Does anyone have a good solution for how you would stop the mosque from being built? Given that our politicians have failed us in so many ways over the years, and they are already drunk with too much power, I would not want them to have the power to stop any church from being built. I also believe building a mosque there is a symbol on conquest for Islam over us "infidels". Islam stands against everything that is American. Yet being American also means all the cooks and nuts are free to believe in whatever religion they want to believe, to peacefully assemble, and to have free speech even if it they call for our destruction.

I'm not really sure what would be the right or constitutionally sound American way to stop a mosque at ground zero. Off the top of my head I say we raise so much money that the current owner can't resist selling it to us and then we put in a Hooters Restaurant in its place.

I really don't have a good solution. Any ideas?

Yep.

But I'd be banned if I posted it.

Open a pork BBQ restaurant next to the proposed site on one side, and a strip club on the other side?


 

I absolutely don't care.

Welcome to America, yeah it sucks about the mosque but there isn't shit you can do.

You're right. There's no way that any laws can be passed to prevent it.

If a bunch of wacko nutjobs decided they wanted to "take the law into their own hands", I suppose it could be prevented.

Or you could try my approach: not give a damn what someone builds on their own private property as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else or deprive anyone else of their liberty.

Correct, nor should there be.  Property rights are property rights.

I think there already is both those things about a block away.

Yes, you liken it to putting a German Cultural Center near Auschwitz in 1955 or a statue of the Emperor of Japan in Pearl Harbor or Nanking...(Emperor =  God).

One could try to convince the guy behind the mosque that building it would have the exact opposite effect of the "bridge building" he touts.

I'd hate to have a mosque near my work or home because of what they stand for. Also  looking at other countries such as Holland, where mosques are spreading like wildfire, I wonder how long until the most common name for a baby in USA will also be Mohammed as it is now in Holland? How long should something akin to a cancer grow that ultimately wants to destroy your country? I wonder if our founding fathers ever contemplated such a scenario?

You can't stop Muslims from building a mosque at ground zero, it is totally unacceptable to American standards of political correctness to oppose our enemies. We must cower to Muslim supremacy as we must cower to all other PC supremacy, that is the way of America now, you and I are WRONG and our enemies who want to kill us are right, that's all we need to know.

probably the easiest way would be for us to abandon the concept of private property rights.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but could that also not be seen simply as apathy? How close do we have to get to imposing Sharia law, when it will impact how we live our lives, to start to give a damn?

LOL. I'm starting to think perhaps our founding fathers never thought people would get so mind numb to do what we are doing now under the god of PC.

Call in a favor from Don Carleoni.

You know, I had my response typed out and will defer to your wisdom in this matter.

So you are in favor of just tearing up the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

You can only be conquered when you give up. Is that what you have done. Give UP?


It's really no difference then allowing some controversial group to hold a march. My goodness if we can allow Fred Phelps and his kooky followers we can deal with this.

Should it be built. Yes. If not then everything we have fought for over these past 200+ years was all for naught.

You can't stop it unless you're willing to break the law and ignore the constitution. You can apply pressure, they are starting to dig up dirt on the players in this farce and more questions are popping up so we will see.

Was this tongue in cheek, or are you literally convinced that Sharia law is close to being enforced in America?  I can't tell any more.



 

You don't stop it.



It SHOULD be built.



You build a suitable office-tower and/or memorial at the actual ground zero location (which the 'mosque' is a few blocks away from), that is suitably impressive enough, and no one will notice an 'Islamic Center' stuffed in between old retail buildings & associated run-down NYC streets....
 

Why don't we just wait until it is completed and then see if someone will fly a lear jet into it.

Irony...... now that is some funny shit

I read an article a few days ago and a lot of the Building Trades in NYC are pledging not to work on the project if it actually does break ground. The Unions are silent on it but their members have no desire to work on it. A lot of the trades worked on the recovery effort and are very opposed to the issue of the Mosque.

that would be one plus

A little of both.... Who would have guessed 20 years ago that the most common name in Holland today would be Mohammed? At the rate things are going now, where might we be in USA in 20 years? Look at birth rates and it's not far fetched to think your kids or grandkids may end up living in a country much different than the one we grew up in.

short, and oh-so to the point...

All I can say is WOW. I can't wait to see how this is relevant to the building of the Mosque, or even relevant to the US.

Rift Imperils Ground Zero Mosque
          Buzz up!44 votes ShareretweetEmailPrintAsra Q. Nomani Asra Q. Nomani – Mon Aug 30, 1:49 am ET
NEW YORK – New revelations about the owner of the mosque building near ground zero could mean a split between him and the project's influential imam, making it unlikely to ever get built.

