Apologists, including the President, have tried to make the case that it is we who are being intolerant and inconsistent with our own First Amendment. But there are a few problems with this argument:

1.) We aren’t dealing with just any religion, but one whose beliefs comprise a complete socio-political system that is hostile to our own culture.

2.) First Amendment absolutism has never existed, and in this case, the recipient of such constitutional largess would actively work against those rights. No one should have the freedom to destroy freedom.

3.) There is ample historical evidence that the building of such a massive mosque at or near Ground Zero would be a symbol to the Muslim World of their victory and continued call to violent Jihad (a national security issue).

While I’m sure there are many ironies at play with this issue, one that immediately comes to mind is the fact that the most intolerant religion on earth is making a plea for tolerance. There is something surreal about a religion that would execute any Christian attempting to build a church in most Islamic nations, and whose teachings require death for apostates, appealing to the very Western concepts they despise.

To quote the insightful and erudite Roger Kimball:

…the fact that one has an abstract right to do something does not entail that one has license to do it regardless of other considerations.  Rights are embedded in larger social imperatives that direct and qualify how they may be exercised. There are plenty of things you may have a right to do but that it would be wrong to attempt….Muslims have a right to build houses of worship in the United States. That does not mean that it is morally permissible for them to build one at Ground Zero.

If the alleged motivation for the building of this mosque is religious reconciliation, then why continue with the project when so many people, including the families of the victims of 9/11, have expressed outrage? Would it not be more sensible and show sincerity in their professed agenda by moving this project much farther away? But they refuse. So we are only left with the more nefarious conclusion, supported by centuries of Islamic history.

It should be remembered that Islam is more than just a religion to most of its followers; you cannot separate Islam from politics. Therefore, as a necessity of their beliefs, they will work actively to undermine our entire system of government and culture in order to advance shari’a law in this country.

As distinguished scholar and historian Bernard Lewis explains in Islam and the West, “There is only a single law, the shari’a, accepted by Muslims as of divine origin and regulating all aspects of human life: civil, commercial, criminal, constitutional, as well as matters more specifically concerned with religion in the limited, Christian sense of that word.” Western cultures generally subscribe to certain principles, such as separate roles for church and state, but is a concept that “is alien to Islam” according to Lewis.

I conclude with Kimball:

The bottom line is this: Islam is a proselytizing, intolerant religion.  Its aim is to institute Sharia as the “sole reference point for . . . ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community . . . and state.” That is the end. The means are multifarious. Steering commercial aircraft into American skyscrapers is only one tactic.  Using and abusing liberal democratic freedoms in order to promulgate an ideology that is neither liberal nor democratic is less ostentatious but may in the end be more effective precisely because it is less dramatic. This is the lasting significance of the case of the Ground Zero mosque. It represents another step on the march to Islamize the West. [emphasis added]