Could Mayor Mike finally have read the First Amendment to the US Constitution? Seems so.
Regarding the swirling debate over the Ground Zero mosque, the mayor said this yesterday: “This is all about the First Amendment — you have a right to say what you want and I respect [that].”
This represents a sea change for Bloomberg, whose previous position was that opponents of the undertaking “should be ashamed of themselves.”
But it takes a truly constricted interpretation of the Constitution to support such an assertion. For the First Amendment guarantees so much more than freedom from governmental interference in the practice of religion.
Like free speech, a free press and the right to petition government for “the redress of grievances.”
We’ll be frank here. From the outset, we considered the decision to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center so close to Ground Zero to be at the least obnoxious, and at most an incitement.
But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the right of Muslims to build a mosque and worship there.
That is beyond question.
But that doesn’t trump the right of oth ers to question the means by which the mosque is to be built, and the motives of those who intend to build it.
There is no need here to rehearse the details of the 9/11 attacks themselves — and all that has occurred since, most recently in Times Square on May 8 — to state flatly that New York City is a prime target of Islamist extremism.
And it is also a fact that certain Mideast countries, Saudi Arabia first among them, lavishly fund Islamist extremists — if only to keep them at bay.
Thus New Yorkers have a right — if not the duty — to express concern about the mosque, given Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s continuing refusal to identify the sources of the $100 million he proposes to spend on the mosque.
Especially since he has said he plans to raise the bulk of it in the Mideast.
Equally disquieting is Rauf’s refusal to comment on — let alone renounce — the mosque’s endorsement by the co-founder of Hamas, which Rauf famously has declined to label a terrorist organization.
To note that Rauf is not being a good neighbor would be an understatment.
We believe him to be a provocateur, a conclusion we have reached only after waiting patiently for weeks for a sign — any sign — that the imam ever intends to explain himself. Clearly, he does not.
Yes, he cannot be compelled to do so.
Yet when even the president of the United States questions the “wisdom” of Rauf’s undertaking, is it any wonder that fully 70 percent of the American people oppose it — most, vehemently?
We hope that Rauf eventually proves us to be mistaken. As things stand, however, count us among the opponents of what only can be termed a wrongheaded, inflammatory undertaking.
We have that right, you know.