Islamic cleric behind plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York warned that retreating on the project would only strengthen the hand of the Muslim extremists.

But imam Feisal Abdul Rauf did not rule out that developers would move the Islamic center, telling ABC: “The decisions that I will make-that we will make-will be predicated on what is best for everybody.”

Critics say building a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is offensive to the memory of the nearly 2,800 people killed when Al-Qaeda hijackers steered two planes into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

The mosque, to be built on the site of a derelict clothing store, was proposed by Abdul Rauf as a way of giving Islam a new face in the United States and supporters see it as a place for reconciliation between faiths. Thousands marched through New York on Saturday’s ninth anniversary of the attacks, facing off in angry debate under a heavy police presence as they protested both for and against the project.

The row was enflamed in the run-up to somber September 11 ceremonies in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania by threats from an evangelical pastor to burn hundreds of Korans unless the mosque was moved.

Terry Jones, the pastor of a tiny Florida church, later relented and promised not to proceed with the Koran-burning, but not before his incendiary threats had triggered violent demonstrations across the Muslim world.

Two people were shot and killed Sunday by the Afghan army in the eastern district of Baraki Barak as a crowd of up to 300 protesters chanted anti-US slogans and tried to storm the governor’s office.

Jones flew to New York at the weekend to meet with Abdul Rauf, but the imam has so far snubbed him and vowed not to barter.

“How can you equate the burning of any person’s scripture with an attempt to build inter-faith dialogue?” Abdul Rauf told ABC. The imam said he would never have conceived the whole mosque project if he had anticipated the trouble it was going to cause.

“I’m a man of peace. I mean the whole objective of peace work is not to do something that would provoke controversy.”

Now, he said, the “discourse has been, to a certain extent, hijacked by the radicals,” making the decision on whether or not to move the mosque, “very difficult and very challenging.

“My major concern with moving it is that the headline in the Muslim world will be ‘Islam is under attack in America’,” he said. “This will strengthen the radicals in the Muslim world, help their recruitment.”

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is an avowed backer of the mosque, while President Barack Obama has been more circumspect, declining to say whether he thinks building the mosque is wise while defending organizers’ right to do so.

“If you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on a site,” Obama said at a press conference on Friday.

Polls show a majority of Americans, and some 70 percent of New Yorkers, think the mosque should be moved further from Ground Zero. AFP, Washington.