No Mosque at Ground Zero protest

June 7, 2010, by Jack Kemp

Diagonally across from southeast corner of Ground Zero, Pamela Geller told a surprisingly large, impassioned crowd that she would be filing papers to have the site of the “Cordoba House” mosque, the old Burlington Coat Factory store, designated a national memorial because actual pieces of one of the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 was smashed onto the building. Calling this site a war memorial, Geller reminded the crowd that this was the anniversary of the landing on the beaches of Normandy, France, in World War II.

Despite expected rain, a crowd estimated at 5,000 showed up. There were many who had lost loved ones on 9/11, many veterans in areas designated for protesters: Zuccotti Park (formely called Liberty Plaza), the Trinity Place (the street where the speaker’s stage was located) and the area spreading south of it on both sides of the actual street.

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer introduced a diverse group of speakers, from Coptic Christians from Egypt to Simon Deng, an African enslaved by Muslims in the Sudan. Anders Gravers, the head of Stop Islamization in Europe, Dr. Babu Suseelan from India and the head of a Russian Jewish victims of 9/11 group spoke as well. Many of them compared the placing of a mosque near Ground Zero as similar to the placing of a mosque in conquered territory such as the Hagia Sophia in Istambul, or the placing of the mosque on the site of the former King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem – or the mosque put up in Cordoba, Spain, the namesake of this Cordoba House project.

Ms. Geller referred to Ground Zero – and the former Burlington Coat Factory site a few blocks away a war memorial. Many of the long-time Americans who spoke, such as Dan Malloney and Michael Faulkner, both candidates for political office in New York, spoke movingly of this proposed mosque being an insult to the memory of those who died there as did Beverly Carson of the Band of Mothers. The audience was told that 3,000 souls were looking down on this demonstration and asking it to be their voices. A retired policeman first responder, Alan DeVona,  spoke of the horror of 9/11, of people jumping out of buildings, as did a volunteer who sorted through the ashes on the site looking for body parts to identify and partially fill a coffin of that person so that their family could at least have that at the funerals.

A PACE University Professor of Philosophy, a self-described Democrat who has lived in a Muslim country, spoke of the limits of tolerance and where it steps on the feet of decency, asking what about tolerance and respect for the majority of Americans. He predicted a mosque near Ground Zero would lead to more strife and bad feelings, just the opposite of what the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, its spokesperson, claimed his proposed center would be against.

Although the main stream media were conspicuous in their absence, there were many film crews both in the designated area and among the crowd.

Robert Spencer reported at the Atlas Shrugged website that Pamela Geller was doing interviews with “Al-Jazeera, AP, Chilean television, Italian television.” I must have seen close to 30 camera crews at this protest, getting the word out to people around the internet and the world.

When the protest wound down at around 2:40 pm, two of the speakers sang “God Bless America” from the stage and everyone was urged to pick up their garbage, leaving the place clean – which they did. The NY Police were thanked numerous times from the stage and Pamela Geller promised another gathering to protest on September 10th. Check her website, AtlasShrugs.com, for updates.

This story is found here: http://www.timothybirdnow.com/?p=3120