Mosquing Ignorance

Daily Politics has focused attention on the dust up over the funding of a proposed Ground Zero mosque-with gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio pushing his putative rival Andrew Cuomo to investigate in his role as attorney general-but our mayor has a different perspective: "Mayor Bloomberg doesn't think GOP gubernatorial hopeful Rick Lazio's request to investigate the funding sources of The Cordoba House, the Islamic center proposed within blocks of Ground Zero, is such a terrific idea."

Bloomberg, never a deep thinker to begin with, then responded to a Maggie Haberman question with what we believe just might be the single dumbest remark on this subject that has ever been uttered-demonstrating incontrovertibly, that there is no correlation between great wealth and great intellect: "I don't think we're going to go and start investigating funding sources for religious organizations or vetting people who preach, pray in religious organizations. That just is so out of character for what this nation stands for and the way we conduct ourselves," Bloomberg replied."

But the mayor wasn't done: ""I've said that the government should never -- never -- be in the business of telling people how they should pray or where they can pray, and I think we want to make sure that everybody from around the world feels comfortable coming here, living here and praying the way they want to pray." Oh, good grief!

So, let's get this straight. Two decades of Islamic terrorism-some of it directly planned right out of extremist mosques-has simply gone right over the little mayor's head-leaving out the additional fact that Islamism, as a hateful, ideology is often fueled by radical imams. Now this doesn't mean that the Cordoba mosque is within that radical mindset, but to pretend that this religion hasn't been at times-and some would say frequently-hijacked by terrorists is to live in  a complete alternate universe. My God, you'd think that these were a bunch of Quakers!

If Bloomberg is seriously considering a presidential run, we counsel him to think again-we already have an incumbent who lives in a world where even the word terrorism is abjured because it might offend certain delicate sensibilities-we don't need someone who might actually outdo him. And to think that this is NYC's leader in a post 9/11 era.

We'll give the perceptive Paul Berman the last word on the nature of Islamism-and his observation of the virulent antisemitism of the Islamist should give our Jewish mayor some pause-although we know it won't since he is simply well out of his intellectual depth: "In our present Age of the Zipped Lip, you are supposed to avoid making any of the following inconvenient observations about the history and doctrines of the Islamist movement: You are not supposed to observe that Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and '40s. You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide."

To not even want to do a simple due diligence about the who and what of the Cordoba mosque is a scandalous disregard for NYC's recent history-and the memory of the fallen. And someone who can say that, "investigating or vetting religious organizations goes against what the nation stands for," is not fit to lead in such a time as ours.