If freedom of religion means anything in the United States, it means that Mus lim-Americans have a right to congre gate and worship wherever they please — including places those with vivid memories of 9/11 may find distasteful.
But that doesn’t mean the people behind a planned mosque blocks away from Ground Zero are acting like good neighbors — or good citizens.
Exhibit A: Their secrecy about who’ll actually be funding the project.
Granted, the groups leading the mosque-building effort seem just fine.
The Cordoba Initiative, led by Kuwaiti-born Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, says it’s devoted to “interfaith tolerance,” while its sister organization, The American Society for Muslim Advancement, seeks to “foster an American Muslim identity.”
But it is hardly unknown for US Muslim leaders to preach one message in public and another behind closed doors.
Cash, on the other hand, rarely lies — and that’s precisely what Rauf & Co. need to address.
Rauf has said to domestic audiences that money to build the 13-story mosque-cum-community center will be raised from among American Muslims — though he hasn’t said from whom.
Yet he recently told an Arabic-language newspaper in Britain that funding would also come from Arab countries.
And that’s a red flag.
As laid out in a 2005 report from Freedom House, financing mosques abroad to spread the radical Wahhabist strain of Islam is one of the main ways Saudi Arabia keeps its own radicals pacified.
The human-rights group found radical, Saudi-backed materials in some of the most prominent mosques in more than a dozen US cities.
And Rauf, for his part, maintains disturbing ties to some pretty bad actors.
As Stephen Schwartz reported in The Weekly Standard last week, among the project’s energetic supporters is one Hossein Mahallati, who also sits on the board of a New York-based nonprofit with Rauf.
Mahallati has previously served as Iran’s ambassador to the UN, as well as director of the Alavi Foundation, which the feds charged last year acted as a front for the Iranian regime and participated in nuclear proliferation.
Adding to the suspicion are Rauf’s own statements — including a pointed refusal last month to label Hamas a terrorist organization.
It is possible — maybe even likely — that the Ground Zero mosque project is entirely peaceful and well-meaning, despite its unfortunate associations.
But, given the full range of circumstances, it is not presumptively so.
If its backers truly seek to promote “understanding,” they could start by making their finances fully transparent.
If they don’t do so, fair-minded New Yorkers are entitled to assume that they have something to hide.