Ground Zero

There has been much written by people of all political stripes about the proposed Cordoba project. One thing is becoming apparent. The people who make up the Cordoba Project are sticking a finger in our eye and daring us to do something about it.

We have got to stop thinking of these people through the lens of our experience. We have to understand that this is an out-and-out challenge, and that this challenge was no more accidental than the attack of 9-11.

This Imam Rauf is a slick carnival con-man, with a penchant for organizing sub rosa anti-American Islamic foundations and has multiple ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that go clear back to his father. I’m really disgusted by people who would say that having a mosque, only two very short blocks from the very epicenter of ground zero, somehow bridges the gulf between a free Republic and the seventh century socio-political-military treatise called the Koran, in which self-proclaimed prophet Mohammed managed to weld together the wild tribes of the region into a conquering army with the fiery zeal of the true fanatic.

Ferocity and fanaticism turned out to be two of the attributes that the Arabs had in abundance from hundreds of years of inter-tribal warfare. Couple that to a ‘religion’ that mandated killing or conversion to a rigid ideology of conquest. No society has ever lived in harmony with ‘the religion of peace’. Only those who have had the strength to resist by strength of military arms have survived, and only then with constant vigilance.

We as a society have to come to the realization that without fundamental change Islam will not peacefully exist within the United States. It will seek to weaken and divide the country as it grows in strength like a cancer. It’s exactly what’s occurring in Europe right now.

I really hope somebody figures out a way to move that mosque. As I see it, it’s going to be nothing but a bloody mess. Nothing gets built in New York without the cooperation of the unions… all of them… the trades and the unions have pretty much agreed that no work will be done on that mosque site, and if you understand eastern union politics at all, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that I wouldn’t want to be a scab or a foreign construction company trying to set foot on that ground… it wouldn’t be pretty.

We have to observe Islam within our country very closely. Islam has sworn to our destruction. Is there a single reason for us not to be a little suspicious of the Muslims among us? I worked with an old Texas cowboy on a mining operation once, who used to say “Boy, if there’s a snake in the high grass around camp you’d better know where it is.”

Does this mean that all the Muslims in this country are raving fanatics?… No… But neither do I see all of these ‘peaceful’ Muslim congregations across the country raising their voices in patriotic American support for the sanctity of ground zero.

Those six hundred feet comprise two of the shortest blocks in New York. 45 Park Place is in more than just the event horizon at ground zero… it was in ground zero. One of the landing gear assemblies from the second plane was propelled through the roof to come to rest in the basement. There were body parts on the roofs of the buildings surrounding the towers.

Yes, it is ground zero. Yes, it is worth stopping that mosque at all costs. The eyes of the world are watching to see if we have what it takes to face the Islamo-fascist threat.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2010

It has become a cliché over the years, one that is still frequently heard. “Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot?” As time goes on, the answer will more often be along the lines that the interviewee was too young to remember, or that they were not even born yet.

A far more recent variation of the question, one that may usurp the commonality of the Kennedy enquiry, is “Where were you when you heard that the Towers had been hit?”

I certainly remember, as if it was just last week. I was having a coffee in the staff restaurant at my place of work. One of my co-workers (lovely guy, but not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, along with a predilection for idle gossip) came in and announced that a bomb had gone off at the Trade Center.

After the attempt several years earlier, in 1993, I assumed it was another vehicle device, or one concealed in a bag. It was only when I gained access to a television that the full scale of the attack became clear, and the reality hit home.

It was a day that would change people’s attitudes, and government policies, for years, perhaps even decades, to come. This was not a grudge attack against a single entity. Rather, it was an offensive on America itself and indeed, against the free world.

Today marks Rosh Hashanah, known to many as the Jewish New Year. Traditionally, it marks a time of reflection. Perhaps, on this day, two days before the ninth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, we should all cast our minds back to that fateful day and remember. Remember the 3,000 souls who lost their lives, the many more thousands stricken with grief by the loss of their loved ones and lastly, but by no means least, the bravery and sacrifice of the rescue services.

The new Freedom Tower

We all have our own memories from 9-11, but one that is instilled in my mind is that of the spirit of Americans as they came to terms with, perhaps, their darkest hour. There was a defiance shown to an aggressor, that had probably not been seen on such a scale since World War Two, that united the entire country.

Going forward, we must remain vigilant. Those forces of evil are still out there, some closer to home than others. There are those that would destroy America, freedom and the Constitution that guides us. On this Rosh Hashanah…. remember.

(Editor Dee is in for Skip today)

‘Inner Muslim’ is a term which has increasingly been applied with regard to Barack Hussein Obama. His latest exploit into anti-Americanism, by hiding behind ‘religious tolerance’, has drawn justifiable outrage from pretty much across the board, with not a few Democrats very uncomfortable and moving towards the right.

