Be careful,,it’s not just mosques,,,it’s also churches and ancient religious sites and according to Fact check (ahem), it was started under BusAlthough this chain e-mail first appeared months ago, we have received a large number of inquiries about it recently, as Congress debates cuts in federal spending. It started when the American Family Association sent an e-mail to supporters and posted an item on its website claiming that “Obama gives your tax dollars to rebuild Muslim mosques around the world.”
The message points to a State Department document that lists recipients of the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation Awards in 2010. According to the State Department website, the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation “provides direct grant support for the preservation of cultural sites, cultural objects, and collections, as well as forms of traditional cultural expression, in eligible countries around the world.” U.S. ambassadors nominate projects to be funded.
But the program isn’t the brainchild of President Barack Obama. The program was created by Congress in late 2000 under President Bill Clinton, and the first grants were announced under President George W. Bush in 2001. The State Department says that, in total, the fund has contributed nearly $26 million to approximately 640 cultural heritage sites in more than 100 countries, and more than half was given before Obama took office.
It’s true that mosques are among the cultural sites that have received grant money under this program. But temples and churches around the world also have received funding, contrary to AFA’s claim that the “secular left” would be upset if “these monies had been spent to repair Christian churches.” When we searched the State Department’s database and lists of 2009 and 2010 projects for “mosque” and “minaret,” we found that 30 mosques or minaret restoration projects had received funding under Bush, and seven such sites had been funded under Obama. Also, 29 projects for churches and cathedrals were funded under Bush and 13 under Obama. Those totals do not represent all Christian or Islamic historical and cultural sites, however — our search for “mosque,” for instance wouldn’t pull up funding for an Islamic monument or conservation of ancient manuscripts, and our search for “church” didn’t pull up restoration of convents or monasteries. Plus — as anyone who has visited the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul or the Mezquita, a mosque and cathedral in Cordoba, Spain, could tell you — there are many ancient sites that were Islamic and Christian places of worship at different points in time. In fact, our searches of “mosque” and “church” both pulled up the $33,455 awarded to the 14th century Mosque of Old Dongola in Sudan, which was a church in the 9th century. And one of the “cathedral” projects in Uganda under Bush was the documentation of “historic buildings,” including “cultural sites, unique architectural designs, cathedrals, Hindu temples, mosques, state buildings and ancestral homes,” according to the State Department database.h.
The U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) — which is putting millions toward “heritage preservation” projects in the developing world — financed mosque-related projects in all the aforementioned countries.
In Montenegro, for example, the State Department has funded an effort to restore and conserve the Shadrvan (Fountain) of the Old Mosque in Pljevlja. According to the State Department’s website, without needed repairs there would not be a sufficient place for ritual washing before prayer.
Nicole Thompson, a State Department spokeswoman, told The Daily Caller that the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation is a type of diplomatic effort and outreach, what she says Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “soft power.”
“It is helping to preserve our cultural heritage. It is not just to preserve religious structures,” Thompson said. “It is not to preserve a religion. It is to help us as global inhabitants preserve cultures.”
In a document provided on Monday to Indiana Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the State Department explained that the practice of funding such projects became acceptable in 2003 when the Justice Department declared that the U.S. Constitution’s Establishment Clause did not preclude federal funds from going to preserve religious structures if they had cultural importance.
The DOJ wrote: “That advice is provided in the following paragraph that appears in every AFCP request for grant proposals… ‘The establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution permits the government to include religious objects and sites within an aid program under certain conditions. For example, an item with a religious connection (including a place of worship) may be the subject of a cultural preservation grant if the item derives its primary significance and is nominated solely on the basis of architectural, artistic, historical or other cultural (not religious) criteria.’”
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has also spent millions reconstructing and financing multiple mosques in Cairo and Cyprus, as well as providing computers for imams in Tajikistan and Mali.
Interestingly, however, according to the Code of Federal Regulations, “USAID funds may not be used for the acquisition, construction, or rehabilitation of structures to the extent that those structures are used for inherently religious activities.”
What bothers me more than the State Department using the guise of cultural heritage as an excuse to fund these projects are some of the countries on the list.
For example we are spending taxpayer money to help renovate or rehabilitate mosques in Yemen. This is the very same country that the State Department has issued a travel advisory on due to terrorist activities in Yemen by Al-Qaeda against American interests.
http://www.aim.org/don-irvine-blog/state-dept-funds-mosque-rehab/
And no taxpayer money should to to any of this. ESPECIALLY mosks.