NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Rauf considered American history a narrative of progressive triumph over such prejudices. After Pakistani jihadis murdered the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl for being Jewish, Rauf delivered a moving address to the Upper West Side's B'nai Jeshurun congregation. He told Pearl's grieving father, Judea, "Today I am a Jew. I have always been one, Mr. Pearl." 

"We strive for a 'new Córdoba,'" Rauf wrote, "a time when Jews, Christians, Muslims and all other faith traditions will live together in peace, enjoying a renewed vision of what the good society can look like."

Rauf had been preaching twelve blocks from the World Trade Center since 1985. He located his new Córdoba there. At 45 Park Place was a mid-nineteenth-century building left vacant after undercarriage debris from the doomed planes cratered several floors of what was then a Burlington Coat Factory. Aided by Sharif El- Gamal, a real estate developer and self-described "shark," Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, purchased the property for $4.85 million in July 2009. They planned to restore it as the thirteen-story Cordoba House, which would feature a community center, pool, restaurant, performance space, mosque and culinary school. Rauf conceptualized it as a Muslim version of the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish space on the Upper East Side that plays a cherished role in the intellectual life of New York City. The site of the new Córdoba struck Rauf as poetic, even sublime. It was a chance, he said, to send "the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11."

But to Rauf's horror, several in New York's 9/11 survivor community did not believe the project was sending a different statement at all. When Khan unveiled Cordoba House to a Manhattan community board's finance committee early in May 2010, Rosemary Cain, mother of fallen 9/11 firefighter George Cain, said it was "atrocious that anyone would even consider allowing them to build a mosque near the World Trade Center." Khan, shaken, explained to the committee that she and her husband felt "an obligation as Muslims and Americans to be part of the rebuilding of downtown Manhattan."

Fanning the flames was Pamela Geller, who blogged that a "monster mosque" was coming to Ground Zero, an "insulting and humiliating...victory lap" celebrating terrorism. A veteran of the business side of the ruling-class broadsheet New York Observer, Geller was radicalized by 9/11. She told New York Jewish Week that she was embarrassed not to have known who it was that attacked America, so she turned to authors and journalists who revealed that the culprit was Islam. Geller was also a birther, though not one tied to any particular theory of Barack Obama's origin; she once published a reader's theory positing that his real father was Malcolm X. Her ally against Cordoba was Robert Spencer, whose books lined the FBI library at Quantico. Spencer claimed Rauf was erecting a "victory mosque." Together, they created a pressure group called Stop Islamization of America. Asked by The Washington Post if he was being deliberately provocative, Spencer replied, "Why not? It's fun."

Soon the New York Post ran columns about "mosque madness" generating anger from "fed-up New Yorkers." Fox News crusaded against it. By the end of May protesters holding signs reading SHOW RESPECT FOR 9/11. NO MOSQUE! packed a four-hour-long public hearing on Cordoba House. "This is humiliating that you would build a shrine to the very ideology that inspired the attacks of 9/11!" Geller lectured. Rauf, who had the support of New York's power structure, was left pleading that they had "condemned terrorism in the most unequivocal terms." El-Gamal described the anger at the meeting as "the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life." [...]

As thousands filled the streets on the ninth anniversary of 9/11 to denounce the Ground Zero Mosque, local Muslims rode out a terrifying moment. Geller led a protest at the site featuring signs objecting to "Obama's Mosque." One of the speakers was Geert Wilders, a Dutch legislator and Islam's premiere persecutor in Europe, whom Geller introduced as a "modern-day Churchill." He urged the protesters to "draw the line" against Rauf, "so that New York, rooted in Dutch values, will never become New Mecca." Another speaker, by teleconference, was Bush's U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, who Geller enthused spoke "bluntly and unequivocally" about the "affront to American values" the "mosque" represented. One protester told Time it was "the first stage of Saudi Wahhabist takeover of the United States." He might have been more extreme than most, but by then, a CBS poll recorded 71 percent of Americans objecting to the "mosque."

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