A candidate for Congress in North Carolina.  Pantano is one of the GOP’s great hopes for wresting control of the House away from the Democrats. North Carolina’s 7th district, which includes Wilmington and its environs, prefers Republican presidential candidates. John McCain took it with 52 percent and George W. Bush took it with more. Since 1996, however, the area’s voters have sent blue-dog Democrat Mike McIntyre to Washington, often with commanding majorities against token opposition. Pantano insists that he’ll deliver a different result in 2010:

“Cordoba Center” sounds comfortably latino and almost familiar in a multi-ethnic city like New York. The name’s Spanish origin has a little bit of history too: the Cordoba Mosque in Spain symbolized a gateway to Muslim conquest of Western Europe – a conquest which today is unfolding in real time. But as disturbing as the sharia invasion of the EU might be, my concern is the new $100 million mosque that will sit smugly just 600 feet from Ground Zero.

This new Cordoba Mosque will occupy a building that was literally struck by pieces of an exploding passenger aircraft deliberately piloted into the World Trade Center by martyrs shouting “Allahu-akbar.” The suggestion that this mysteriously funded mosque is anything other than a permanent demonstration of Islam’s march on the West is naïve at best.

I used to work in one of the buildings that was destroyed (4 WTC) in downtown Manhattan where 3,000 graves and 300,000,000 nightmares mark the scorching of our national psyche. It is almost profane to consider that the number of innocents who perished is blessedly small compared to the devious intent of the plot’s jihadist masterminds. Mega-mass murder was interrupted by the selfless heroism of a brave few that charged into the inferno. Thousands of lives were saved that September day by heroes whose sacrifices should never be forgotten. But forgetting is something this society does shamefully well. So is lying to ourselves.

This Cordoba Mosque is not benign. This is not about reconciliation or understanding. If this was truly about bridging cultures, we should be erecting a church because it was Christians who were targeted for murder, not Muslims. This is about marking religious, ideological and territorial conquest. The Mosque is a martyr marker, and it must be stopped.

Denying the true intent of a new Mosque at Ground Zero is the worst kind of lie. And ignoring the symbolism of its location is a dereliction of duty. Travel the graves at Fort Hood if you think that ignoring the truth in favor of “cultural reconciliation” doesn’t have consequences. Failing to be honest about the Islamo-facist threats we face and who is behind them caused 13 people to die and 30 more to be wounded. Major Hassan was able to commit his act of jihad on a US Army base because even soldiers were afraid to do their duty. Fear of death was eclipsed by the bureaucratic stigma of being deemed “intolerant”.