Daniel Greenfield, aka Sultan Knish, writes a passionate though entirely rational essay evoking memories of 9/11, and condemning the psychological sadism of Imam Rauf’s plan – defended by the unprincipled mainstream media – to build a mosque at Ground Zero.

The essay deserves to be read in full. Here is part of it:

Just the Facts, Imam. Here 3,000 Americans were murdered. For working in offices or visiting them. For being members of the NYPD or the PAPD or the FDNY. For putting on a uniform or a suit. For living their lives. And then the walls and floors and furniture around them burned. The papers in their hands burned. Their bodies burned. The ashes drifted down narrow streets. Streets where George Washington and his men once passed to visit Fraunces Tavern and toward Broadway where the Iranian hostages rode back in a ticker tape parade on their return.

Now the money that nourished their killers, will help erect a mosque. A temple of death by the ashes of the dead. And the media is outraged that we won’t allow it. That we won’t stand for it. The same media that stood and grinned while Muslims burned synagogues, churches and temples. That tells us that the Muslim terrorists who try to kill us are not really Muslims. Just going through a midlife crisis, picked up some PTSD from some bad coffee or was just having a bad day. Because we are not equal. On their farm, some animals are more equal than others. Some have the right to kill, others only have the right to be killed. Some have the right to build houses of worship, others have the right to build and to burn what others labor to build. Some have the right to be offensive, others only the right to be silent.

The dead of 9/11 are silent now. Or rather they have been silenced. As countless millions have before them were silenced. With flame and sword. In mass graves and at spearpoint. Tortured and mutilated. Torn apart with bombs. The dead cannot speak out against their murderers, but we can. The dead cannot protest, but we can. It is our duty to stand up and speak out. This is our place. Our land and our city. These are the streets where they tried to kill us. These are the streets where they will try again. To speak out is to defy those who would kill us and claim our cities as their own. Who would build monuments to their own victory over the ashes of our dead.

First they bomb. Now they occupy. We have lived through the bombing. And now we rise to defy the occupation.

We are not adverse critics of President Bush’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But we think the intervention should have ended when the tyrant was gone. We don’t believe that Iraq (any more than Afghanistan) can be transformed into a liberal democracy.

Americans will not change Iraqis, will never break their habits and reform their customs. In Arab and Islamic countries, torture of captives is routine. It’s a normalcy of the culture, and the US showed recognition of this by not even trying to interfere with the practice in Iraq.

When First World nations fought wars of conquest in the Third World to subdue native populations and establish rule over them, they hoped to civilize them – or at least the British did. It would take time and colonization, they thought. And here and there they succeeded to some extent. The United States never wanted even to try such empire-building. Americans want to go in, force a regime change, get the natives voting, and get out.

If they don’t get out in good time, they themselves will be damaged and vitiated.

Here’s part of the Telegraph’s take on the Iraq war documents released last week by Wikileaks:

The 391,831 reports, drawn up in many cases by US soldiers of relatively junior rank … provide a terrifying insight into the anarchy which enveloped Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed.

The reports reveal in terrifying detail how any hope of replacing the former dictatorship with a functioning democracy quickly became a faded dream as Iraq descended into an orgy of killing which reached every corner of the country.

In often nauseating detail, the files disclose the coalition commanders turned a blind eye to acts of torture and murder conducted on an industrial scale.

In one log it is reported that an Iraqi man was arrested by the police and shot in the leg by an officer. The report continues: “this detainee suffered abuse which amounted to cracked ribs, multiple lacerations and welts and bruises from being whipped with a large rod and hose across his back”. The report, with stunning understatement, adds that these acts amount to “reasonable suspicion of abuse” but the outcome was: “No further Investigation Required”.

The decision not to investigate was a direct order from the Pentagon as US officials sought to pass the management of security from the coalition to the Iraqis.

It was a cataclysmic error which probably lengthened the insurgency as the victims of abuse sought vengeance and directed their anger at US and British troops. How many dead coalition troops would be alive today had the Iraqi death squads been stopped?

Stopped how, when the tactic was to make friends with as many Iraqis as possible with a view to “winning hearts and minds”? Even if it were possible to stop the death squads and torture, would interfering with their traditional pleasures do anything but annoy them?

And now Americans, who – like the great British imperialists in the past – see it as their moral duty to improve the lives of backward peoples, are finding themselves blamed, and not unjustly, for the anguish and calamity that has attended their intervention.