Sharif El-Gamal, 37, the owner of the building at the center of the storm over the construction of a "ground zero mosque," is a quintessential American story, a man who went from waiting tables in New York's A-list restaurants to buying and selling properties.

But new revelations are emerging that present a very different narrative. And it could lead to a split between the forces behind the mosque.

Court records from Florida to New York state reveal that Sharif and his younger brother, Samir "Sammy" El-Gamal, 35, a partner with him in his company SoHo Properties, both have a history replete with intersections with tax and debt issues, dating back to at least 1994 and continuing into this year. In one case, a NYPD officer arrested Sharif in 1994 for “promoting prostitution.” (He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of disorderly conduct.) In another instance, Sharif told a court he didn't hit a tenant from whom his brother and he were trying to collect back rent. He said to police, the tenant's "face could have run into my hand."


I now don't think the mosque will be built at the location staked out near ground zero.

The New York state licensing services division, which oversees real-estate agents, is investigating Sharif and his company, SoHo Properties. "We have an open investigation based on a complaint," the spokesman, Joel Barkin, said. According to the complaint, according to people familiar with the case, Taylor Lukof, a 20-something partner at Toro Trading LLC, a New York firm, gave Sharif and his brother $6,200 that was supposed to be kept in escrow for an apartment. When the apartment didn't come through, Lukof asked for the money back, the people familiar with the complaint said, and was promised the money, but he hasn't received any money. Jack Billelo, district manager at the licensing services division, is overseeing the investigation. Lukof declined to comment. Sharif has declined to be interviewed.

After tracking Sharif's finances and talking to acquaintances about his rough-and-tumble business style, I now don't think the mosque will be built at the location staked out near ground zero. According to people familiar with the mosque project, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, a community leader, were blindsided by the revelations about Sharif, making a partnership unlikely. Moreover, Sharif’s domineering personality troubles them because it doesn't fit into the slow, methodical, and even boring work of building a nonprofit.

I expect that Rauf and Khan will gracefully bow out of this project near ground zero, lead an interfaith community effort to build an Islamic center elsewhere, and welcome Sharif and his family in the congregation with open arms. To me, that’s the best solution out of this political—and now PR—debacle. I'm also certain that somewhere in there the businessman in Sharif will see a profit.



Earlier this summer, I left the humble Jersey City home of Rauf and Khan, with my son, Shibli, 7, believing in their vision. But, over the next weeks, I got a funny feeling about the project. Four years ago, I had started an organization with three other Muslim moms, Muslims for Peace. Sharif had asked one of the moms if the new mosque effort could raise money using Muslims for Peace’s nonprofit status. That didn't feel right to me, nor did the insistence on the location near ground zero, amid so much opposition and hurt. I recused myself from the mosque effort. With conspiracy theories circulating, I wrote a story that Muslims for Peace had raised less than $9,000 for the mosque. The Muslims for Peace fundraising effort was later nixed because Sharif felt betrayed by the public disclosure, and I stepped down from the organization (though I’m still a Muslim for peace, lowercase).

The New York Post reported yesterday that Sharif and SoHo Properties are "tax deadbeats," owing $224,270.77 in back property taxes on the site, and that a Sharif company “failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July.” (An El-Gamal spokesman told the Post the taxes had been paid.)

On the trail of the El-Gamal brothers is a Sarasota, Florida, private investigator, Bill Warner, whose interest got piqued when he started getting phone calls last month from New Yorkers saying that the whole story about Sharif wasn't out. Warner is posting his findings on his website and sharing it with the media. He provided me with leads that allowed me to see more clearly the trail of troubles that lies in Sharif's wake.

• Asra Q. Nomani: The Mosque is the New Balloon Boy• The Money Behind the MosqueThe El-Gamal family's immigrant journey is like that of many other American-Muslim families. The patriarch, Mohamed A. El-Gamal, an Egyptian, arrived in the U.S. during the late 1960s or early 1970s with a first wave of Muslim professionals and graduate students. According to media reports, he married a Catholic woman of Polish descent. Blond and blue-eyed, Sharif was born in Brooklyn two days before Christmas 1973. His younger brother, Samir, was born in the summer of 1974.

The family hop-scotched between the U.S., Liberia, and Egypt, and Sharif graduated from New Hyde Park High School in Nassau County, Long Island.

According to friends, the brothers ran with a fast crowd in their twenties. Sharif waited tables at the posh restaurant Serafina, while Sammy waited tables at Tao. For a short while, Sharif worked as a waiter at Michael Jordan’s, named after former basketball star. But, according to people familiar with that restaurant, he was fired within two months for arriving reeking of alcohol, among other things. This is around when Sharif started acquiring a criminal record, say people familiar with his life.

