Articles: A Mosque Is Not Like a Church or a Synagogue#.UCfZMdqG5Ps.twitter
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/a_mosque_is_not_like_a_church_or_a_synagogue.html
The marked proliferation of mosques in the U.S. since 9/11 should raise a red flag for Americans. Recent controversies surrounding mega-mosque construction projects countrywide — many in locations with almost no Muslims to speak of — have grave implications for the future of these targeted communities and areas beyond.
Accelerated mosque-building — in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Ground Zero, New York; and Santa Clara and Temecula, California, to name a few — carries significance beyond the mere construction of a collection of Muslim houses of worship. It represents yet another orchestrated effort to oust traditional American values and replace them with Islamic practices, laws, and beliefs.
Although most U.S. mosques heretofore have been built without resistance, the newly attendant controversies present speciously polarized views between, on the one hand, ostensibly welcoming, tolerant, multi-culti progressives who deny any possible radical agenda despite substantial evidence to the contrary in existing mosques and, on the other hand, so-called fearful, Islamophobic, ignorant bigots unwilling to embrace diversity. Mainstream media’s predominant point of view is that any opposition to mosque-building represents a blatant unwillingness to integrate Muslims into American communities. This view disallows the possibility that such objections represent appropriate, reasoned responses to an attempt to destroy America from within and supplant its culture with a supremacist, totalitarian, and misogynistic ideology.
Islamic terrorism expert Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project for Terrorism, attributes the spate of mosque-building and land acquisition to the Muslim American Society (MAS), an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Emerson contends that the MAS has been actively buying up property and establishing mosques to control the appointment of imams who “distribute the message they believe is necessary to spread Islam around the world.”
It should be noted that a mosque is totally unlike a church or a synagogue, entities that serve their communities under the law of the land and are both empowered and restrained under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Under the Establishment Clause of that amendment, the government is prohibited from establishing a state religion or conferring preferential treatment on one religion over another. Although the government may not interfere with religious beliefs and opinions, the proscription of religious practices is permissible, as in the examples of polygamy and human sacrifice.
In the U.S. and in other Western countries, Christians and Jews freely and critically choose their brand of theology from a multitude of ecclesiastic offerings and determine their individual levels of religious observance or none at all. The exercise of faith and the observance of faith-related practices occur across a broad spectrum of individual behaviors based solely on personal choice.
In Muslim countries, no separation exists between mosque and state. Islamic doctrine or sharia controls all aspects of a person’s existence, from the correct way to use the toilet to permissible forms of lying, or taquiya. For Muslims, Mohammed is the perfect man, whose every example must be emulated, even though by Western Judeo-Christian standards he was a mass murderer, pedophile, rapist, torturer, and looter. Furthermore, Islamic doctrine is immutable, and any criticism of the traditions and practices of Mohammed is considered apostasy, which is punishable by death.
No free individual will exists or is allowed when it comes to practices and observances. Sharia must be strictly followed. A mosque is a symbol of this ultimate authority and serves the function of organizing every aspect of life in a Muslim community.
