Bruce Bawer on the Ground Zero Mosque...

I've stayed away from the controversy, but Bruce's essay is well worth reading...

The principal argument made by these defenders of Park51 is that Imam Rauf is a moderate and a “bridge-builder.” In Time magazine, Bobby Ghosh describes Rauf and his wife, Daisy, as “the kind of Muslim leaders right-wing commentators fantasize about: modernists and moderates who openly condemn the death cult of al-Qaeda and its adherents.” But anyone who has followed the spread of Islam in Europe over the last decade or so has repeatedly seen imams identified as “moderate” and as “bridge-builders” only to learn that they are anything but. We have been told a thousand times, for example, notably by former London mayor Ken Livingstone, that Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a moderate bridge-builder, when in fact he supports the death penalty prescribed by sharia law for apostates, rape victims, and gays. Western intellectuals and journalists have applied the term “bridge-builder” countless times to Tariq Ramadan, who purports to represent a liberal, reformed “Euro-Islam” but who, as Paul Berman, Caroline Fourest, and others have conclusively demonstrated, shares the extremely illiberal views of his theological mentor, Qaradawi, and of his illustrious grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the terrifying Muslim Brotherhood.

Over the years we have been told that this or that mosque is “moderate” only to see videotapes of sermons, filmed with hidden cameras, in which gays, Jews, and infidels are compared to pigs and dogs and described as deserving of death. We have been told that this or that mosque is “moderate” only to have undercover reporters discover that it has connections to terrorist groups and that its library is full of books advocating violent jihad.

“Moderate”? As Douglas Murray notes, “No major Islamic leader in the world today preaches a message even remotely close to what most of the new American ‘let’s build the mosque’ crew would find even barely tolerable.” So it was that when the mosque controversy began, my years-long experience with claims about “moderate imams” led me to view the statements about Rauf’s moderation with great suspicion. And indeed, as the days and weeks have gone by, more and more information has surfaced that, to put it as mildly as possible, raises serious questions about Rauf’s theology. For example, it turns out that he has refused to condemn Hamas (Ghosh refers to this, absurdly, as a “perceived reluctance to condemn Hamas”), that in comments he made in the wake of the Madrid and London bombings he seemed primarily concerned with dodging the uncomfortable truth about the perpetrators, that he is an admirer of Qaradawi, and that he strongly supports the tyrannical religious government of Iran. Any of these facts alone should be enough to silence the claptrap about Rauf’s moderation and love of American liberty. Though Christopher Hitchens supports allowing the mosque, even he has written about Rauf that “the more one reads through his statements, the more alarming it gets.”

Still, virtually the entire media establishment in the United States has rushed to stand shoulder to shoulder with this dubious figure – and to slander as bigots those who have dared to question his motives or criticize his religion.

But, go and read the whole thing...