Rudyard Kipling gave warning of the hazards of such foreign adventures. He wrote what is now an extremely politically incorrect poem about them. The first line alone would earn it a fatwa and a banning by National Public Radio.

Here are some lines from it:

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Send forth the best ye breed–

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

The savage wars of peace–

Fill full the mouth of Famine,

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

(The end for others sought)

Watch sloth and heathen folly

Bring all your hope to nought…

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go, make them with your living

And mark them with your dead…

Take up the White Man’s burden,

And reap his old reward–

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard…

Take up the White Man’s burden–

Ye dare not stoop to less–

Nor call too loud on Freedom

To cloak your weariness…

An underground site deep in the Zagrod mountains of western Iran, the Imam Ali Base where Shehab-3 medium-range missile launchers are stored, was struck last Tuesday, October 12, by three explosions.

According to the official report, 18 members of the Revolutionary Guards were killed and 14 were injured.

In its official statement on the incident, Tehran denied it was the result of “a terrorist attack” and claimed the explosion “was caused by a nearby fire that spread to the munitions storage area of the base.” In the same way, the regime went to great lengths to cover up the ravages wrought to their nuclear and military control systems by the Stuxnet virus – which is still at work.

Read more about it here at DebkaFile, whose own “military sources” report:

Iran’s missile arsenal and the Revolutionary Guards have … suffered a devastating blow. Worst of all, all their experts are at a loss to account for the assailants’ ability to penetrate one of Iran’s most closely guarded bases and reach deep underground to blow up the missile launchers.

The number of casualties is believed to be greater than the figure given out by Tehran.

The soldiers’ funerals took place Thursday, Oct. 14, at the same time as Ahmadinejad declared in South Lebanon that Israel was destined to “disappear”.

So far, what with Stuxnet and the explosions, it’s Iran that’s looking sick.

Continued from the post below, A flock of pigs:

For once, we say, Robert Fisk is telling the truth in this report on the victimization of women in Islam. We’ll qualify that as mostly the truth. He can’t resist accusing Christians and Hindus of committing the same crimes, though he cites no incidents to bear him out. Still, the report as a whole amounts to a strong – and from him astonishing – denunciation of  Islam.

Here’s a part of it:

Iraqi Kurds, Palestinians in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey appear to be the worst offenders but media freedoms in these countries may over-compensate for the secrecy which surrounds “honour” killings in Egypt – which untruthfully claims there are none – and other Middle East nations in the Gulf and the Levant. But honour crimes long ago spread to Britain, Belgium, Russia and Canada and many other nations. Security authorities and courts across much of the Middle East have connived in reducing or abrogating prison sentences for the family murder of women, often classifying them as suicides to prevent prosecutions.

It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes. How should one react to a man – this has happened in both Jordan and Egypt – who rapes his own daughter and then, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the “honour” of his family? Or the Turkish father and grandfather of a 16-year-old girl, Medine Mehmi, in the province of Adiyaman, who was buried alive beneath a chicken coop in February for “befriending boys”? Her body was found 40 days later, in a sitting position and with her hands tied. [See our post, In the name of Allah the merciful, February 4, 2010]

Or Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, 13, who in Somalia in 2008, in front of a thousand people, was dragged to a hole in the ground – all the while screaming, “I’m not going – don’t kill me” – then buried up to her neck and stoned by 50 men for adultery? After 10 minutes, she was dug up, found to be still alive and put back in the hole for further stoning. Her crime? She had been raped by three men and, fatally, her family decided to report the facts to the Al-Shabab militia that runs Kismayo. Or the Al-Shabab Islamic “judge” in the same country who announced the 2009 stoning to death of a woman – the second of its kind the same year – for having an affair? Her boyfriend received a mere 100 lashes.

And so it goes on, atrocity after atrocity: women electrocuted, burnt to death, buried alive, raped as punishment by judicial order, stoned to death, disfigured by acid and knives …

The headline of the story, for which Fisk himself is probably not responsible, suggests that this is happening as a “crimewave”. No, it is not. Women are subjected to this by order of the holy books of Islam, by the Prophet Muhammad, by fourteen hundred years of custom among his followers. This is the way of Islam.

We’ve seen three pigs flapping their way into the sky in the last few weeks.

The first became airborne when Barney Frank, who had protected the corrupt twins Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the flaming ardor of an angel at the gate of Eden, suddenly declared that they should be abolished. (See our post Gasp, August 19, 2010.)

The next swine soared up a few days ago when Fidel Castro, Communist dictator of miserable Cuba for over 50 years, announced that Communist economics don’t work. (See our post Oops! immediately below.)

