Free Republic

The backers of the controversial "Ground Zero Mosque" have won a court fight clearing the way for them to build the mosque and community center complex two blocks from the site of the 9/11 terror attack. In a decision on Friday that was made public today, New York State Supreme Justice Paul Feinman dismissed a lawsuit by former firefighter Timothy Brown who argued that New York City was wrong to allow the destruction of a 150-year-old building to make way for the Islamic center.

Two co-founders of the plan to build a Muslim community center and mosque in downtown Manhattan have begun exploring a new, and possibly competing, project: an interfaith cultural center that they said might be located at the currently proposed site, two blocks from ground zero, or elsewhere in the neighborhood. Daisy Khan, the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said on Tuesday that she and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, two co-founders whose involvement in the controversial community center plan was curtailed this year after a falling out with their real estate partner, might develop a...

May 14, 2010 - by Alyssa A. Lappen Share | The prospective developer of a $100 million, 13-story mosque 600 feet from Ground Zero presents himself as a Muslim moderate (1). Yet Kuwait-born Faisal Abdul Rauf also boasts of his issue from an “Egyptian family steeped in religious scholarship” (2). Indeed, Feisal Rauf’s Muslim Brotherhood provenance, radical by definition, is as authentic as it gets. Rauf’s father, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Rauf (1917-2004) — an Egyptian contemporary of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna — conveyed to Feisal his family’s long tradition of radicalism, which he acquired at Islam’s closest equivalent...