One Mosque at a Time

Originally posted at American Thinker.

Down through history there are untold examples of hostility and acts of war resulting in the loss of millions of lives. Regardless of ethnicity, religion, or point of dispute, the universal agreement amongst civilized people is that genocidal aggressions like the Nazi Holocaust or Pol Pot’s Killing Fields constitute crimes against humanity.

However, history tells us that if Islam is at the source of the antagonism, reciprocal sensitivity and consideration toward victims of Muslim aggression are oftentimes absent. In fact, the annals of time reveal a disturbing trend: “In the cases where the Muslims conquered principal cities, they constructed the mosque in the place that was the centre of the religion of the conquered people.”

Presently, controversy swirls around the Cordoba Project, a proposal to build a fifteen-storey mosque/community center two blocks from the site of an attack where an attempted deathblow to America was delivered by Islamic jihadists.

The Cordoba Project is partially being promoted as a monument to the three thousand who perished in the World Trade towers that fateful September morn. Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, maintains that Muslims associated with the Cordoba Initiative intended only “to look at the legacy of 9/11 and do something positive.” Khan claims the American Society for Muslim Advancement represents moderate Muslims who want “to reverse the trend of extremism and the kind of ideology that the extremists are spreading.”

In addition to portraying it as a memorial bridge between faiths, defenders of the mosque maintain that building a house of worship on private property is an exercise of the constitutional right that grants freedom of religion to all Americans.

The site where three thousand perished is revered and consecrated by the blood of the dead. Regardless of “moderate Muslim” intentions, Americans view the site of the 9-11 massacre as sacredly significant. In essence, lower Manhattan is a burial ground where the unearthed remains of many still reside.

Muslims who insist on placing a mosque so close to holy ground, which would not exist but for the murderous aggression committed by Muslim warriors, is eerily reminiscent of acts of dominance carried out from age to age by Islamic conquerors.

In 630 AD, Muslims captured Islam’s holiest city, Mecca. It was there that a mosque was erected at the Ka’aba on the site of a building built by Abraham, the Judeo-Christian Old Testament father of faith. Muslims honor Patriarch Abraham for siring desert-dweller Ishmael, son of slave woman Hagar. Muslims claimed Abraham for Islam by building a mosque around the original Abrahamic structure, encircling the building and calling it the Masjid al-Haram.

In the 7^th century, when Islam triumphed over Damascus, the Church of Saint John the Baptist (believed to enshrine the head of the baptizer) was destroyed and replaced with a mosque. Legend has it that “Under the Umayyad caliph Al-Walid the church was demolished … [and] Al-Walid himself initiated the demolition by driving a golden spike into the church.”

Most notably, the struggle for religious dominance continues between the Muslims and the Jewish seed of Isaac on what was once the Jewish Temple Mount, site of Solomon’s Temple. The Muslim descendants of Ishmael, after conquering Jerusalem in 638 AD, turned the temple into a Muslim shrine. The infamous holy place called the Dome of the Rock is situated in close proximity to the highly revered Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Around 700 AD, in Cordoba, Spain, after Muslims conquered the Visigothic kingdom, Emir Abd ar-Rahman I took possession of the Church of St. Vincent, and for the next two centuries, what was once a Christian church was transformed into the Great Mosque of Cordoba.

Before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia was the “center of Eastern Christianity.” The Ottoman conquest initiated the “era of Islamic worship in the holy structure, which Mehmed II converted into a mosque immediately after his conquest.”

In modern history, a territorial struggle started by Muslims culminated in one of the worst acts of genocidal aggression in modern times. The massacre took place at the end of the Slavic civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mining town of Srebrenica, on the border of Serbia. Only this time, barbarian Serbs, Christian in name only, targeted a Muslim enclave and systematically slaughtered 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men.

To date, there is nothing on record that indicates that Serbian Christians have ever requested permission to erect an Orthodox church in Srebrenica to pay homage to the memory of the 8,000 Muslims who perished.

Proposing to erect a mosque whose outline will cast a dark shadow across the ground where Muslim jihadists slaughtered three thousand Americans, even if sincere in intent, is nonetheless an example of tactless insensitivity on the part of those supposedly attempting to bridge a religious divide.

However, if the Cordoba Project is revealed to be menacing in its objective, the Park 51 mosque is yet another example of radical Muslims seeking triumph over territory. Disguised as merchants of peace, men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, may in truth be just others in a long line of warriors who, down through the ages, have committed themselves to advancing Islamic dominance for Allah by subjugating and occupying the world, one mosque at a time.

UPDATE: I have never claimed to be an expert on any subject let alone Balkans history.  Since writing this article I have come to find out the Srebrenica incident remains a controversial issue worldwide and a minority believe in a view contrary to what was contained in my article.  The research I did indicated that the USA, the UN, NATO and the world court all believe there was a massacre at Srebrenica.  At no time did the research indicate an opposing view.  The point about the Christians, in name only, slaughtering Muslim men was peripheral to the article whose main objective was the history of victory mosques.  If, when writing the article, I had been aware of the controversy or the offensive nature of the statement, I would surely have left the comment out.