Debra Burlingame is a leader in the fight against the Ground Zero Mosque. Her group, 9/11 Families for America, has been in the forefront of the opposition to the Mosque. 9/11 Families for America is in this battle for the long haul. They will oppose any and all who would obliterate the real meaning of the hallowed ground of the World Trade Center. WTC is the mass burial site for the innocents who died there.
Ms. Burlingame’s brother was the pilot of the hijacked plane flown into the Pentagon.
The following is her statement, released this morning in New York City. It is, as she says, a “stunned” response to President Obama’s public support of the mosque.
Obama voiced his support at a Ramadan dinner held at the White House last night.
Here is Ms. Burlingame’s press release (my emphasis below — D):
9/11 Families Stunned by Presidents Support of Mosque at Ground Zero
Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago, and where her true values were on display for all to see. Since that dark day, Americans have been asked to bear the burden of defending those values, again and again and again. Now this president declares that the victims of 9/11 and their families must bear another burden. We must stand silent at the last place in America where 9/11 is still remembered with reverence or risk being called religious bigots.
Muslims have worshipped in New York without incident both before and after the attacks of 9/11. This controversy is not about religious freedom. 9/11 was more than a “deeply traumatic event,” it was an act of war. Building a 15-story mosque at Ground Zero is a deliberately provocative act that will precipitate more bloodshed in the name of Allah. Those who continue to target and kill American civilians and U.S. troops will see it as a symbol of their historic progress at the site of their most bloody victory. Demolishing a building that was damaged by wreckage from one of the hijacked planes in order to build a mosque and Islamic Center will further energize those who regard it as a ratification of their violent and divinely ordered mission: the spread of shariah law and its subjugation of all free people, including secular Muslims who come to this country fleeing that medieval ideology, which destroys lives and crushes the human spirit.
We are stunned by the president’s willingness to disregard what Americans should be proud of: our enduring generosity to others on 9/11-a day when human decency triumphed over human depravity. On that day, when 3,000 of our fellow human beings were killed in barbaric act of raw religious intolerance unlike this country had ever seen, Americans did not turn outward with hatred or violence, we turned to each other, armed with nothing more than American flags and countless acts of kindness. In a breathtakingly inappropriate setting, the president has chosen to declare our memories of 9/11 obsolete and the sanctity of Ground Zero finished. No one who has lived this history and felt the sting of our country’s loss that day can truly believe that putting our families through more wrenching heartache can be an act of peace.
We will honor the memory of our loved ones. We will protect our children, whose lives will never be the same. We will not stand silent.
Contact information for 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America is below the fold, along with more analysis of this latest Obama Hopenchange:
– – – – – – – – –
9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America
Co-founders Debra Burlingame and Tim Sumner
911familiesforamerica
Contact: media@911familiesforamerica.org
At Big Peace, Frank Gaffney explains the implications of President Obama’s public support for the Ground Zero mosque.
If you remember, Mr. Obama said initially that he would not be making any statements about “a local affair”. Right. Uh huh. Sure. We believe you, sir. [/sarc] Since when could our president resist holding forth on any subject?
Gaffney says (quite provocatively):
At a White House celebration of Ramadan tonight in the company of representatives of several of the Nation’s most prominent Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, President Obama announced his strong support for one of their most immediate objectives: the construction of a mega-mosque and “cultural center” at Ground Zero. In so doing, he publicly embraced the greatest tar-baby of his presidency. [the link in this quote is mine — D]
Obama has immersed himself in any number of tar-babies, but has emerged with only a few splotches clinging to his image. Call him “Resurrection Man”. Only a Democrat would be given a pass on the multitudinous stupidities of this regime.
[To our European readers: there is a long history on the Tar Baby legend. Until the P.C. Police took over, it was an emblem, a mythological story that resonated on any number of levels. In fact, it still does if you can scrape off the p.c. “death by silence” shroud they’ve laid over it. In that YouTube video above, you can see some of the original resonance.]
Frank Gaffney continues:
In the process, Mr. Obama also inadvertently served up what he likes to call a “teachable moment” concerning the nature of the enemy we are confronting, and the extent to which it is succeeding in the Brotherhood’s stated mission: “…Eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
Yep. Yet another “teachable moment” from Our First Teacher. Our condescending, I-know-more-than-you Fearless Leader whose favorite weapons are a piece of chalk and a pointing forefinger.
Read the rest of Mr. Gaffney’s analysis. He has all the nitty-gritty information on the sleazy couple who front for this “Initiative”.
This is going to be a long struggle, but the Muslim Brotherhood has gone a mosque too far on this one. There are so many survivors of 9/11 who remember only too well what the perps were.
The survivors of 9/11 aren’t going away.
How is America at large reacting on this one ?
I know little about American domestic politics, but Obama’s Ramadan speech seems outrageous to me, irrespective of where one stands on the American political spectrum.
Either he thinks that the mosque should be built because it’s not such a big deal, and the normal course of events would be for him to shut up : I’m not sure it’s within the constitutional duties of the President of the United States to decide where places of worship should or should not be built within a specific city.
Or, he thinks that it’s not really about building a place of worship, but it’s a major political and foreign policy issue.
And then, he would be entitled to talk about it.
Of course, if he takes this path, presumably it is to prevent an agression against America ; it’s because he thinks that the fundamental interests of the country are threatened by such a mosque, and that it justifies that the president should step in.
But for him to speak on the subject to justify the building of the mosque ? Well, it can only mean that the interests of Islam are more important to his eyes than either the interests of America or the American constitution.
I hope this will wake up a certain number of American Obama supporters to the true nature of their champion.