Actions have consequences. A consequence of 9/11 is that despite the left’s concerted effort to do a ‘memory-wipe’ on the American people, it hasn’t worked. The greatest example of this historical revisionism I can recall was back on 9/11. The initial videos plainly showed people leaping out of office windows to keep from being burned alive. By the next day it was getting hard to find unscrubbed versions, and by the second week the only place the originals could be found was in the new media. Had the alphabet networks and the left-leaning cable outlets been the only available news sources, history might have been viewed differently.

9/11 is burned indelibly into our hearts and minds. It is engraved with the fire that burns in our hearts and tempered with the tears we’ve shed for our loved ones and fellow Americans who were the victims of the attacks. When confronted about the edited videos, we were told that it was for our own good. They were afraid that if the graphic images of what really went on that day were repeatedly shown, the anger of the people would force a strong response. The sanitization of the entire Muslim Islamo-Fascist connection in this country was begun in earnest.

Barack Obama has tipped his hand on the Muslim issue time and again. I think most of the country has come to the same conclusion. We were assured that he was a Christian through and through. Christianity and black liberation theology don’t have a heck of a lot in common. His ‘Muslim outreach’ is anti-American and extra-constitutional. Islam is at war with America and it will use any method available to undermine, and ultimately destroy, this country.

Barack Obama is rapidly proving himself to be as big a danger as our enemies abroad. The Cordoba project is an obscenity. Obama’s endorsement of it was blasphemous. The country is watching Obama, and waiting… Eighty days until November 2.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2010

It’s hard to fathom how supposedly sophisticated, intelligent New Yorkers have turned into such saps. It’s not Frank Sinatra’s New York anymore. It appears to be populated by girly-men and women, more concerned with political correctness than the potential for having a thirteen-storey terrorist support facility at the heart of the city, where adherents to a medieval cult slaughtered three thousand on American soil.

Vincent and Joyce Boland, who lost their son, Vincent, on 9/11.

A radical Mullah, Feisal Abdul Rauf, with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and the radical Islamo-Fascist Palestinian movement, and one of the chief sponsors of the Gaza flotilla, attempting to break the embargo of military stores and munitions bound for the East Bank, is behind this scheme.

New York’s Lower Manhattan Community Board 1 (LCBM) Landmark Commission (LMCBLC) literally broke all precedent by refusing to consider the landmark status of the building at 45-47 Park Place, a 152 year old historical building designed by the famous architect Daniel D. Badger. The building was most recently a Burlington coat factory retail outlet. But, more importantly, it is the site where a landing gear assembly from one of the planes that hit the Towers plunged through the roof of the building, coming to rest in the basement.

There’s no nice way to put this, but that board has been bought and paid for. Last Wednesday night, seven members of that board voted to deny historical status to the building. Seven members out of some twenty four. Think the fix might have been in? We need to follow the money. I detect the not-so-delicate hand of CAIR in here somewhere.

Islam has a history of building mosques on the sites of what they consider to be military triumphs. The Temple of the Mount in Jerusalem is one, and there are hundreds of others. That the Mad Mullah has designated the project to be named the Cordoba project in itself is significant, in that Cordoba, Spain, was conquered by invading Muslim armies in 711 AD and became the capital of the Caliphate. Incidentally, Cordoba was also the site of a pogrom aimed at Christians and Jews, in the year 1011.

The planned mosque is proposed to have thirteen floors. Not a coincidence. It represents the thirteenth Imam, who will only re-emerge from his well at the time of Islam’s world triumph. 9-11 survivors, New York and New Jersey firefighters, and associated Patriots groups are taking the lead on fighting this unspeakable crime against the memory of the people murdered by this pernicious religious cult. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has displayed craven cowardice on this issue… refusing to meet with 9-11 family members, survivors and Patriot groups.

America has a very bitter pill to swallow. There is no such thing as a moderate muslim. The very basic tenants of this benighted cult of death call for every Muslim to make jihad against the infidel. That’s you and me. We’ve got our work cut out for us.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2010

[It is another cloudless morning here in New England, just like the morning seven years ago. Back then, two planes were already in the morning sky; observers on the ground might have seen them from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont or New York. There would be a different flight plan that day.

Today, 9/11/08, both John McCain and Barack Obama will visit Ground Zero. In honor of that visit, and in honor of that infamous and painful day, I repost a reflection I wrote several years after 9/11/01. Tomorrow, I will offer another reflection, I think, if I feel so moved.]

Yesterday morning, Friday, July 1, I walked west on Liberty Street and came to a slow stop. It was my first time to visit the World Trade Center since it became Ground Zero. I could see the wide-open 16-acre crater left in downtown Manhattan. But it was not the view that stopped me, but something much smaller. For there, in the southeast corner of Ground Zero, stood a street sign that, for me, was full of symbolic irony. I was at the corner of Church and Liberty.

I noted the irony, perhaps with bitterness touching my heart. And then I walked into the open space, tears filling my eyes, sobs erupting from deep within.

I had not expected this. I had not expected to want to fall to my knees, to wail on the ground, to daven before a new sort of Wailing Wall. I had not expected to feel that I could never leave this place; that I could never go back to something simple, safe, tidy, even naive. I had not expected to want to keep this hole in my heart; this hole from which people leapt and fell through tumult and smoke and confusion.

