Yesterday’s unanimous vote by the city Landmarks Preservation Com mission cleared the last municipal impediment to construction of a 13-story mosque and community center just blocks from Ground Zero.
But important questions linger.
The vote, which denied landmark protection for a building that must be demolished to make way for the mosque, was hailed by Mayor Bloomberg and others as an affirmation of religious liberty of a peculiarly American sort.
As, of course, it was.
Just imagine the city fathers of, say, Riyadh so graciously clearing the way for construction of a 13-story cathedral in the Saudi capital.
As if.
Indeed, such a notion renders risible criticism of the sort leveled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, among others, before the vote.
CAIR had denounced opponents of the projects as “bigots and extremists.”
That’s pretty rich, coming from an organization that in 2007 was named an unindicted co-conspirator in connection with a plot to support the terrorists of Hamas — and that has seen several of its former officials and staffers convicted on terror-related charges.
Fact is, the project has drawn opposition from a lot of level-headed folks — most particularly families of 9/11 victims.
Let’s be clear: Muslim Americans have a right to worship where they please. And that includes a site in the shadow of Ground Zero, if they so insist.
Clearly, though, this is a complicated issue.
The 9/11 mass murder, after all, was committed in the name of Islam.
Moreover, as Dan Senor of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in The Wall Street Journal, whatever the project’s stated goals, “in the minds of many who are swayed by the most radical interpretations of Islam . . . it will be celebrated as a Muslim monument erected on the site of a great Muslim ‘military’ victory.”
And that’s why the question of who precisely will pay to build the $100 million project is so compelling.
At first, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf insisted the funds would be raised entirely from the Muslim-American community.
But then he told an Arabic-language newspaper in Britain that funding would also come from Arab countries.
And it should be noted that Rauf’s father was the long-time director of the Islamic Center of New York, which built the mosque on Third Avenue and 96th Street — a project funded primarily by the governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations.
Now, the Saudis openly fund mosques abroad, spreading the radical Wahhabi strain of Islam, as a means of pacifying their own home-grown radicals.
So it would be particularly troubling if Rauf’s funding comes from abroad — particularly from Riyadh.
Especially given his own disturbing ties to figures like Hossein Mahallati, Iran’s former UN ambassador and an unabashed supporter of Hamas.
Not to mention Rauf’s own pointed refusal to label Hamas a terrorist organization — and his statement, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that “United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”
Which is why he and those behind the mosque project owe it to all New Yorkers to make their plans and — especially — their finances fully transparent, now that they’ve effectively been given a green light to build.
If, as he says, he means to be a force for reconciliation, Rauf must begin by demonstrating to New Yorkers that he has no ties to those who support global terrorism — either ideologically or financially.