This is intended as a continuation of onesong's post, "prayer request please," but I thought it deserved its own subject heading.
The below are the concluding paragraphs of F. William Engdahl's article, "The Bizarre Background of the ‘911’ New York Mosque." If you want to read how he comes to this conclusion of questions, here's the link to the entire article, which is most enlightening: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21039
The geopolitical manipulation
The entire ‘911’ Mosque controversy has been made into world news by CNN and other select media. The US head of the military command in Afghanistan, General Petraeus got into the fray with a plea to the Florida pastor not to burn Korans, a move which naturally led several other wanna-be preacher bigots to say they too planned to burn Korans on the ninth anniversary of the World Trade Center event. The President, Barack Obama, got into the act by praising the building of the mosque as a symbol of Americans’ religious freedom and tolerance.
At the end of the day it all fuelled a “Clash of Civilization” tension across America, and had the convenient effect, whether the mosque is built on the site or not, of reinforcing the US Government version of the collapse of the World Trade towers on September 11, 2001, namely that the destruction was carried out by two commercial hijacked jets being deftly rerouted into the two towers. And that the Boeing jets had been allegedly hijacked by 19 Arab students, armed only with paper box cutters, who had just been trained at a Florida flight school to fly small Cessna-size private planes. By keeping alive the myth of the “Second Pearl Harbor,” as George W. Bush once called 911, perhaps some people such as Barack Obama or General Petraeus hope to keep attention on the need for US military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even spreading the war beyond Afghanistan.
One interesting question in the entire business is who put up millions of dollars for the sleazy El-Gamal brothers’ Soho Properties to pay $5 million cash for the property and to buy the other property for $46 million? Did the very established Witkoff Group, whose head, Steven Witkoff was selected as "Man of the Year" by The Jeffrey Modell Foundation in 1998, and who do major deals from London to New York not do a due diligence research on their new potential clients? Or is this all play money games using intelligence agency or other fake companies to create the explosive scenario at the anniversary of 911? These are some of the interesting questions to ask.
Hi Bob-
Thanks for posting this. Here's more on the funding in case you haven't already seen it. People need to be made aware of the level of funding, sophistication and planning that goes into manipulating their opinions.
http://911blogger.com/news/2010-09-10/untangling-bizarre-cia-links-ground-zero-mosque
Wendy
Thanks, Wendy.
It's amazing what lies below the surface of this and many other things we normally take at face value. And then when we look into them we're likely to be labeled conspiracy nuts. As long as there is mass unbridled greed there will be real conspiracies, and many of them. Only a mass change of heart will change that. Giving up the seductive dream of "all for Me". It seems so surreal that our world is essentially run by those dedicated to the smallest, darkest, most parasitic elements in the human makeup. It's upside down.
Yes, our opinions and perceptions certainly are the prize, given the money and effort that are put into perverting them. The positive part of it is that we can see how much the people are feared by the PTB. They know full well, as George H.W. Bush is reported to have said, "If the the American people really knew what we had done, we would be chased down the street and lynched." I'm not in favor of the lynching part, but the waking up part has to happen, is happening. Not lynchings, but light. Floods of light.
Let the Light Shine On...
I hate to ask a stupid question but what does PTB stand for? Not a term I am familiar with yet. Thanks!
Powers That Be - another one we frequently use is Main Stream Media
I should have added - not a stupid question at all - I had the same one a while back.
Wendy
Thank you Wendy...I was racking my brain over those!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/nyregion/08zero.html?hpw
In Fierce Opposition to a Muslim Center, Echoes of an Old Fight
The Rev. Kevin V. Madigan outside St. Peter’s Church, the oldest Roman Catholic church in New York State.
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: October 7, 2010
Many New Yorkers were suspicious of the newcomers’ plans to build a house of worship in Manhattan. Some feared the project was being underwritten by foreigners. Others said the strangers’ beliefs were incompatible with democratic principles.
Marcus Yam for The New York Times
Father Madigan celebrates Mass at St. Peter’s, which is observing its 225th anniversary.
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Concerned residents staged demonstrations, some of which turned bitter.
But cooler heads eventually prevailed; the project proceeded to completion. And this week, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Lower Manhattan — the locus of all that controversy two centuries ago and now the oldest Catholic church in New York State — is celebrating the 225th anniversary of the laying of its cornerstone.
The Rev. Kevin V. Madigan, who is the pastor of St. Peter’s, said that when he began reading about the history of his church early this year in preparation for the anniversary on Tuesday, he was not initially struck by the parallels between the opposition it had faced and what present-day Muslims have encountered in proposing a community center and mosque near ground zero.
“There was no controversy when they first proposed it, and we were just pleased to have a new neighbor,” said Father Madigan, whose church, at Barclay and Church Streets, sits two blocks from 51 Park Place, the site of the proposed Islamic center. Both are roughly equidistant from the construction zone at ground zero.
But as an uproar enveloped the Islamic project over the summer, the priest said he was startled by how closely the arguments and parries of the opponents mirrored those brought against St. Peter’s in 1785.
Father Madigan detailed those similarities in a letter to parishioners over the summer, in two sermons at an interfaith gathering last month and at a special Mass last Sunday marking the church’s anniversary.
For starters, he said, there was the effort to move the planned church somewhere else.
City officials in 18th-century New York urged project organizers to change the church’s initial location, on Broad Street, in what was then the heart of the city, to a site outside the city limits, at Barclay and Church. Unlike the organizers of Park51, who have resisted suggestions they move the project to avoid having a mosque so close to the killing field of ground zero, the Catholics complied, although they had no choice.
Then there were fears about nefarious foreign backers. Just as some opponents of Park51 have said that the $100 million-plus project will be financed by the same Saudi sheiks who bankroll terrorists, many early Protestants in the United States saw the pope as the enemy of democracy, and feared that the little church would be the bridgehead of a papal assault on the new American government.
The Park51 organizers say they will not accept any foreign backing. But with about only 200 Catholics in New York in the late 1700s, most of them poor, St. Peter’s Church would not have been built without a handsome gift from a foreigner — and a papist at that — $1,000 from King Charles III of Spain.
The angry eruptions at some of the demonstrations this summer against the Muslim center — with signs and slogans attacking Islam — were not as vehement as those staged against St. Peter’s, Father Madigan said.
On Christmas Eve 1806, two decades after the church was built, the building was surrounded by Protestants incensed at a celebration going on inside — a religious observance then viewed by some in the United States as an exercise in “popish superstition,” more commonly referred to as Christmas. Protesters tried to disrupt the service. In the melee that ensued, dozens were injured, and a policeman was killed.
“We were treated as second-class citizens; we were viewed with suspicion,” Father Madigan wrote in his letter to parishioners, adding, “Many of the charges being leveled at Muslim-Americans today are the same as those once leveled at our forebears.”
The pastor said he respected the feelings of those who lost relatives or friends on 9/11. “They bear a grief that is inexpressible,” he said. Park51’s organizers, he added, would have to “make clear that they are in no way sympathetic to or supported by any ideology antithetical to our American ideals, which I am sure they can do.”
But he said Catholic New Yorkers had a special obligation. The discrimination suffered by their forebears, he said, “ought to be an incentive for us to ensure that similar indignities not be inflicted on more recent arrivals.”
A version of this article appeared in print on October 8, 2010, on page A19 of the New York edition.