Plans for a 13-storey mosque at Ground Zero provoke anti-Muslim backlash

James Bone, New York  

Plans to build a 13-storey mosque and Islamic centre two city blocks from Ground Zero in New York are provoking an anti-Muslim backlash in America.

Muslim organisations picked the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory shop damaged in the September 11, 2001, attacks. The building at 45 Park Place has been vacant since it was hit by the fuselage of one of the jets flown into the World Trade Centre by Islamic terrorists.

"We want to create a platform by which the voices of the mainstream and silent majority of Muslims will be amplified. A centre of this scale and magnitude will do that," said Daisy Khan, director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, which is behind the project.

The financial district committee of New York Community Board 1, representing local residents, gave the proposed Islamic centre a vote of confidence at a meeting on May 5.

The $100 million (£69 million) project would include a swimming pool, a basketball court, a 500-seat theatre and possibly a daycare centre. About 2,000 Muslims are expected to attend Friday prayers there.

The plans, however, have stirred a groundswell of opposition, with a group called Stop the Islamicisation of America calling for a street demonstration on June 6. "What could be more insulting and humiliating than a monster mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Centre buildings that were brought down by an Islamic jihad attack?" said Pamela Geller, the group's director. "Any decent American, Muslim or otherwise, wouldn't dream of such an insult. It's a stab in the eye of America."

Ms Geller's group said that Islam had a history of building mosques on top of the holy places of other religions as a symbol of Muslim dominance. It cited al-Aqsa Mosque on top of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Ayasofya Mosque in the former Hagia Sophia basilica in Istanbul, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus atop what was once the Church of St John the Baptist.

"The only Muslim centre that should be built in the shadow of the World Trade Centre is one that is devoted to expunging the Koran and all Islamic teachings of the violent jihad that they prescribe, as well as all hateful texts and incitement to violence," she said.

Paul Sipos, a member of Community Board 1, also questioned the symbolism. "If the Japanese decided to open a cultural centre across from Pearl Harbor, that would be insensitive," Mr Sipos told the New York Post. "If the Germans opened a Bach choral society across from Auschwitz, even after all these years, that would be an insensitive setting. I have absolutely nothing against Islam. I just think: why there?"

Some critics have been more extreme in their views. Mark Williams, a leader of the right-wing Tea Party movement, provoked controversy with an incendiary post on his blog.

Mr Williams, the chairman of the Tea Party Express, wrote: "The monument would consist of a mosque for the worship of the terrorists' monkey-god." Urged to apologise, he said: "I owe an apology to millions of Hindus who worship Lord Hanuman, an actual monkey god."

His comments drew a sharp rebuke from a spokesman for Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, who noted that the building had planning permission for a variety of uses, including a religious centre. Some families of September 11 victims have also voiced misgivings about the project. "I don't like it," said Evelyn Pettigano, who lost a sister in the attacks. "I'm not prejudiced. It's too close to the area where our family members were murdered."

After years of wrangling, work will soon be under way on every building project within the 16-acre Ground Zero site. The frame of the skyscraper once known as the Freedom Tower, which is to be the tallest in the city, is now 25 storeys high. A second tower has also risen above ground level; work has begun on the foundation of a third block and will soon begin on a fourth.

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