I shortened that title simply because I prefer short ones. However, the complete version is here.

Yep. I chose Pamela Geller’s version of the story, the one she published on the 25th.

I chose hers because it is the most heartfelt version, and because she has put so much time, energy and money into this pushback, and because her very being has gone into protecting Ground Zero from the Ummah. It is a visceral response.

I chose hers because paramount to her telling of the story is her identity as a New Yorker. Don’t get me wrong — New Yorkers are Americans through and through. But they’re a different breed of us: a faster gait, a rapid pulse, voices raised, words tumbling out of their mouths in their own characteristically quick-paced tempo. New Yorkers possess a hypertrophied sense of place, they live in the certainty that this is where everything worth knowing or doing or being begins.

Every New Yorker knows why the City was chosen as the first target of the Nineteen Creepy Bridegrooms: destroy our nerve center and the rest of the country would be a chicken with its head cut off. Washington? Strategically it must have been a secondary target; no doubt the B team terrorists were assigned to bring it down, but only after the Towers were infernos.

Pamela Geller has been a fearless fighter against the monstrous idea of a mosque intruding itself upon the hallowed space of Ground Zero in New York City. I have always believed the precise reason for their bullying intrusion into our grief was to remind us as graphically as possible that the horrific deaths of thousands of people on September 11th, 2001 is their doing. They are like mobsters having the gall to show up at the funeral of someone they contracted to have rubbed out.

Putting the mosque up was clearly standard operating procedures, taken right out of the Koranic manual of Jihad. Yes, we’ve learned more than we ever wanted to know about Islam in the intervening years since 9/11. One fundamental truth is this: once they have conquered a piece of territory they never ever give up. Even a cemetery with dead Muslims in it belongs to the Ummah.

That’s one of the reasons they take such offense at the name of our blog, though we didn’t realize it when we started out. All we knew was that it seemed fitting to remind our readers that once upon a time there had indeed been a miraculous victory for the West in its war against Islamic totalitarianism; this triumph stopped the further encroachment of Muslims for many centuries — at least until the suicidal mind-worm inched its way into the Western psyche, and suddenly Europe decided that importing thousands of Mohammed’s disciples into its sovereign nations was a capital idea. This notion has much in common with the West’s other suicidal venture, known cynically as “the war to end all wars” and subsequently dubbed “World War I”. Both “world wars” succeeded in killing off much of the best and brightest of European manhood — as can be attested to by most of the ‘leaders’ we’ve ‘elected’ ever since.

Our learning curve at Gates of Vienna has included a course you could call Islam Hates Any History That Makes It Look Bad. A corollary is that Truth itself is repugnant to Islam. Understanding this makes it easier to grasp why Islam is eager to twist history, and even more, why it is so eager to destroy historic artifacts. After all, if you keep the evidence of the past around for future generations to ponder, mightn’t they discover the Truth?

Islam flees from the Truth the way evil flees from the light. Western philosophy has always taught Truth as part of a triumvirate, Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and has applauded the search or creation of all of these as worthy endeavors. But none of them exist for Islam except as they may on occasion serve the interests of the Ummah. Thus in Mecca, beautiful or historic buildings are destroyed because they represent Idolatry. Or perhaps more to the point, they are historic, and Islam, upon close examination, is beginning to seem more and more to be a Gigantic Lie.

Look at poor Egypt. The grandeur of its past is long buried under the desert Islam made of its wheat fields as the conquerors destroyed the intricately engineered irrigation system which harnessed the Nile (see the greenhouses in Palestine for a modern version of the same phenomenon). Egypt’s grains — once upon a time — made it the granary of the Mediterranean. Its papyrus production allowed easy literacy. No more. Now Egypt’s superstitious, illiterate populace faces famine unless the West comes to the rescue. For sure their oil-rich Arab brothers won’t feed them. What is the profit in that? And now the new regime threatens to destroy yet another library, kill the artists and dancers, and — if they can — destroy the Pyramids. For this last crime alone they ought to be driven out of power, but the pusillanimous ‘leaders’ of the West will tell us they can’t interfere.

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Now on to the tale of the newly discovered landing gear. You decide if Pamela Geller has the story right or if that esteemed British MSM outlet, The Daily Mail is more accurate [disclosure ahead of time : I’m with Atlas Shrugs on this one, whatever the particulars turn out to be — D]

Ms. Geller says: [please go to her site to access the many links in this post]

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