If it isn’t one spite-filled act of race-baiting it’s another.

Fresh from their embarrassing the crap out of themselves with the Sherrod mess, wingnut pundits are now whining incessantly about the “Ground Zero Mosque,” a community center being planned by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to be built two blocks away from where the twin towers used to be. Many 9/11 families are protesting the community center with signs. I’ve heard it told to me that this is part of Muslim plot to build over the ruins of America’s secular temple just like the Dome of the Rock was built over where the Jerusalem Temple once stood. In reality, you can’t even see Ground Zero from where the “Ground Zero Mosque” would be.

Many, including Rush and Beck, are falsely claiming it’s going to be opened on 9/11/2011. Newt Gingrich quoted Winston Churchill, at the peak of the Battle of Britain, saying, “Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization” and claimed that there should be no mosques near Ground Zero as long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. No doubt if Iran outlawed churches like our ally Saudi Arabia does, he would have used that instead.

So the protesters pushed for the 152-year-old Burlington Coat Factory to be torn down in it’s place to be declared a landmark to stop them. It somewhat echos the time in the 1950s when the village of Sands Point in Long Island, New York, tried and failed to block the conversion of a property known as The Chimneys to a synagogue. The committee decided by unanimous decision not to declare it a landmark. I heard Rush claim on his radio show that every building on the block had been given landmark status or was “pending” to suggest the decision made by the 11-commissioner committee was politically motivated. Since the building had itself been “pending” with a hold since 1989 before the application was reinstated, I’m guessing that the majority of the buildings on the block have the same “pending” status.

Time illuminates the myth behind the lies in their article “The Moderate Imam Behind the ‘Ground Zero Mosque'”:

“Ironically, Islam’s roots in New York City are in the area around the site of the World Trade Center, and they predate the Twin Towers: in the late 19th century, a portion of lower Manhattan was known as Little Syria and was inhabited by Arab immigrants — Muslims and Christians — from the Ottoman Empire.”

With city authorities now out of the way, it is the people spearheading the project who must bear the enormous pressure to give up their plans and scrap the building. They are being accused of sympathizing with the men who crashed the planes on 9/11 and of designing the project as, in Newt Gingrich’s reckoning, “an act of triumphalism.”

And yet Park51’s main movers, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, are actually the kind of Muslim leaders right-wing commentators fantasize about: modernists and moderates who openly condemn the death cult of al-Qaeda and its adherents — ironically, just the kind of “peaceful Muslims” whom Sarah Palin, in her now infamous tweet, asked to “refudiate” the community center. Rauf is a Sufi, which is Islam’s most mystical and accommodating denomination. (See the very best #Shakespalin tweets.)

The Kuwaiti-born Rauf, 52, is the imam of a mosque in New York City’s Tribeca district, has written extensively on Islam and its place in modern society and often argues that American democracy is the embodiment of Islam’s ideal society. (One of his books is titled What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America.) He is a contributor to the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, and the stated aim of his organization, the Cordoba Initiative, is “to achieve a tipping point in Muslim-West relations within the next decade, steering the world back to the course of mutual recognition and respect and away from heightened tensions.” His Indian-born wife is an architect and a recipient of the Interfaith Center Award for Promoting Peace and Interfaith Understanding.

As it says, Sufism is the most peaceful of Islam’s three main sectsSufism and actually holds to some Gnostic teachings. William Kristol instead claims that he is a Wahabist, the violent subsect of the Sunnis that Osama belongs to.

If the Muslim Arab-Americans can’t build a mosque there, is it all right for the Christian Arab-Americans to build a church there? If so, wouldn’t that be breaking the First Ammendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .” Can Muslim Arab-Americans build a school that teaches religion courses? Can they build a library that includes religious literature? Where does it end? If these people against the community center care so much about symbolism, why don’t they try to push for something to be built on Ground Zero itself like everyone was saying when the towers came down? What happened to being the beacon of freedom to the world?