If Mayor Michael Bloomberg ever decides to stop buying his way around New York City’s term-limit law, he’d be a perfect fit at the State Department.

Hizzoner was not content with having embarrassed himself by predicting that the attempted bombing of Times Square — the heart of a city that has been a jihadist target for 17 years — would prove to be the work of a disgruntled right-winger upset over the health-care bill. Bloomberg has now treated us to a cri de coeur in favor of the Ground Zero mosque. Funding sources for this project, originally known as the “Cordoba Initiative” in honor of the caliphate that conquered Spain, remain unknown. What is known is that the gigantic Islamic center would be located near the crater where Islamist terrorists killed more than 2,700 Americans while destroying the World Trade Center.

Mayor Bloomberg is clearly ready for prime time in the State Department’s production division: It was only last year that our foreign service used your tax dollars to broadcast, on its website, a little movie called “Eid in America.” Eid, the occasion for this exercise in cinematic hagiography, is the feast that ends what our government takes pains to call “the holy month of Ramadan” and commemorates with gala dinners around Washington. The star of the video was the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center — and accompanying mosque — in Falls Church, Va.

JUST LIKE THE MARINES
Dar al-Hijrah (which means “Land of Migration”) was presented as the moderate face of Islam in America — exactly what Bloomberg and other government officials assure us the Ground Zero mosque will become. Prominently featured was Johari Abdul-Malik, Dar’s soft-spoken “director of outreach,” who positively glowed as he spoke about his community’s growth.

There were, however, a few lines that Foggy Bottom evidently decided were best left on the cutting room floor. Like imam Abdul-Malik’s call for “sabotage” terrorist attacks against Israel. As he put it in 2001:

I am gonna teach you now. You can blow up bridges, but you cannot kill people who are innocent on their way to work. You can blow up power supplies . . . the water supply, you can do all forms of sabotage and let the world know that we are doing it like this because they have a respect for the lives of innocent people.

Yes, what better way to show respect! Of course, omitting this speech spared State the embarrassment of explaining that it was given at a conference hosted by the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). IAP was the Muslim Brotherhood–created headquarters of U.S. support for Hamas. Incidentally, a top IAP official, Nihad Awad, has become one of the Ground Zero mosque’s most visible supporters. Awad also happens to be a founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations, another Muslim Brotherhood creation. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator by the Justice Department in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which several defendants were convicted for providing Hamas with millions of dollars in funding.

Imam Feisal Rauf, the force behind the Ground Zero mosque, declines to condemn Hamas, which is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It has been formally designated a terrorist organization under our law for many years. According to its charter, Hamas’s purpose is to create an Islamic Palestinian state by eliminating Israel through violent jihad. Continue here to Page 2 & 3 of Andrew C. McCarthy's article in the National Review