(will be adding to this post throughout the day)

Charles Krauthammer spells out the Moral myopia at Ground Zero

Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers — according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., more than 80 million souls — it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.

Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.

No Sheeples Here has the video as part of a great post,

Scott Johnson has the latest about Rauf on the road

Claudia Rosett has taken a professional interest in the taxpayer-funded travels of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. For reasons that escape me, Rosett is apparently alone in her efforts. In any event, in a dispatch posted late last night, Rosett reports:

[L]ate Thursday night, New York time — Thursday morning in the Middle East — I phoned the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain, the first stop on Rauf’s “public diplomacy” tour.

Asked if the imam had arrived in Bahrain, an embassy official told me: “Yes, that’s correct.”

And that, folks, is the sum total right now of the information available to the American public about the taxpayer-funded public outreach activities these next few days of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in Bahrain. I had more questions. But Imam Feisal evidently moves in circles in which inquiries about whom he’s meeting overseas, what he’s telling them, or where he plans to get $100 million for his mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero are seen by both Rauf and his hosts as an extraordinary intrusion on his public outreach and bridge-building endeavors. The U.S. Embassy in Bahrain would offer nothing further on the record about Ambassador Adam Ereli’s controversial guest. There is so far no reply to queries I emailed to the U.S. embassies in Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE.

Jammie links to a NY Daily News article on the unions – no building goes up in New York City without union work: The workers are even wearing stickers on their hardhats,

They won’t build it! Hardhats vow not to work on controversial mosque near Ground Zero

A growing number of New York construction workers are vowing not to work on the mosque planned near Ground Zero.
…
The grass-roots movement is gaining momentum on the Internet. One construction worker created the “Hard Hat Pledge” on his blog and asked others to vow not to work on the project if it stays on Park Place.

“Thousands of people are signing up from all over the country,” said creator Andy Sullivan, a construction worker from Brooklyn. “People who sell glass, steel, lumber, insurance. They are all refusing to do work if they build there.”

Darleen has the cartoon (click on it for larger image),

And one of this year’s greatest ironies, Ground Zero Mosque Proponents Now Seeking Support of … George W. Bush

El Cid Versus the Mosque, Part 1

As a counterweight to Imam Rauf’s propaganda coup, The El Cid Project aims to establish a different narrative around the hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan. The Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, popularly known as “El Cid”, led a successful campaign in the 11th century against the Moors. He is a hero of the Reconquista, the centuries-long Christian struggle to drive the Muslims out of Iberia.

In 1961 El Cid was made into a movie starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. It’s a gorgeous production — they don’t make movies like that anymore. Just imagine: Christian soldiers marching proudly into battle under the banner of the Cross — in a Hollywood movie!

What a difference fifty years makes.

The El Cid Project proposes screening the movie near the Ground Zero site. We’ll do our part by showing a YouTube version of it here in seventeen installments

Here is part 1,

Watch the rest here.