Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald offers some considerations on the Boston mosque:
When a Mosque Project is proposed on land owned by the government (federal, state, local) or that requires any government permission (as zoning and building permits):
1) Investigate everyone connected with the mosque, not merely the front men.
2) Find out who is signing the papers. Note: if a city employee of the local redevelopment authority (in this case the BRA) seems to take an unusual interest in expediting the whole thing, take note.
3) If the papers for the sale of land are sent to Saudi Arabia for signing, be a little suspicious. Who is paying? Could it the Saudis? Could it be part of the nearly $100 billion they have used to promote not merely Islam, but their own special brand that even orthodox Muslims (and Bernard Lewis, and James Woolsey) like to pretend is the real source of the problem? Mosques and madrasas help in the conduct of Da’wa, the main instrument of the Jihad — the Office of War Propaganda.
4) When a sweetheart deal is made, so that public land is sold at below-market prices, ask who has been involved in the deal at every level. Any reason to think anyone at the BRA (the Boston Redevelopment Authority) took a special interest?
The Alamoudi connection, the Qaradawi connection — what will it take for Mayor Menino to retract his generous offer? City land worth millions of dollars was sold to this plausible Muslim group for under $200,000. One wonders if he will ultimately reconsider, or be forced to reconsider. I am sure that the contract can be undone, because the plan was for a purely religious institution, and any court is likely to find that this was clearly to be a “dual-use” mosque — prayers, of course, but also a meeting place (for whom? for what purpose?), sermons from the minbar (but sermons on what subjects, and using what texts — the khutba is nothing like sermons in churches, more politics than religion, and so on). No “dual-use” mosque should be built, or if built, should be allowed to continue to hide under First Amendment guarantees about freedom of religion — not where a “religion” is itself “dual-use.”
5) Note the location of the intended mosque. Is it placed near a population that has, by Muslims, been identified as suitable for Da’wa because the economic or other conditions of the local population make them particularly vulnerable to a belief-system that, whatever else it is, is now felt and seen as a vehicle for expressing one’s alienation from, and protest at, the circumambient society? The Boston Mosque is being built right across from Roxbury Community College. This cannot, by the way, give enormous satisfaction to black ministers in the neighborhood, who of course are remaining silent — what else can they do?
6) Ask what other wonderful things the local would-be mosque-builders are going to do in lieu of full market payment. In the case of those behind the Boston Mosque, there was an offer, gratefully accepted apparently, to supply thousands of books on Islam (I think I can easily list those books that would not be included — that is, every book by every truthful Western scholar of Islam) and a series of “lectures on Islam” to be given “for free” to the students at Roxbury Community College.
The Trojans. The horse. Who forgot to read his Homer, or for that matter, who forgot the morals of all those tales that American children once read, and who taught them not only to be good (and it sometimes worked) but to be careful, to be skeptical (and that sometimes worked).
One hopes that terrific pressure will be put by Boston taxpayers on Menino. The next time any American mayor plans on land giveaways (think of the full horror of the 8 acres in Rome naively donated for the Saudi and U.A.E.-built Rome Mosque, scarcely a mile from the Vatican — a center of Muslim triumphalism and intra-Muslim political intrigue, held up by such clerics as Qaradawi as clear symbols of the eventual Muslim takoever of Rome. Innocence abroad and at home — how much more of this must Infidels endure from their own leaders, who simply refuse to study, or be instructed in, the central political tenets of Islam, and refuse to consider anything other than the most sanitized and sappy versions of Islam, presented by plausible and oily apologists. Maddening.
P.T. Barnum was right. But did one of those suckers have to grow up and enter politics, and become the mayor of Boston?