Cordoba in Manhattan

With Saudi financial support, a Muslim group under the name of the Cordoba Initiative is trying to build a great mosque in New York, just a few yards short of Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11. They say that they want to promote interfaith tolerance and dialogue. If the promoters are acting in good faith, either they are fools or insensitive to the pain of the victims (and those allied with them) of jihadist terror. Otherwise, they are liars who only try to gauge our capacity for endurance or measure our weakness.

In fact, isn’t it already highly suspicious that they chose a location with proximity to Ground Zero as ideal though the name of the initiative itself, “Cordoba,“ already says more than enough about their ideals? It is an unsustainable myth that the three religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, coexisted in peace in an Islamic Spain. Ten years after the Bin Laden attacks, it is very troubling that Cordoba remains a fantasy for remembering the good old days of Islam.

When Al Qaida refers to Spain as Al-Andalus and cries out for the reconstruction of the caliphate, many people perceive this as ideological rants or implausible rhetoric. To Bin Laden and his followers, what we believe or do not believe does not matter. They do believe, and very much so, indeed.

The attempt made by a group of Austrian Muslims to take the Cordoba Cathedral and return it to Islam as the mosque it once was, is not linked to what their fellow American believers seek to establish in the south of Manhattan. Nevertheless, both events have the same logic: to impose Islam on our land. Cordoba in Manhattan intends exactly that.