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(CNN) -- Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the religious leader behind plans to erect an Islamic center and mosque a few blocks from New York's ground zero, said Wednesday night that moving it to another location would embolden Islamic radicals and help them incite violence against Americans. "If we move from that location, the story will be the radicals have taken over the discourse," Rauf told CNN's Soledad O'Brien on "Larry King Live." Rauf said he was speaking about "radicals" on both sides of the debate on the Islamic center. "Our national security now hinges on how we negotiate this, how...

AS my flight approached America last weekend, my mind circled back to the furor that has broken out over plans to build Cordoba House, a community center in Lower Manhattan.I have been away from home for two months, speaking abroad about cooperation among people from different religions. Every day, including the past two weeks spent representing my country on a State Department tour in the Middle East, I have been struck by how the controversy has riveted the attention of Americans, as well as nearly everyone I met in my travels. We have all been awed by how inflamed and...

If you have to ask how it is that, nine years after the Twin Towers fell, Americans still have a negative impression of Islam, consider this: From September 11, 2001 forward, we have fought two bloody wars against savage Islamist fighters, and we have witnessed, in no particular order or priority, the shoe-bomb attempt, the gruesome murders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg, the mutilated corpses on the Fallujah bridge, the London and Madrid subway attacks, the murder of Theo van Gogh, the cartoon riots, the foiled British airliner attack, the Bombay massacres, the Fort Hood massacre, the foiled Fort...

The leader of the Ground Zero mosque got hugely valuable tax-exempt status for a Muslim organization he founded after claiming as many as 500 of its members prayed daily in a small, one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment also listed as his wife's residence, The Post has learned. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf sought "church status" -- an official IRS term for a house of worship of any religion -- for the American Sufi Muslim Association, or ASMA, in 1998. The feds granted the request. "Church status" is more than just an exemption -- it means never having to pay taxes, file...

The Park51 mosque and community center near Ground Zero is not Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s first venture into real estate development. As The Record reports, beginning in the late 1970s, Rauf acquired five apartment buildings in Union City, North Bergen, and Palisades Park, all urban areas along the New Jersey bank of the Hudson River. He developed the properties with the help a series of government grants and loans totaling in the millions — including $384,000 in 1989 endorsed by Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), then mayor of Union City, and $1,295,000 underwritten by then Hudson County executive Robert C....

(CNSNews.com) -- A coalition of American Muslims has released a Public Service Announcement (PSA) to combat what they call “anti-Muslim rhetoric stemming from the Islamic center issue” in New York City. The PSA says Muslims do not want to “take over this country” and do not “support terrorism of any form.” “We aren’t associated with any group. We maintain our independence and everyone who worked on this did pro bono and paid for the costs out of their own pockets,” Hassan Ahmad, project manager of the initiative called "My Faith My Voice,” told CNSNews.com. "There is no organization behind this,”...

The names of the city that we now call New York bear witness to successive waves of conquerors/colonizers. First came the Dutch, who named the city "New Amsterdam," then gave way to the British who renamed it "New York." Now come Muslims invoking the name of the Spanish city that was the seat of the Caliphate of Iberia and North Africa. In A.D. 711, Muslim hordes conquered Spain for Islam's first inroad into Western Europe. The first mosque was built in the Spanish city of Cordoba, the site of a historic Islamic victory in conquest and subjugation of Spain and...

Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah has come out strongly in support of the controversial Islamic center proposed for construction in New York, even as his party appears to be using opposition to the so-called "Ground Zero mosque" as a campaign issue. In an interview over the weekend with Fox 13 News in Salt Lake City, Hatch noted that "there's a huge . . . lack of support throughout the country for Islam to build that mosque there, but that should not make a difference if they decide to do it." "I'd be the first to stand up for their...

Imam Behind Park51 Ignores Low-Income Tenants Pleas, They SayThe Muslim imam who plans to build a controversial Islamic center near Ground Zero should first take on a smaller project, like ridding his New Jersey apartment buildings of rats and bedbugs, angry tenants told ABCNews.com. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf owns buildings across the Hudson River in several New Jersey cities, including Union City, North Bergen and Palisades Park, which he reportedly renovated with tax dollars. Residents, many of whom are immigrants and most of whom are working-class Hispanic Catholics, say they have complained about unsanitary conditions for years. The imam, however,...

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 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." The New York Post reported yesterday that Sharif and SoHo Properties are...

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, chairman of the soi-disant Cordoba Initiative, has gotten all the attention he deserves for his astonishingly insensitive attempt to build a 13-story mosque and community center at the site of Ground Zero. Rauf has largely escaped attention for his efforts to build a sawed-off version of the same on the grounds of the venerable and historically Christian Chautauqua Institution in western New York State. Although the resistance to Rauf at Chautauqua has not made the news, it is deeply felt, and it is coming from both Christians and Jews. As shall be seen, the forced feeding...

