Metro

Oh, stop this inane hysteria already!

Call me an al Qaeda stooge — but count me out of the hysteria over plans for a new mosque and Islamic community center two blocks north of Ground Zero.

What horrible symbolism, many say — so close to where 2,749 died at the hands of Islamist butchers on 9/11!

But the site at 45 Park Place, owned by Cordoba Initiative and its real-estate partners, might as well be a mile away in dense downtown, where larger and taller structures block even a glimpse of it from the World Trade Center.

Despite hints that giant minarets would loom over the massacre site, you wouldn’t likely even see the proposed 13-story building from Ground Zero.

A stink over a relative pipsqueak of a project is ridiculous in a city facing real threats by Islamist butchers. If we’re afraid of a mosque with a swimming pool on top of it, we might as well save time by adopting sharia law now.

Downtown-dwelling Muslims were not guilty of 9/11. There’s been a mosque on Warren Street, close to the WTC, for 30 years, and no one has raised a peep.

It isn’t clear whether Cordoba has the $100 million it needs to build. If it does, no legal obstacle stands in its way. It could put up the mosque without any zoning changes.

The only possible barrier is the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which can be a kind of terror itself.

The sleepy LPC has had its eye since 1989 on naming the building that now stands at 45 Park Place, the five-story former Burlington Coat Factory, a protected landmark — but never cared enough to vote on it.

Once the LPC puts a property on the calendar, its owners can’t do anything to it until the LPC makes up its mind whether to designate it or not — a lazy limbo that drives both landlords and preservationists nuts.

Mosque foes want City Hall to nudge the panel into declaring the factory a landmark.

That’s a favorite ploy of every knee-jerk, anti-progress faction in town: to seek retributive, retroactive landmarking of a building nobody cared about — until a landlord proposed replacing it with something the NIMBY crowd doesn’t like.

The real insult to those who died on 9/11 is not a mosque that Ground Zero visitors won’t even know is there, but how long it’s taking to rebuild the WTC — an affront that can’t be blamed on Islam at its most maniacal.

scuozzo@nypost.com