Pelosi overlooks minimum of $40 billion behind opposition to Ground Zero mosque

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, wants an investigation into funding behind opposition to the Ground Zero mosque.[Screen snip from video at Breitbart TV.]Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) apparently agrees with most conservatives’ legal stance on the Ground Zero mosque. Pelosi cited the “right of people in our country to express their religious beliefs on their property.”

However, Pelosi and former White House communications director Anita Dunn have criticized Americans’ political response. Many of us take issue with building a mosque blocks from where 3,000 civilians and first responders died nearly nine years ago. Pelosi said there has been “a concerted effort to make this a political issue.”

The California congresswoman has questioned how opposition to the mosque has been funded. Pelosi could easily answer that question—there is a minimum of $40 billion fueling the opposition, and in truth, there is far more than that behind it.

WHO MADE GROUND ZERO MOSQUE A POLITICAL ISSUE?

Although she did not mention President Barack Obama catapulting the Ground Zero mosque into an international debate, there is no doubt Pelosi is also correct about efforts to introduce politics into the dialog.

Obama did “make this a political issue.” The president’s comments about the mosque during the White House celebration of Ramadan were irrelevant to the affair. At that point the mosque was largely a local issue. Obama spoke with deliberate ardor about the mosque and supporters’ rights to build it, but he did not mention the losses of September 11 or the political aspects of the supporters’ motives.

It is possible Obama hoped to create a new media issue to deflect attention from the Democrats’ most dismal failure—the promise of reviving the US economy. That was Obama’s most vocal promise during his presidential campaign.  Dunn clearly had control of traditional US media during Obama’s election. Dunn explained Obama's media strategy: “We controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it…very rarely did we communicate through the press anything we didn’t absolutely control.”

Subsquently The Daily Caller’s investigation of an influential group of writers, bloggers and politicos who worked together via Journolist determined there was de facto collusion to ensure a Democrat victory in November, 2008. This explains why so many major network pundits often sound like Democrat shills.

IMPERIALISM, RELIGION AND POLITICS

Once Obama spoke about the mosque, bloggers responded by acknowledging constitutional limitations on government’s role in religion. But conservative bloggers also criticized the obvious—to all perhaps but people like Pelosi, Obama and Dunn—political intent of the developers.

Any individual who has studied history and religions knows major religions are always in search of converts. Islam is no different than Christianity or Catholicism in that regard. At the moment Islam is, however, fractured by international and internecine disagreements over everything from women’s rights (denied by fundamentalists) to the rights of others to freely practice faiths other than Islam in theocracies where fundamentalists rule in conjunction with military power.

Fundamentalist Islam is at present in imperial mode just as other faiths in ancient times were. One example is the iron grip the Taliban has in primitive areas in Afghanistan. Another is the increasing globalization of groups formally or informally allied with al Qaeda.

There is little reportage on this imperialism by traditional government-allied media. The best way to understand this concept is to read Middle Eastern news sites and blogs by visiting the sites in their native language and using Google to translate. MEMRI does an excellent job of tracking this phenomenon.

The placement of a mosque at Ground Zero is an obvious political move and it is dubious that even someone as ideologically narrow as Pelosi or Dunn fails to grasp that fact. It is likely they are attempting damage control on behalf of a president who stepped into a political minefield.

WHO OR WHAT IS FUNDING OPPOSITION TO THE MOSQUE?

A major impetus for fiscal conservatives lies in a minimum $40 billion US dollars paid out for insurance losses for life, property and business interruption. This was a projected figure in 2002 and details are publicly available at the US Library of Congress where the 9-11 Commission Report is archived.

Additional billions have gone into funding wars that Congress deemed necessary until Democrats saw a political advantage in reversing the stance on Iraq they held near the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term.

Increased costs for airlines, the food industry and local security also factor in. Some conservatives have also questioned whether a sizable percentage of the toxic mortgages that figured in the financial meltdown were not a direct result of terrorism based fraud. The FBI has acknowledged an avalanche of mortgage fraud prosecutions and investigations. As of 2009, there were a total of 42 FBI mortgage fraud task forces or working groups, with 1,644 investigations pending.

9-11 IN CONTEXT

Aside from the economic losses, there are issues related to Democrat policy no one ever talks about and those issues figured into the attack on America by Muslim extremists. The 9-11 Commission Report details numerous attacks before the attack on the USS Cole in October, 2000.

Osama bin Laden had also granted a TV interview to a news magazine; he publicly declared war on the U.S. while Clinton was president.

In November, 2000, presidential candidate Al Gore and his team of attorneys delayed the transition for President George W. Bush. The transition was anything but fluid particularly when compared to the cooperation Republicans gave President Barack Obama in 2008.

Numerous investigations, some by left-leaning national newspapers, determined Bush did win the election. Yet many grassroots Democrats, mostly uninformed about political reality as opposed to political fact, still claim Gore was the rightful winner.

Those same Democrats perpetuate the myth that Bush lied about Iraq although high profile Democrat senators have official statements in the Congressional record declaring a belief Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Those statements occurred while Clinton was still president.

Clinton (halfheartedly) bombed Iraq in 1998. In a statement to the American people, Clinton said, “Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons.”

A PACIFIST APPROACH TO TERRORISM

Clinton’s approach was to work behind the scenes and mollify extremists. Obviously Bush inherited the legacy of that astronomical failure, but Bush never sought to blame another for what he agreed to take on as president. As an aside, Bush did not blame anyone for the struggling economy he inherited—an economy that struggled after Clinton’s big tax increase, one of the largest in American history.

Nor did Bush 'control' the media narrative as Dunn has so expertly for Obama. Bush endured an ongoing character assassination by left-leaning national media. He still does.

Pelosi should realize that for most Americans, national security is a vital issue and there is still strong support for American sovereignty despite her Democrat party’s rather obvious intent to govern the world rather than the nation. Perhaps that is one reason Pelosi and her Democrat Congress gave a green light to the United Nations to tax American citizens, an act that is one of many unconstitutional amendments and bills Democrats have pushed through.

EMOTIONAL AND ECONOMIC FUNDING

So we can safely say there is a minimum of $40 billion behind our political opposition to a mosque built within two blocks of Ground Zero at a site where parts of planes fell. And that $40 billion is a drop in the bucket when you compare what we Americans lost that day nearly nine years ago as we watched fellow Americans leap from buildings to escape a horrific death by fire. Every single one of us paid a price for 9-11 and that debt remains to this day.

Few of us will ever, thankfully, have to choose whether to die by plummeting from a skyscraper or by burning alive. Perhaps Pelosi will factor that issue into her questions about who is funding opposition to the Ground Zero mosque.

(Commentary by Kay B. Day/Aug. 18, 2010)

Update on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 2:27PM by Kay B. Day, Editor

The Daily Caller has an excellent feature including remarks by mainstream American Muslims who believe placing the mosque at Ground Zero is a mistake.

Why government-allied media never give mainstream Muslims who have assimilated as other faiths have in the U.S. is beyond my comprehension. These voices must be heard, in my opinion, to stop the hijacking of a faith by radicals.