This past weekend, capturing this period of Sharif's life, the Daily News ran a headline, "Park51 developer Sharif El-Gamal has a history of run-ins with the law," including pleading guilty in 1994, 1998, and 1999 to disorderly conduct in Manhattan, as well as pleading guilty to disorderly conduct in 1990, a DWI in 1992, and attempted petit larceny in 1993 in Nassau County, N.Y.

According to Broward County court records, on March 3, 1999, Hollywood, Florida, police arrested Sammy, then 25, for "theft/to deprive," a misdemeanor. Later that year, Sammy pleaded guilty, and Judge Sharon Zeller fined him $143 and required him to attend a "substance-abuse through education" course. Just two years ago, during the summer of 2008, the court filed "financial obligation suspension" papers for Sammy's failure to pay his fine.

Neither Sammy nor Sharif responded to a request seeking comment.

After the 9/11 attacks, Sharif told New York magazine that "he just felt like praying." Sharif first started attending Manhattan Masjid, known in the community as "the Salafi mosque," for its adherence to a rigid, puritanical interpretation of Islam, espoused, among other things, on its website. Then, he discovered Masjid al-Nur, or "Mosque of Light," where Rauf preaches. It's nicknamed "the Sufi mosque" by congregants.

Career-wise, Sharif was heading into real estate, collecting commissions off rental leases. He was no big shot, and really never has been, building just a small portfolio of property. In late 2003, he created a website, sohoproperties.com. The three partners were Sharif, Sammy, and Nour Mousa, the young nephew of Amr Mousa, secretary general of the Arab League, a relationship that would later become a lightning rod for critics of the mosque.

On September 10, 2005, New York police arrested Sharif for alleged assault on a Manhattan renter, Mark Vassilieve, when Sammy tried to convince Vassilieve to pay his rent. The charges were dropped when Vassilieve filed a civil suit, which Sharif settled.

On January 24, 2006, according to court records, Nino and Nicola Gaudio won a judgment of $3,300 against Sammy, as well as permission to evict him from property they owned. On February 1, 2006, they won another $3,300 judgment, and on April 6, 2006, N&S Realty won a judgment allowing them to have forcible entry against Sammy. The Gaudios couldn't be reached for comment.

Big things were still in the air though. According to electronic records, Sharif created a website, retailsoho.com, in April 2006. (A visit this weekend showed nothing on the site.) That year, Sharif told the Daily News, he hired a teenager, Francisco Patino, to scout for a new mosque location, when he spotted him on a TV at a Sharper Image store, charming TV viewers of the reality show American Inventor. That same year, according to media reports, Sharif bid on the property at 45-47 Park Place.

The next year, on March 13, 2007, New York state issued a state tax warrant against Sammy for $19,895, according to court records. On April 30, 2007, Sharif bought apartment 6C in a building on W. 93rd Street for $1.075 million with his wife, Rebekka, an American-born convert to Islam.

By this time, the El-Gamal brothers knew Imam Rauf well. In December 2008, Rauf officiated Sammy's wedding to Allison Poole, a scarf delicately draped over the bride's golden brown locks. The young couple clasp hands and gaze softly into each other's eyes in a photo taken at the wedding, as Rauf led the ceremony, smiling, with a microphone hooked to his loose tunic.

On July 7, 2009, after buying the property where he wants to build the Islamic center, Sharif created two companies, 45 Park Place Partners LLC and 45 Park Place LH, LLC. The next day, he started Soho Properties General Partner LLC as a foreign limited liability corporation. On October 16, 2009, Sharif created Soho Properties Inc., naming himself chairman.

Since the controversy erupted, the media has largely portrayed the man behind the mosque effort as Imam Rauf, an Egyptian-born progressive Muslim cleric who could be Sean Connery's body-double. His wife, Khan, a Muslim community leader born in Kashmir, India, occasionally shares the spotlight. Known inside the Muslim community as unabashedly ambitious, the couple has irked Sharif and others in his camp. Last week, in a conference call with interfaith partners and others, set up by the Council on Foreign Relations, Khan said, "one of our congregants, Sharif El-Gamal, took it upon himself" to find new space for the overcrowded mosque where Rauf led prayers. Otherwise, there wasn't another word about the Brooklyn-born Sharif. Khan directed folks to the website of the Cordoba Initiative, an interfaith nonprofit her husband runs, not the developer's website for the effort.

Ironically, in one of Sharif's SoHo Properties newsletters, Sharif's company declared to its potential partners: "We look forward to a prosperous partnership!"