Now we’ve spotted another.

Robert Fisk has spent a lifetime in journalism defending Arabs and Islam, and Palestinians in particular. He lied consistently about Israel (to my certain knowledge as I was witness to the same events during the Israeli intervention in Lebanon that he reported in 1982 and 1983 – JB.]  Now he’s suddenly discovered that Islam oppresses, tortures and murders women. We’re glad that he has ferreted out this obscure fact, that he is appalled, and that he is publishing cases, descriptions, and the names of victims. We applaud him for it. But he’s the last person we would have expected to write this report.

Harrowing though it is, it needs to be read. This time Robert Fisk, the veteran liar, is telling the truth. …

Continued in the post above, The atrocity that is Islam.

Obama has stopped the prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, “a major al-Qaeda figure”, who coordinated the lethal attack on the USS Cole.

October 10 will be the 10th anniversary of the bombing.

The Washington Post reports:

The attack …  killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.

In a filing this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department said that “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future.”

The statement, tucked into a motion to dismiss a petition by Nashiri’s attorneys, suggests that the prospect of further military trials for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has all but ground to a halt, much as the administration’s plan to try the accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in federal court has stalled.

Why  has the prosecution of al-Nashiri been dropped?

We hear pundits on TV saying that it is because the US “needs Yemen”.

What for?

If  Yemen is a country that requires terrorist murderers to be acquitted, why does the US have anything whatsoever to do with it?

Oh, we remember now: Yemen is an Islamic country, and the president of the United States wants the country he leads to submit, submit, submit to Islam.

The surge worked! Victory for the US-led coalition forces! The last combat brigade departs, leaving behind them a peaceful unified country governed by a democratically elected parliament.

Why spoil the hour of triumph? Obama wants his victory, claims credit for it even though he opposed the surge when Bush launched it.

Only thing is – tell it not in the American news media – no sooner had the last dust-cloud dispersed behind the last huge uncomfortable transport vehicle carrying the combat troops over the border into Kuwait from where they were to fly home, than murderous explosions broke out all over the country. It was a celebratory mass-killing, a fiesta of death, as terrorists let the country and the world know they were still there, still active. It was also a declaration that the victory, the peace, the solemn rituals of democracy, the visions of unity and co-operation were only such stuff as dreams are made of and will dissolve into thin air.

Newsmax reports:

Bombers and gunmen launched an apparently coordinated string of attacks against Iraqi government forces on Wednesday, killing at least 43 people a day after the number of U.S. troops fell below 50,000 for the first time since the start of the war.

The violence highlighted persistent fears about the ability of Iraqi troops to protect their own country as the American military starts to leave.

There were no claims of responsibility for the spate of attacks. But their scale and reach, from one end of the country to the other, underscored insurgent efforts to prove their might against security forces and political leaders who are charged with the day-to-day running and stability of Iraq.

The deadliest attack came in Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, where a suicide bomber blew up a car inside a security barrier between a police station and the provincial government’s headquarters. Police and hospital officials said 16 people were killed, all but one of them policemen. An estimated 90 people were wounded.

An eerily similar attack came hours earlier in a north Baghdad neighborhood, where a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb in a parking lot behind a police station.

Fifteen people were killed in that attack, including six policemen. Police and hospital officials said another 58 were wounded [including 7 children] in the explosion that left a crater three yards wide and trapped people beneath the rubble of felled houses nearby. …

Since Iraq’s March 7 elections failed to produce a clear winner, U.S. officials have feared that competing political factions could spur widespread violence. …

U.S. and Iraqi officials alike acknowledge growing frustration throughout the nation, nearly six months after the vote, and say that politically motivated violence could undo security gains made during the past few years. …

From the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk to the holy Shiite shrine town of Karbala, scattered bombings killed and wounded scores more. …

They included bombs in Muqdadiyah and Tikrit, car bombs in Kirkuk, Iskandariyah, Dujail, Karbala, Basra, and a suicide bombing in Fallujah.

And that is only the beginning.

The UN does an enormous amount of harm. It would have to do an enormous amount of good just to balance its moral books, but does it do or has it ever done any good at all? If so, we’ve missed it.

Whatever the noble intentions behind its creation, its General Assembly is nothing better than a grand coven where evil-wishers chant curses on the United States and Israel. Its Security Council occasionally passes resolutions, of dubious value at best, that theoretically have the force of law but cannot be enforced. Its plethora of commissions and agencies send their devils posting about, going to and fro on the earth and driving up and down on it, doing wrong on tax-free wages.