Thursday during the 1 p.m. hour, CNN’s “Newsroom,” this exchange took place between CNN reporter Ali Velshi andTime Magazine’s deputy international editor Bobby Ghosh: VELSHI: The name Cordoba- some people are associating it with Muslim rule and bloody battles, when, in fact, Cordoba was one of the finest times in relations between the major religions. GHOSH: Exactly right- in interfaith discourse- VELSHI: Yeah- GHOSH: And the great mosque of Cordoba that people are talking about and that Newt Gingrich was talking about- the man who built it, the Muslim prince who built it, bought it from a Christian group- paid...

New audio has surfaced of the imam behind the controversial mosque near Ground Zero allegedly telling an audience overseas that the United States has been far more deadly than al-Qaeda. "We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non Muslims," Feisal Abdul Rauf said at a 2005 lecture sponsored by the University of South Australia. After discussing the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Rauf went on to argue that America is to blame for its testy relationship with Islamic countries.

At Sunday's Ground Zero mosque protest, I spoke to one guy who had been with the counter-protesters, Joey “Boots” Bassolino, immediately after the police pulled him out from the crowd. What happened, I asked? “There was a guy standing up, a Pakistani guy, who had identified himself as a Pakistani, and he said: ‘We’re not going to sit there and back these Zionist Jews,’” Bassolino recounted, still clearly a little shaken up. “And I’m like, whoa, wait a minute. What’s up with the racism? And they’re like, ‘what’s racist about that?’” The guy behind Bassolino yelled “f*** you,” reached forward,...

The real issue behind the controversy that has erupted over plans to build a 15-story cultural center, mosque and madrassa a few yards from Ground Zero is not only about the mysterious funding behind the Cordoba Center initiative, or whether or not its founders and backers have malign intentions. It is primarily about understanding how Muslims across the world, in particular Islamists, would view the conversion of the site of the greatest Muslim attack on U.S. soil into a Muslim house of worship. Given the long history of mosque-building following Muslim military victories, the building of the Cordoba House on...

Thursday during the 1 PM hour CNN’s “Newsroom,” this exchange took place between CNN reporter Ali Velshi and Time Magazine’s deputy international editor Bobby Ghosh: VELSHI: The name Cordoba- some people are associating it with Muslim rule and bloody battles, when, in fact, Cordoba was one of the finest times in relations between the major religions. GHOSH: Exactly right- in interfaith discourse- VELSHI: Yeah- GHOSH: And the great mosque of Cordoba that people are talking about and that Newt Gingrich was talking about- the man who built it, the Muslim prince who built it, bought it from a Christian group-...

Some of the imam’s American critics said they fear he is using the taxpayer-funded trip to raise money and rally support in the Muslim world for the mosque. “I think there is no place for this,” said the Rev. Franklin Graham, who is the son of evangelist Billy Graham and opposes the Islamic center and mosque. “Can you imagine if the State Department paid to send me on a trip anywhere? The separation of church and state — the critics would have been howling.”

The Mosque issue isn't going away and it just got more interesting. Apparently Steve Emerson, Executive Director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism (a large storehouse of archival data and intelligence on Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorist groups), has unearthed hours of audio in which Imam Rauf sounds not so moderate after all. The audio hasn't been released yet, nor the context, but from the sounds of it....the context won't matter a whole lot: Steve Emerson has unearthed 13 hours of audio tape of Imam Rauf. Emerson and his team of investigators has spent the past four weeks going through...

By Judy Shedlock First we overlooked the travesty of the Shanksville, Pennsylvania “Crescent of Embrace” memorial “honoring” those killed on Flight 93 on 9/11. Surely the god of political correctness has been appeased, and we can go back to sleep. So what’s the problem? The problem is the Cordoba Initiative, better known as the Mosque at Ground Zero. While our own Memorial to the Victims of 9/11 flounders, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, has endorsed the building of the mosque at Ground Zero as the epitome of the exercise of freedom of religion. The two sides on...

Americans have a short memory span, and most Americans are entirely ignorant of the significance to Muslims of the building of a mosque on the hallowed ground of those they have conquered. The dispute about the building of a mosque adjacent to the site of the Twin Towers is not about religious freedom, it is about stopping Islamic fundamentalists from celebrating their victory there – while shoving our noses into the dust left behind by their murderous attack. Muslims have long memories, and they teach their children to remember long-forgotten events. They have a long history of destroying symbols of...