The Hijacking of 9/11

Maybe we should have known it would become this way. The ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks turned a day of commemoration into a day of protest in Lower Manhattan. It was all ostensibly over whether or not the Islamic community center at 51 Park Place should exist. But on Saturday morning, nobody could get in the face of the store front gated site of the forth coming Park51. 

Park Place between Church Street and West Broadway was blocked off by NYPD barricades. Protestors be damned.

One visitor approaching the barricade— a rotund, pasty-white, fiftyish male— attempted to argue what he viewed as a forceful case: “I drove all the way up here from South Carolina to see the Ground Zero Mosque on 9/11.” After hearing innumerable variations of the same story, the officer responded with the identical response he gave dozens of others, “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.” With a quick turn of his head, the red-faced visitor walked away, mumbling expletives under his breath.

Without fail, a continuous stream of eager out-of-towners attempted to get past the police line on both ends of the block.

A middle-aged African-American man from Harlem, who claimed he only goes by the name of Jenkins, put it simply when he said, “You know these people aren’t New Yorkers. The New Yorkers are over there,” he said, pointing blocks away where the names of the victims were being read.

“Look at them,” scanning the crowd with his eyes, “lost in the big city and angry about God knows what… They don’t even know why they’re here or how to act. We lost thousands of people here that day and they’re worried about their little protest against a community center that’s going to be built anyway, and then they go back to wherever they came from after their weekend away is over—while we have to live with it.”

“Screw them,” Jenkins said, adding, “If they want to see angry, I can show them angry.”

I was happy to finally find Jenkins.

Aside from the police, I talked to 22 people before reaching this native New Yorker.

The happenings away from the memorial service included demonstrations from the 9/11 Truthers, who held signs saying “9/11 Was an Inside Job” or “Bin Laden Was Framed.” And Jesus, with all sorts of agendas, also had a strong presence.

“Look at this,” said Carol Thompson, pointing to the anti-abortion protestors with their large, graphic banners of mutilated fetuses. The retired visitor from Illinois traveled to support a lifelong friend who lost her son in the World Trade Center. “I’m absolutely disgusted at what I’m seeing here today,” Thompson said, as a man standing behind her offered the crowd pages he was ripping out of the Koran to be used as “toilet paper.”

“And then there’s an anti-Islamic center protest later?” Thompson said. “Do these people have no respect for what happened nine years ago? For the families?”

This was not a persuasive argument for Pamela Geller, the organizer of the main anti-Park51 demonstration in the afternoon, who apparently viewed the protest as a sort of personal calling. According to a release on her Stop Islamization of America website, she responded to 9/11 family members who requested she not hold the protest on Saturday, Sept. 11 by saying, “I would have canceled the rally, but due to the large number of family members who have contacted me and asked us to help them speak out for their loved ones and give them a voice to express their opinions, in all conscience I cannot postpone the rally.”

And after the rally, regret was the furthest thing from Geller’s mind. “The rally was a huge success,” said Geller, responding by email, adding, “We were able to convey why we oppose the mosque and how determined we are in that opposition.”

Defiantly, Geller said, “We will not give up, and we will not be silenced.”

According to Geller, “Tens of thousands came and showed that the political elites cannot ignore the 70 percent of Americans who oppose the mosque.” Mainstream media outlets—including Politico and Agence France-Presse—estimated no more than 2,500 were present at Geller’s rally.

Of those, it appears that a majority came from outside New York. Geller admits protestors were coming from places as far away as Texas, Florida and California. The Stop Islamization of America website boasted that individuals could “Join the largest Caravan in America coming crosscountry to the 9/11 Rally.”

Geller herself, of course, is a Long Island native with longstanding ties to the New York City media establishment. With 10 years on the business side of the New York Daily News and five years as associate publisher at the New York Observer, Geller now runs a very successful blog and routinely appears on cable news shows. The gal knows how to perpetuate a meme. With the help of prominent political personalities such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, Geller has been instrumental in the success of calling the proposed community center at 51 Park Place—where cooking classes, afterschool programs and exercise classes will take place—the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

Strikingly, I didn’t see a single protestor or incident outside Masjid al-Farah—the actual mosque just 10 blocks down the street—where Imam Rauf, the controversial figure who is the face of Park51, has led prayers and been a prominent figure.

The protest, which took place on West Broadway at Park Place, drew on speakers from New York, but mostly from out of town, with a couple of them, including possible 2012 presidential candidate and former U.S. Ambassador to The United Nations John Bolton and media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, needing to be teleconferenced in on a large screen television.

In person, however, Geert Wilders, the Dutch Member of Parliament, was one of the headlining speakers who urged the audience to “draw this line so that New York… will never become New Mecca.”

Wilders—who claims that he’s not anti- Muslim, just anti-Islam—is far from the fringe of the Dutch political scene, as one might expect; he’s the leader of the third largest party in the Netherlands. Wilders’ Freedom Party platform centers around banning the Koran (calling it a “fascist book”), halting immigration from Muslim countries and taxing (read: fining) Muslim women who wear the hijab.

But where he is most useful to Geller and the Stop Islamization of America effort is the headway he’s made in public opinion with his intention to prohibit the building of mosques in his country. Wilders’ radical views have earned him constant death threats, and are why he has a slew of bodyguards. He’s also been banned from various European destinations, but in the United States, he has been quite welcome among conservative groups and with individuals on the Hill such as Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), who invited Wilders to show his film in Washington last year.

Also present was the English Defence League, a far-right, single-issue group formed last year in the north of London. According to the group’s website, they consider themselves a “grassroots social movement” with “members that represent our culturally rich, ‘patriotic’ and nation-loving populace. People who can see the threat of ‘Islamism’ for what it is: a vile and virulent ideology based on seventh century barbarity, intolerance, hatred, subjugation and war.”

Their reputation as a group committed to the destruction of Islam, however, does not match their self-fashioning. The EDL, which has recently expanded its international presence, is credited in England with violent demonstrations and attempting to, according to one Member of Parliament, spread its “agenda of hate,” made apparent at one rally where EDL members were observed chanting, “We hate Muslims.”

Of course, New Yorkers were present. It wouldn’t be a New York real estate deal unless Donald Trump was somehow involved, and he swept in a day before with an offer to buy out one of the investors—only to be turned away. And a group that has come to be known as Concerned New Yorkers ([read the sidebar "Dialogue With Power" here]) also saw the importance of talking about Park51 on 9/11, but removed themselves from the scene as much as possible, saying that it was “partially the nature of our project, but also out of respect.”

There are, undoubtedly, New Yorkers who have no interest in seeing the Park51 project go forward. One New York firefighter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said, “The thought of a mosque or a community center or whatever the hell it is makes me sick to my stomach. I absolutely can’t believe they are doing this and that we’re allowing it, but this is not what today is about,” he said. “Today was supposed to be about remembering. I can worry about the mosque tomorrow.”

-- Allen McDuffee is a Brooklyn-based independent journalist who blogs at Think Tanked, [www.thinktankedblog.com](http://www.thinktankedblog.com).