Per Debra Burlingame’s letter: Demolishing a building that was damaged by wreckage from one of the hijacked planes in order to build a mosque and Islamic Center will further energize those who regard it as a ratification of their violent and divinely ordered mission
Here is a simple way of viewing this entire political train wreck.
Encouraging any demolition of the Park Avenue site is, in effect, rendering further assistance to the 9-11 hijackers and their mission to destroy as many buildings as possible at the Ground Zero location.
That’s it. Pure and simple. The Ground Zero mosque is just another strategic extension of the 9-11 atrocity itself. There is absolutely no distinction that needs to be drawn between the stated goals of either the 9-11 hijackers or those who seek to build the Ground Zero mosque.
THEIR AIMS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME.
The Park Avenue site was damaged during the 9-11 atrocity and demolishing the building is merely a further completion of that terrorist attack. Adding to the 9-11 atrocity’s destruction is to abet Islamic terrorism at the most basic level.
This is a simple mental formula that just about any patriotic American can discern. Anyone who argues against it will be forced to, in one way or another, make excuses for Islam and terrorism. There is no way around it.
Once again, it is time to make support for Islam into a political third rail for all candidates seeking office in America. Only a complete halt to all further expansion of Muslm practices and institutions will be acceptable. There is no alternative and making any excuses should terminate a candidate’s political career. Full stop. End of line. End of story.
One possible scenario is that the Mosque/ Cultural Center/ whatever will get started and New Yorkers will demonstrate their collective ire by picketing the site, intefering with the construction and maybe even the labor unions will strike and refuse to work on it.
Then I woke up. Judging from the New Yorkers I’ve met, the most they will do is sip lattes, guzzle martinis and whine a lot about it on the Internet. Which is pretty much how the radical islamists percieve Americans and why the jihadis think they will win
Our president gives a speech for Ramadan, celebrates it even, but nothing for Lent this year?
He’s looking more Muslim all the damn time.
@goethe–
IIRC he did do something re Passover, but I’m not sure.
As for Lent, he gave up…umm, he gave up having his pizza flown in? He gave up wagyu beef?…
There is a chasm between what Obama says WE ought to do and what he actually does…a chasm into which I pray he falls come 2012.
Didn’t the President mention something about not getting involved. certainly a poisoned chalice if I wanted to appease Muslims. Didn’t take him long to get involved in the arrest of a Black Professor by a White cop if I remember. Seems funny too me, but I would certainly know who too vote for in the next election.
goethechosemercy: He’s looking more Muslim all the damn time.
BHO isn’t a Muslim. The vicious hatred of America he exhibits betrays his Black Liberation Theology roots. An excerpt:
Black Liberation Theology actually encourages a victim mentality among blacks. John McWhorters’ book Losing the Race, will be helpful here. Victimology, says McWhorter, is the adoption of victimhood as the core of one’s identity — for example, like one who suffers through living in “a country and who lived in a culture controlled by rich white people.” It is a subconscious, culturally inherited affirmation that life for blacks in America has been in the past and will be in the future a life of being victimized by the oppression of whites. In today’s terms, it is the conviction that, 40 years after the Civil Rights Act, conditions for blacks have not substantially changed. As Wright intimates, for example, scores of black men regularly get passed over by cab drivers.
Reducing black identity to “victimhood” distorts the reality of true progress. For example, was Obama a victim of widespread racial oppression at the hand of “rich white people” before graduating from Columbia University, Harvard Law School magna cum laude, or after he acquired his estimated net worth of $1.3 million? How did “rich white people” keep Obama from succeeding? If Obama is the model of an oppressed black man, I want to be oppressed next!
However, through BHO’s abject appeasement of Islam and facilitation of its shari’a agenda, he has become a de facto Muslim
Yorkshireminer: Seems funny to me, but I would certainly know who to vote for in the next election.
There is a delicious irony in seeing this supposedly great communicator manage to so severly antagonize the American voting public that he has likely inspired even more party disloyalty and partisan hostility than his predecessor.
The “just so long as it isn’t Bush” crowd is going to get a run for their money in 2012.
Ed Driscoll said…
“Imagine yourself on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.
As you sat there in shock, what if someone had told you that in 10 years, the World Trade Center would still be a crater. However, just off of Ground Zero, a gigantic, 13-story mosque would be erected. A mosque endorsed by President Barack Hussein Obama.
You would have thought we had lost a war, wouldn’t you? “
The Flea said…
To those who are still confused: The men who wish to build this mosque had the choice to build it further from Ground Zero. They refused. If they were granted the choice to move it closer to Ground Zero, to build it on Ground Zero, do you still think they would refuse? If you think the answer is “no”, you should have your head – and your heart – examined.
William Kristol said…
…For Obama, 9/11 was a “deeply traumatic event for our country.” Traumatic events invite characteristic reactions and over-reactions–fearfulness, anger, even hysteria. That’s how Obama understands the source of objections to the Ground Zero mosque. It’s all emotional. The arguments don’t have to be taken seriously. The criticisms of the mosque are the emotional reactions of a traumatized people.
But Americans aren’t traumatized. 9/11 was an attack on America, to which Americans have responded firmly, maturely, and appropriately. Part of our sensible and healthy reaction is that there shouldn’t be a 13-story mosque and Islamic community center next to Ground Zero (especially when it’s on a faster track to be built than the long-delayed memorial there). But Obama (like Bloomberg) doesn’t feel he even has to engage the arguments against the mosque–because he regards his fellow citizens as emotionally traumatized victims, not citizens who might have a reasonable point of view.
Barack Obama said…
Happy Ramadan!