There was no surprise, however, at the enormity. I had always understood that; had felt it; had known its significance. I always understood the mechanics and the engineering; the aerodynamics and the flight paths. I had already stood on the ledge of a broken window; I had fallen. I had huddled with my child in the back of a plane; felt the pressure change in my ears and the turbulence of a bad pilot; I had seen the sparkling Hudson and the September blue; the smoke ahead; and I had felt the tipping of the wings as the engines were throttled full. I had waited for death to come in 3,000 different ways; and yet my imagination remained intact enough to remind me that I had not died even once.

What I had not expected were the tears. I thought that I had passed through that. I thought that I was, if not insouciant, so to speak, I was at least through with all the grief. But I was not. And clearly neither were many of the others walking by me, slowly, each pausing at various signs, reading them, performing a sort of Stations of the Cross along a postmodern Via Dolorosa. An old man, huddled against the massive, imposing fence, his long white hair and flowing beard tangled around his weary face, played an old silver flute, its dulcet tones reaching out and up, Amazing Grace trembling in my ears. He was crying in each breath.

I became quietly indignant (I was too humbled to be truly self-righteous) at those tourists from "far-away" who posed for digital cameras. And I was miffed, though only mildly, by the hawker silently moving through the crowd with a photo album, 9/11 pictures for sale, though numerous postings declared that such sacrilege was strictly forbidden. But I could forgive all this, for grief and horror do strange things to people. The abundance of cameras reminded me of a funeral I went to last spring, where the family of the 39-year-old father killed in a tragic accident gathered at the funeral parlor before the burial so that portraits could be taken around the open casket. My friend, the owner of the parlor, told me that it "happens all the time." Grief does strange things indeed.

I strolled north, stopping frequently. A young woman next to me, her back to the scene as she waited to cross Church - heading toward the Millenium Hilton - blurted into her cell phone, "I am going to get SO f***ed up tonight!" I moved away from her and closer to the fence, admitting to myself, a little sadly perhaps, that the world is indeed a very diverse place. The brown-haired woman to my right stared in disbelief westward, her lips trembling, tears on her cheeks. She wasn't thinking about getting "f***ed up." She was grieving for those who no longer could.

But there was one thing that was physically surprising to me, and beyond the scope of my imagination. It was that, with all the buildings surrounding the site, with the highest to the north, east and south, it was if I was INSIDE something, like a temple, cathedral or sanctuary. What happened on September 11 in New York was literally IN New York; with walls echoing sounds like the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul's Cathedral. I could see the Twin Towers, their heads poking through the ceiling of New York, and I could hear sounds. Sounds unbearable.

Later, I spoke with a woman who witnessed nearly everything on September 11. She told me that she was in the shower of her 23rd floor apartment on Liberty (the southwest corner) when the first plane smashed into the North Tower. She confessed that that she didn't realize what was happening until she was drying herself off. She said she heard a roar of jet engines overhead (the second plane), and then, echoing throughout her house, the sound of thousands of people screaming. (I think I can hear that sound right now.) And I know it was one of the sounds I could still hear trembling in the faint murmurs of the buildings surrounding Ground Zero. The walls do speak. And they speak sorrowfully. (The woman, a Manhattan lawyer I fortuitously met on the train home, told me that she was never able to return to her apartment after closing the door to it just before the towers fell. It was essentially uninhabitable, at least for her. And she told me her entire harrowing story: the dust cloud filled with glass particles; the people screaming and pressing in the dark, the leaping into a boat on the Hudson, a thrown puppy, the vomiting, the uncertainty about more attacks, and so much more.)

But at the end of my too-short visit to Ground Zero, I could not shake from my mind the street sign, Church and Liberty. For Osama bin Laden attacked America - at least according to his own fatwa - because of its "Christian" infidelity (and its support and alliance with infidel Jews) and the liberty both synagogue and church provide. And it was America's liberties, our very freedoms, he turned against each of us: our freedom of travel, our easy borders, our freedom to build, and work in, tall buildings; our freedom to believe in God and liberty, or not. This is our vacant lot: that our virtues were turned against us by a man and men too impotent to build a nation, too weak to fill it with soldiers and weapons and wealth and commerce and hope; and too poor to attack us with something created by the superiority of their own vision. No, they attacked us with our own virtues, turned into weapons against us. They did not attack us with their virtues, but with their own spiteful vice. And for a moment, we staggered.

This morning, though far from New York, I still stand at the corner of Church and Liberty. I look up and understand: This is the World Trade Center. And I ask myself, "What world are you willing to trade?" My enemy has already asked that question, and he has shown me his answer. And now I give him mine: I am not trading.

Yesterday I walked through New York wearing a T-Shirt my wife gave to me two years ago. It reads on the front, in small print, "July 4, 1776: Remember Why." On the back, in quiet letters, it reads, "Live Free." I was amazed at how many people looked at my simple message as I passed through subway lines or strolled The Mall in Central Park. It is a good message.

Remember why.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

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