And who pays pays the most for it? Why, the United States of course.

From the Heritage Foundation:

The U.S. has been the largest financial supporter of the U.N. since the organization’s founding in 1945. The U.S. is currently assessed 22 percent of the U.N. regular budget and more than 27 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget. In dollar terms, the Administration’s budget for FY 2011 requested $516.3 million for the U.N. regular budget and more than $2.182 billion for the peacekeeping budget.

That includes cash for UNIFIL, the organization that assists Hizbullah (see here and here), and for Moroccan rapists sent to keep peace for the UN in the Ivory Coast (see here).

The U.S. also provides assessed financial contributions to other U.N. organizations and voluntary contributions to many more U.N. organizations. …

The OMB [Office of Management and Budget] released its report on FY 2009 U.S. contributions to the U.N. in June 2010. The report revealed that the U.S. provided $6.347 billion to the U.N. system in FY 2009, including over $4 billion from the State Department, over $1.7 billion from USAID, over $245 million from the Department of Agriculture, and tens of millions more from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Energy.

This is an all-time record in U.S. financial contributions to the U.N. system but, considering recent budget trends in the U.N., the record is likely to be broken in FY 2010.

Claudia Rosett writes about the UN’s waste, fraud, and abuse. She combs through such reports as can be winkled out of it and finds these instances among others:

In the realms of UN peacekeeping, with its more than $8 billion annual budget, for which U.S. taxpayers alone fork out roughly $2 billion per year, check out the UN’s nearly $1 billion annual program for peacekeeping air operations. In an August, 2009 report, the UN’s own internal auditors noted that participation by senior management was “inadequate,” current staffing levels were “insufficient,” time of effective bidding on air charter services was “insufficient,” provisions in air charter agreements were “unclear” and some vendor registration was “improper.”

It takes a certain amount of determination to slog through the UN jargon, in which an executive summary of “not adequate” is often code for outright abuse or screaming failure, if you slog on to the details of the report. But in these reports, which cover only a sampling of the UN’s sprawling global system, the problems roll on and on. In corners that rarely receive attention from the media, they range from poorly documented lump-sum handling of noncompetitively-sourced travel arrangements for the UN mission in East Timor (UNMIT), to the UN’s disregard of its own rules in choosing a director for the UN Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD), headquartered in Japan. …

When the Oil-for-Food scandal [UN/Iraq, see here] broke big time in 2004, the UN refused to release its internal audits of the program even to governments of member states, including its chief donor, the U.S. After a showdown with congressional investigators, the internal audits were finally tipped out in early 2005, via the UN inquiry led by Paul Volcker. They provided damning insights into UN administrative abuses and derelictions that helped feed the gusher of Oil-for-Food corruption. Those reports might have been useful in heading off the damage of that UN blowout, had they been released to the public as they were produced, instead of being exposed later as an embarrassing piece of the UN’s self-serving coverup. …

The UN delenda est!

The UN must be destroyed!

Obama says that Islam has contributed much to the United States.

An editorial in the Washington Times disagrees:

Mr. Obama has used the occasion of Ramadan to rewrite U.S. history and give Islam a prominence in American annals that it has not earned.

In this year’s greeting, Mr. Obama said the rituals of Ramadan “remind us of the principles that we hold in common and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality. And here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”

That Islam has had a major role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings may come as a surprise to Muslim women. Young Afghan girls who are having acid thrown in their faces on the way to school might want to offer their perspectives. That Islam is “known” for diversity and racial equality is also a bit of a reach. This certainly does not refer to religious diversity, which is nonexistent in many Muslim-majority states. …

Most puzzling is the president’s claim that “Islam has always been part of America.” Islam had no influence on the origins and development of the United States. It contributed nothing to early American political culture, art, literature, music or any other aspect of the early nation.

Throughout most of American history, the Muslim world was perceived as remote, alien and belligerent. Perhaps the president was thinking about the Barbary Pirates and their role in the founding of the U.S. Navy, or Andrew Jackson’s dispatch of frigates against Muslim pirates in Sumatra in the 1830s. Maybe he was recalling Rutherford B. Hayes’ 1880 statement regarding Morocco on “the necessity, in accordance with the humane and enlightened spirit of the age, of putting an end to the persecutions, which have been so prevalent in that country, of persons of a faith other than the Moslem, and especially of the Hebrew residents of Morocco.” Or Grover Cleveland’s 1896 comment on the continuing massacre of Armenian Christians: “We have been afflicted by continued and not infrequent reports of the wanton destruction of homes and the bloody butchery of men, women and children, made martyrs to their profession of Christian faith. … It so mars the humane and enlightened civilization that belongs to the close of the nineteenth century that it seems hardly possible that the earnest demand of good people throughout the Christian world for its corrective treatment will remain unanswered.”

