Imagine the American response in 1950 if the Japanese government sought to erect a shrine to its World War II Emperor in Pearl Harbor, right next to the sunken wreckage of the USS Arizona.

Would “outrage” be strong enough to describe the response?

Now fast forward to 2010.

Less than nine years after the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history, an imam who blames America for the 9/11 attack wants to construct a 13 story, $100 million dollar mosque and Islamic center 600 feet from “Ground Zero.”

And he wants to unveil it to the world on September 11, 2011 – the ten year anniversary of the greatest jihadist atrocity ever perpetrated against America on its own soil.

News and blog sites across the country are heating up over this.  ACT! for America, the nation’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to combating radical Islam and global jihad, today launched a national petition opposing the mosque, which says in part:

We are opposed to the grotesque symbolism represented by the building of this mosque at “ground zero…”  We are deeply disturbed by the insensitivity to the families of the victims of the 9/11 jihadist attack exhibited by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his supporters.

As a measure of the public’s outrage , over 5,000 people had signed the petition in the first three hours.

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By Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer

A massive fifteen-story mosque and Islamic Center going up in what was once the shadow of the World Trade Center claims to offer “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.” The Center organizers, the America Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), have worked hard in the media to portray themselves as Islamic moderates working for peace on the exact spot where their belligerent coreligionists perpetrated murder and mayhem in the name of their religion. But the words and deeds of the leader of the effort, the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, suggests a more ominous reality: Abdul Rauf is a master of deceptive, Orwellian use of language, manifesting a deep contempt for non-Muslims and full accord with the supremacist goals of the 9/11 hijackers.

So anxious were they to secure the location at Ground Zero that a Muslim real estate company paid $4.85 million in cash for the building, with part coming from Abdul Rauf’s other Islamic group, the Cordoba Initiative. It is unnerving – the deliberate speed and anxiousness that the leader of the American Society for Muslim Advancement has demonstrated in working to open a mosque at the gaping wound of Ground Zero. He claims that it will heal that wound. But how will it do that? How will a mosque, the place where jihadis go for spiritual sustenance, at Ground Zero help stop jihad terrorism? Even the name of the initiative – Cordoba – speaks volumes. While Islamic Spain is held up today as a proto-multiculturalist paradise, in reality non-Muslims there suffered under the discrimination prescribed in Islamic law for dhimmis, non-believers who were subjugated as inferiors and denied equality of rights.

ASMA seems to have deliberately sought a connection to Ground Zero for their new mosque site. Muslims are already conducting daily prayers on the site, an old Burlington Coat Factory outlet where, according to Abdul Rauf, “a piece of the wreckage fell.”

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