Pamela Geller makes an extraordinarily important point here: the Ground Zero mega-mosque controversy has already been a tremendous victory for the Islamic supremacists — they have changed what is associated with Ground Zero in the popular mind.
“The Theft of Ground Zero,” by Pamela Geller in the American Thinker, December 13:
The most egregious aspect of the Ground Zero mosque controversy is something that people don’t think or talk about: the incalculable theft involved in this second wave of the 9/11 attacks. These Islamic supremacists are grifting the system big time. And yet the biggest theft of all is one that everyone has overlooked.
The biggest theft of all is that they have stolen Ground Zero itself from America like thieves in the night. They have ripped it from our collective soul and national psyche.
Now, whenever anyone mentions Ground Zero, it has nothing to do with the largest attack ever on American soil. Whenever anyone speaks about Ground Zero now, it is never about the thousands of lives lost that day. It is never about the hundreds who jumped to their deaths because the alternative was worse. It is never about the horrified, terrified people on the planes who watched in indescribable horror as they crashed into these buildings to the wail of Allahu akbar.
Imam Rauf and Daisy Khan have stolen Ground Zero. They have kidnapped it. Hijacked it. Before these heartless Islamic supremacists declared their stealth jihad, Ground Zero was like Pearl Harbor or Antietam or Gettysburg: the site of a catastrophic loss of life through an unprecedented act of war. Ground Zero was the site of the largest attack on American soil in our history. Ground Zero was where we would mourn our dead. Ground Zero was where moms, dads, aunts, uncles, kids, construction workers, stockbrokers, waiters, postmen, and other ordinary Americans became the infantry — soldiers without uniforms. Ground Zero was hallowed ground.
But no more. Not since these raiders came in the dark of night with their fifteen-story mega-mosque. They have succeeded in stealing our memory, our cherished remembrance of that horrible day. They stole Ground Zero. Before the advent of Daisy Khan and Feisal Abdul Rauf, Ground Zero was just that: it was September 11. But now Ground Zero is all about a mosque. It has morphed (like the Ground Zero mosque controversy itself) into an angst-ridden conflict about insensitivity toward Muslims, “backlash” against Muslims, and American attitudes toward Islam.
Now, Ground Zero is all about the earnest, unctuous, smug, and deceitful faces of Imam Rauf and Daisy Khan, and about their concern over imaginary “Islamophobia.”…