The editorial concludes with a horror story:

It also is customary in the United States to search for obscure contributions made by in-vogue minority groups as a feel-good way of promoting inclusion. One of the earliest Muslims to come to the United States was a 17th-century Egyptian named Norsereddin, who settled in the Catskills and was described by one chronicler as “haughty, morose, unprincipled, cruel and dissipated.” Spurned by the princess of an Indian tribe that had befriended him, he managed through a subterfuge to poison her. He was later run down by the betrayed Indians, who burned him alive. It is not the kind of tale that makes it into politically correct history books.

How do Muslims who live in the US feel about the country Obama thinks they have helped to build and strengthen and glorify?

On May 19, 2010, some American Muslims debated whether they should be loyal to America.

You can read the pros and cons here at an interesting site called Muslims for a Safe America.

The cons:

1. American Muslims have no special relationship with (or obligation to) America. American-born Muslims have given no “implicit pledge” to be loyal to America. The “Oath of Allegiance” taken by naturalized American citizens is just a formality to gain citizenship; most people who take the “Oath of Allegiance” don’t even remember the words they recited. A Muslim’s true covenant (or pledge) is with God.

2. American Muslims can be loyal to both God and country, but only if that country is [ie if America becomes] an Islamic state, governed by Islamic law (Shariah), not a country that rejects God’s law and follows man-made laws.

3. American Muslims must be loyal to the worldwide Muslim community, not to Americans of other faiths who have rejected Islam and repeatedly elected political leaders who have caused great suffering in the Muslim world. God says, “O ye who believe! Take not my enemies and yours as friends (or protectors), offering them (your) love, even though they have rejected the Truth that has come to you, and have (on the contrary) driven out the Prophet and yourselves (from your homes), (simply) because ye believe in Allah your Lord!”

4. [An example to be followed.] Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) instructed a Muslim, Naim bin Masud, to place his loyalty to the Muslim community over his loyalty to his tribe. The tribe of Banu Ghatafan and its allies besieged the Muslims of Medina (in what came to be known as the Battle of the Trench). During that siege, Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) learned that Naim, a prominent member of Banu Ghatafan, had secretly become Muslim. The Prophet asked Naim to feed false information to his tribe, Banu Ghatafan, and its allies. Naim agreed. Naim’s false information helped create distrust and break the alliance between Banu Ghatafan and its allies, contributing to their failure to defeat the Muslims.

5. America and Islam have contradictory agendas and priorities, and they have different visions for the world. American Muslims cannot simultaneously support both sets of agendas, priorities, and visions.

6. American Muslims who loyally pay their taxes are funding whatever evil the American government does.

7. America is dar-ul-harb (the land of war), because America is at war with Muslims in various countries, oppresses Muslims in various countries (including in America), and seeks to dominate the Muslim world. America is dar-ul-kufr (the land of disbelief), because America has rejected Islam and actively opposes the establishment of a Caliphate in the Muslim world.

Nothing is said about a count of votes, so we don’t know which side had the greater support.

Imam Rauf, who insists on building a mosque next to Ground Zero (a triumphal monument to the Muslim mass-murderers 0f 9/11), is trying to hide the connection of his “Cordoba Initiative” with Iran.

Anne Bayefsky writes:

A Cordoba-Iranian connection? …

More questions have arisen about the attempt to build a mosque adjacent to Ground Zero, as part of the so-called Cordoba Initiative. In particular, why has the Cordoba website just removed a photograph of Iranian Mohammad Javad Larijani, secretary-general of the High Council for Human Rights in Iran? Is the move an attempted cover-up of their Iranian connections?

Two weeks ago the Cordoba Initiative website featured a photograph of the project’s chairman, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, and Iranian Mohammad Javad Larijani at an event that the Initiative sponsored in Malaysia in 2008. This week, the photograph, which appears below, has disappeared.

