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Sometime after the 25th anniversary of September 11, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members included Osama bin Laden, intends to build a megamosque in New York City.
And American taxpayers struggling to feed their children are the ones paying for it.
The organizers of the megamosque situated near the world famous Bronx Zoo, and across the narrow channel of Harlem River from Manhattan, boast that it will be the largest mosque in the state with four floors and 32,000 square feet overshadowing the mostly single-story houses and the occasional leftover Victorian from the neighborhood’s gentler past in the neighborhood.
Two of which the mosque has already demolished and whose residents it shamefully evicted.
The megamosque is being set up within the conservative Italian-American neighborhood of Morris Park which traditionally voted for Republicans before Muslim mass migration created the so-called ‘Little Yemen’ area inside it. It’s still the only part of the Bronx represented by a Republican councilwoman. But the growth of Little Yemen aims to make it fully Democrat.
And the building of the megamosque is backed by over $1 million in federal taxpayer funding.
The Bronx Muslim Center is a source of hate where speakers have mocked Christians, spread antisemitism and supported Hamas. The Bronx megamosque’s social media account cheered for “victory” in Gaza with pro-Hamas groups and urged followers to “disrupt” cities in protests for Gaza. A past NYPD intelligence document had warned that “individuals believed to be supporters/members of Hamas may have links to the Bronx Muslim Center”.
As reported last year, Hamud Alsilwi, the imam of the Bronx Muslim Center, praised Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin for “making the Jews sleepless”, backed stoning ‘adulterers’ and posted a message stating that the war “stirs jihad in the souls of Muslims, which terrifies the West.” Akram Omar, a supporter of Zohran Mamdani, of the Bronx Muslim Center had promoted Hamas propaganda and “reposted praise for the October 7 attacks, featuring video of cheering crowds.” In remarks at the mosque, he declared that Muslims are “willing to die” to defeat Israel.
At a rally at the terror mosque, Mamdani had urged that in the election, the congregation had “an opportunity — to tell the world that Muslims don’t just belong in New York City but that we belong in City Hall.”
Behind the hate megamosque is the Muslim American Society. The MAS’s co-founder and documents seized in a raid on a Hamas associate identified the organization as a Muslim Brotherhood operation. MAS admits that the Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan was behind its founding, while claiming that “many immigrant organizations would likely have had some founders who had some involvement or even membership in the Ikhwan.”
The Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan is the organization behind numerous international Islamic terrorist groups including Al Qaeda and Hamas. Osama bin Laden had first traveled to Pakistan as an envoy of the Muslim Brotherhood. One of Al Qaeda’s founding organizations was a splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s successor and the thinker behind much of Al Qaeda’s operations came from a Brotherhood family and was inspired by Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb to join EIJ.
MAS president Esam S. Omeish had been forced to step down after video of a speech in which he declared that, “you have learned the way, that you have known that the jihad way is the way to liberate your land.”
15 years ago, the MAS had been at the epicenter of the plan to build a three story mosque in Sheepshead Bay which had torn apart that Brooklyn community. Around that same time, work also started on the project to build the Bronx ‘megamosque’ to secure control over the area.
MAS locations have been sources of disturbing advocacy and training for Islamic terrorism.
The Philadelphia chapter of the MAS posted videos of children at an MAS school singing “chop off their heads” and vowing to be “martyred” in the Islamic Jihad.
Now American taxpayers have been forced to contribute over $1 million to the construction of a megamosque preaching hate, terror and death in a former Republican district. In contrast to the $1,050,000 appropriated for a foreign organization’s mosque that preaches hate and terror, the Word of Life Community Center, which helps the borough’s African-American community received less than half of that as did the roof repair projects of two local libraries.
But they matter less than the megamosque.
In his 2023 appropriations request for the megamosque, Rep. Ritchie Torres claimed that the money is “an appropriate use of taxpayer funds because the construction of the Bronx Muslim Center will allow the center to increase its social services to the community.” But the Community Development Block Grant under which Rep. Torres applied bars the use of federal funds for any religious activities. And the vast majority of the Center’s activities appear to be religious.
The mosque’s fundraising site shows that it was trying to raise $1.5 million (of which it only appears to have raised less than $500,000) after $2 million in previous spending suggesting that the $1 million federal grant actually makes up much of the current funds for the mosque’s construction. The Bronx Muslim Center’s fundraising focuses on the need to find space for 2,000 Muslim settlers to attend services and study Sharia, not aiding non-Muslims. It describes its mission as conveying “Islam with utmost clarity”, not providing social services to the borough.
And rather than improving life for non-Muslims in the Bronx, the mosque evicted the residents of two houses to demolish them and make way for their four-floor temple of hate. Even before it’s completed, the megamosque is already making life worse for New Yorkers.
The ACLU would be suing if federal funds were going to churches or synagogues, for example, the ACLU sued to block funds from going to the Princeton Theological Seminary and a New Jersey Yeshiva school, it has filed lawsuits in numerous states to block funds from going to Christian institutions, but it has done nothing about the federal funding of mosque construction in New York because in this, as in so many other things, the rules are different for Islam.
But the rules shouldn’t be different. And taxpayers shouldn’t be funding terror and hate.
American taxpayers are being compelled to fund a megamosque that preaches hate toward Christians and Jews, that supports lawless assaults on businesses, whose leaders cheer on terrorism and whose origins lie in organizations intertwined with Al Qaeda and Hamas.
As the 9/11 anniversary approaches, New Yorkers are reminded of who’s really winning the war.