When will you muster outrage over this?  



When they name it the Mohammed Atta Memorial Mosque and have the Ossama's Martyrs Brigade Gift Shop and Prayer Rug Rental Emporium in the foyer?  



I believe that you are legally prevented from inciting riots even on private property.  



These folks are poking the scars on America which were put there by their "brethren" who they support and whose actions they approve by their continued silence.  There is no reason for them wanting to built this there other than as a place to dance on the ashes of the infidels.  



And before anyone cries that "many Muslims died on that day too!"  nearly every IED in Iraq killed many as well, yet they consider collateral damage to be acceptable during Jihad.  
 

I really don't see why NY couldn't just take if from them as blighted and give it to another developer....that is the present state of property rights..as in Kelo.    There are always ways to thwart the NRA building a storefront in NY City so thwarting this will be nothing particularly new.

 

I think a lot of people are confusing the moral and legal dimension here.

While it may be legally permissible to build a mosque, it sure as hell isn't morally permissible.

Have respect for those involved in the incident and respect their wishes. Just because you CAN do something (e.g. build the mosque) doesn't mean you SHOULD do something.

Build it and begin gathering intel.

100% of the individuals who would visit it should have jackets started immediately.

The only way would be to declare it a violent, political anti-government orgaization like they did to the michigan militia.  Then seize the property.

That's about the only way you could get most of the Muslims I know to go.

If property rights are property rights then how is it that the gov't can tell you that you can't build an adult entertainment business or bar near a school?  Why are there zoning rules? How can some local communities win lawsuits, keeping a Walmart from being built in their town?  If property rights are property rights then these companies can build whatever they want to on their land right..regardless of what everyone else, including the gov't thinks. Right?

How about simply creating a zoning ordinance that says that there can't be a mosque inside the diameter that the furthest body struck?

I believe that that would be unConstitutional on it's face, on several counts.  



 

I was being poignant. Count me in with the property rights folks...even though it pisses me off.

The Bill of Rights wasn't written to protect popular ideas.

It's born of the same idiocy that claims the mosque/center in NY (it's not at ground zero) is a 'victory taunt' of some sort...



Namely the belief that all Muslims are the enemy, rather than a small bunch of radicals....



 

I care. At best, it's tasteless. At worst, it's a victory shrine.

However, there really is nothing that can be done legally. The freedoms we all enjoy, include the freedom to worship as you please, where you please, to build what you want, where you want.

And the pig farm across the street.

Spread the rumor that it's a CIA front to recruit islamic operatives.

Wow? Huh? You need to seriously start reading about what is happening in the world if you don't see the relevance of Holland and Europe becoming Islamic states! Unless you don't care where we are headed as a nation, then what is happening in Europe with the growth of Islam doesn't matter I guess. There is a lot more at stake than just the "ground zero" mosque. The ground zero mosque shows the arrogance and audacity of their unbridled expansion. Maybe there is no answer and we are destined to submit or die. Like I said, I don't have the answer but I'm curious how this forum community sees this threat to our way of life. I think USA may be a frog in a kettle of water placed over the fire...

http://americaspeaksink.com/2009/01/muslim-birth-rate-taking-over-the-world/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0U5Kw57iv4

for such a small group that is so tiny in size, they've managed to keep us busy for 10 +years Russia busy, Israel Busy, France Busy England busy, hell their frequent flier miles must be outrageous

How do you stop it?  Well hell, I already told you people how to stop it....buy up all of the land that they want to use to build it.  Don't own the land=can't build it.  Done.

OR

Build it, but put bugs in it...and I'm not talking about bedbugs, but hidden mics, cameras, hidden passageways, etc.  That way you can keep an eye and ear on them.
Wait, then they might be speaking in arabic/farsi/dari/etc...will have to be able to translate it...but who can we trust to do it...Wait, then again this is Arfcom...just claim all the jibber jabber that you hear and don't want to understand to be terrorism speak, thus ground for arresting them.  See, this is where the hidden passages come into play.  Achmed is walking down the hall, you grab him and take him away.  Keep it up, next thing you know the mosque is empty...empty mosque means it will shut down and probably be coverted into a Starbucks or something.

Done.

 

1% of 1.1BN is enough to do that.....



The point is that not all 1.1BN Muslims - nor all 5 million or so that are in the US legally - are the enemy, and it's absurd to treat them as such...



Just like it's absurd to expect every oppressed population in the world to 'free themselves' without help (especially since we couldn't even pull that off ourselves)....



Both seem to be ARFCOM 'staples', at least in GD.



 

Appeal to their sense of tolerance, good taste, respect, and propriety.

Good luck.