Sonny, that sounds VERY plausible.
I'm pretty much thinking it might be true, alot of these muslims folks seem to know who these guys are, and they describe them as being very shady.
The flip side (aka disclaimer), Muslims/arabs tend to be very big conspiracy theorists, so who knows, but they do have some points here (like how most of the money isn't coming from muslims in New York but from leftys around the country).
One of them gave me a pretty good idea about how this is a scam. He noted that the original cleric in charge had been telling the media, that he was going to go to iran to try and raise money. Okay. As this guy pointed out, this is supposed to be a sunni mosque, the iranians are shiite. It would be like protestants going to the pope to build a baptist church. Its for media consumption, since they don't know, but muslims do.