Where is mosque near ground zero

For the next eight years, the Burlington Coat Factory was abandoned. In December , Abdul Rauf and Sharif El-Gamal, the chairman and CEO of Soho Properties and college dropout born in Park Slope to an Egyptian father and Polish mother , floated the idea of repurposing the building as a cultural center for the neighborhood, of which a mosque would be one part.

The following summer, in , the local community board voted twenty-nine-to-one, with ten abstentions , to approve plans for a fifteen-story, hundred-million-dollar community center modeled on the 92nd Street Y. The families of victims were trotted out. On the other side of the argument, the Islamophobes were heavily bankrolled by hedge-funder Robert Mercer, who personally paid for a million-dollar advertising campaign stirring up anti-mosque sentiment.

According to the New York Times , Mercer, who was a researcher at IBM before he joined the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, has donated more than fifteen million dollars to conservative political causes since In any event, Abdul Rauf and El-Gamal did not back down. Our initiative is intended to cultivate understanding among all religions and cultures.

An interview with El-Gamal on beliefnet. Late that summer, though, it had came to light that Soho Properties did not actually own the entire property on which El-Gamal and Abdul Rauf had proposed to renovate and build the community center, which was to stretch from 45 to 51 Park Place.

Hence the name. While Soho Properties controlled the entire site, technically what it had purchased from the Pomerantz family in was only 45—47 Park Place; 49—51 Park Place, which at one point had been used as a Consolidated Edison substation, was still owned by the energy company.

When Soho Properties bought 45—47 Park Place from the Pomerantz family in , it also paid seven hundred thousand dollars to take over the ninety-nine year, thirty-three-thousand-dollar-per-year lease at the adjacent building. But another relative of a victim, Charles Wolf, said basic principles had to be honoured. There have been extremists in all religions.

New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, expressed similar sentiments in an interview with the New York Post , saying: "Democracy is stronger than this. You know the ability to practice your religion was one of the real reasons America was founded.

Critics have pointed out that when surveyed, most Americans oppose the mosque, although one poll suggested that more people in Manhattan itself supported it than opposed it. Many of the critics of the plan have insisted they do not oppose the building of new mosques in New York per se, emphasising that it is only the siting of this project near Ground Zero that is "tasteless".

Some have even said the choice of the name Cordoba House could be significant, alluding to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, built on the site of a Spanish church, and turned into a cathedral after the Christian Reconquista. One of the clerics behind the project, Imam Feisal Rauf, says he hopes the Islamic cultural centre will be a force for good.

When we say it here, we will be heard. They lost their space around May We made the move to buy 45 Park Place in July in part to offset the loss of this space. Currently, our space at 45 Park Place accommodates around people every Friday. Organizers say no. As best we can determine, the idea that the cultural center and mosque would open that day is unfounded speculation. Project organizers say that no official date has been set for the opening of the proposed center.

Project organizers took to the social networking site Twitter as recently as Aug. Our timeline to build is 18 — 38 months. The idea that the center and mosque would open on Sept.

The American Freedom Defense Initiative sponsored advertisements that may have also contributed to that thought. We see no evidence of that. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has a long history of cooperation with the U. Rauf is an adherent of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam that has itself been targeted by extremists. Indeed, Rauf has often spoken out against extremism, including recently as part of a Washington Post discussion about the Park51 project, then called the Cordoba Institute:. Rauf, July We are not the extremists.

We are that vast majority of Muslims who stand up against extremism and provide a voice in response to the radical rhetoric. We are a Muslim-American force for promoting the universal values of justice and peaceful coexistence in which all good people believe. Controversial Comments. Lazio, Aug. This Imam Rauf is not one of them. He refuses, only months ago, to, to distance himself from Hamas, in fact, protecting him — protecting them, and only recently one of the developers said that they would consider taking money from Iran.

Rauf, Sept. Rauf: Because we have been an accessory to a lot of — of innocent lives dying in the world. That was a reference to U. After the Soviets pulled out, the Saudis, our best friends in the Arab world, our staunchest ally during the Gulf War, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the newly formed Taliban regime until Khan, Aug. Amanpour: … against the Soviet Union. Khan: The Soviet Union. And how this was, you know, in CIA terms, a blowback of that.