Larijani was the Iranian representative who defended Iran’s abysmal human rights record before the UN Human Rights Council in February and June of this year. Among other things, Larijani told the Council: “Torture is one thing and punishment is another thing. … This is a conceptual dispute. Some forms of these punishments should not be considered torture according to our law.” By which he meant flogging, amputation, stoning … which are all part of Iranian legal standards. …

The Iranian connection to the launch of Cordoba House may go beyond a relationship between Rauf and Larijani. The Cordoba Initiative lists one of its three major partners as the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations. The Alliance has its roots in the Iranian-driven “Dialogue Among Civilizations,” the brainchild of former Iranian President Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami. Khatami is now a member of the High-level Group which “guides the work of the Alliance.” His personal presidential qualifications include the pursuit of nuclear weapons, a major crackdown on Iranian media, and rounding up and imprisoning Jews on trumped-up charges of spying. …

In addition, a Weekly Standard article in July suggested that the idea of building an Islamic memorial in lower Manhattan may have originated back in 2003 with two Iranian brothers: M. Jafar “Amir” Mahallati, who served as ambassador of the Iranian Islamic Republic to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989, and M. Hossein Mahallati.

Also pictured at the same Cordoba-sponsored meeting is U.S. representative to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Sada Cumber. The meeting was part of the Initiative’s so-called “Shariah Index Project,” a plan to rank and measure the “Islamicity” of a state or “how well … nations comply in practice with this Islamic legal benchmark of an Islamic State.” …

*

The State Department has assured America that Imam Rauf will not use his tax-payer funded tour of oil-rich Arab states to raise money for his Ground Zero project.

Absolutely not! The State Dapartment would never permit him to do such a thing. Of course not. How could you suspect otherwise? If you even suggest it, you must be guilty of Islamophobia.

From the Washington Times:

Mr. Rauf is scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar, the usual stops for Gulf-based fundraising. The State Department defends the five-country tour saying that Mr. Rauf is “a distinguished Muslim cleric,” but surely the government could find another such figure in the United States who is not seeking millions of dollars to fund a construction project that has so strongly divided America.

By funding the trip so soon after New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission gave the go-ahead to demolish the building on the proposed mosque site, the State Department is creating the appearance that the U.S. government is facilitating the construction of this shameful structure. It gives Mr. Rauf not only access but imprimatur to gather up foreign cash. And because Mr. Rauf has refused to reveal how he plans to finance his costly venture, the American public is left with the impression it will be a wholly foreign enterprise. This contradicts the argument that a mosque is needed in that part of New York City to provide services for a burgeoning Muslim population. If so many people need the mosque so badly, presumably they could figure out a way to pay for it themselves.

Americans also may be surprised to learn that the United States has been an active participant in mosque construction projects overseas. In April, U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania Alfonso E. Lenhardt helped cut the ribbon at the 12th-century Kizimkazi Mosque, which was refurbished with assistance from the United States under a program to preserve culturally significant buildings. The U.S. government also helped save the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque in Cairo, which dates back to 642. The mosque’s namesake was the Muslim conqueror of Christian Egypt, who built the structure on the site where he had pitched his tent before doing battle with the country’s Byzantine rulers. For those who think the Ground Zero Mosque is an example of “Muslim triumphalism” glorifying conquest, the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque is an example of such a monument – and one paid for with U.S. taxpayer funds.

The mosques being rebuilt by the United States are used for religious worship, which raises important First Amendment questions. U.S. taxpayer money should not be used to preserve and promote Islam, even abroad. …

For example, our government rebuilt the Al Shuhada Mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, expecting such benefits as “stimulating the economy, enhancing a sense of pride in the community, reducing opposition to international relief organizations operating in Fallujah, and reducing incentives among young men to participate in violence or insurgent groups.” But Section 205.1(d) of title 22 of the Code of Federal Regulations prohibits USAID funds from being used for the rehabilitation of structures to the extent that those structures are used for “inherently religious activities.” It is impossible to separate religion from a mosque; any such projects will necessarily support Islam.

The State Department is either wittingly or unwittingly using tax money to support Mr. Rauf’s efforts to realize his dream of a supersized mosque blocks away from the sacred ground of the former World Trade Center, which was destroyed by Islamic fanaticism.

We are not conspiracy theorists. Generally we believe in the cock-up theory of government and history. But we cannot help catching a whiff of conspiracy steaming up from the ingredients in this cauldron: The Cordoba Initiative, the Arab States, Iran, the State Department, the Obama Administration’s “Muslim outreach” program …

Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe it’s just a nice warm brew of inter-faith nourishment and sweet tolerance, spiced with religious diversity.

How does it smell to you?