Constitutional Law

NYC mayor: No reason to probe mosque's finances

By By The Associated Press

NEW YORK — Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this week that an investigation by the state attorney general into the finances of a $100 million Islamic community center and mosque planned near ground zero would set ?a terrible precedent.?

?You don?t want them investigating donations to religious organizations, and there?s no reason for the government to do so,? Bloomberg said Aug. 31.

Meanwhile, more than 50 leading Muslim organizations yesterday cast the intense debate over the planned mosque as a symptom of religious intolerance in America, saying it is ?unethical, insensitive and inhumane? to oppose the project.

A Quinnipiac University poll shows 71% of New Yorkers want state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate sources of funding for the Islamic center project in lower Manhattan, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site. Cuomo, a Democrat running for governor, has promised to investigate if concerns over the financing are found.

Bloomberg, a Republican turned independent, said he would not comment on recent reports that say the imam who is the spiritual leader of the project faces complaints from tenants at his properties in New Jersey, where he maintains apartment buildings.

?I don?t know anything about his personal life,? the mayor said. ?The issue here, to me, is very simple: The government shouldn?t be in the business of telling people who they pray to, where they pray, when they pray, what they say.?

A Bergen County newspaper reported on Aug. 29 that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf got more than $2 million in public financing to renovate low-income apartments and has been beset for years by tenant complaints and financial problems.

The Record said it examined municipal health records and found complaints ranging from failure to pick up garbage to rat and bedbug infestations in buildings Rauf owns in North Bergen, Palisades Park and Union City.

Rauf?s wife, Daisy Khan, told the newspaper that her husband invests in real estate but his business dealings in New Jersey have ?no relevance? to the Islamic center project.

Bloomberg on Aug. 31 also played down the fact that the developers of the building where the center would be established owe more than $225,000 in back taxes on the property.

?They?re going to be treated like everybody else,? he said. ?We enforce the law against everybody, or we protect everybody. And if they owe money, they should pay it. And if they don?t, they don?t.?

The developers have said they are negotiating with the city to pay back the taxes.

Meanwhile, leaders of the Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York, an Islamic leadership council that represents a broad spectrum of Muslims in the city, gathered on the steps of City Hall yesterday to issue a statement calling for a stop to religious intolerance and affirming the right of the center?s developers to build two blocks north of the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

?We support the right of our Muslim brothers who wish to build that center there,? said Imam Al Amin Abdul Latif, president of the Majlis Ash-Shura. ?However, the bigger issue and the broader issue is the issue of ethnic and religious hatred being spread by groups trying to stop the building of mosques and Islamic institutions across the country.?

This is the first time that the council as a body has spoken out on the weeks-old debate over the proposed center.

Islamic leaders yesterday said they would support a move to another location, if that?s what the imam and his supporters choose to do. But they emphasized that Muslims also were killed in the terrorist attacks and were first responders.

?We declare unethical, insensitive and inhumane, the notion that our co-religionists are not entitled to the respect of a place of worship according to their faith, near the location where men and women of our religion worked, lived and died — just like other people,? the group?s statement said in part.

The group is not associated with the planned Islamic center but is representative of a significant number of New York Muslim leaders.

Rauf, meanwhile, has been on a U.S. State Department-sponsored interfaith tour of the Middle East for several weeks and was expected to return to the U.S. today.

The imam told a group that included professors and policy researchers in Dubai on Aug. 31 that the dispute over the mosque ?has expanded beyond a piece of real estate and expanded to Islam in America and what it means for America.?

Rauf sidestepped questions about whether he would consider moving the $100 million mosque and Islamic community center farther from where Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center. Instead, he stressed the need to embrace religious and political freedoms in the United States.

Opponents of the Islamic center, which could include a swimming pool and a Sept. 11 memorial, have seized on the question of the project?s funding, raising concerns the money will come from overseas extremists or anti-American sources. They also argue it?s insensitive to families and memories of Sept. 11 victims to build a mosque so close to ground zero.

U.S. Rep. Peter King, a Republican who?s the ranking minority leader of the Homeland Security Committee, said on Aug. 31 that he disagreed with the mayor. He said the question of financing was fundamental to assessing the Islamic center project?s backers.

?A number of terror plots have emanated from mosques,? he said, citing as one example the 1993 truck-bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

Arrests of conspirators in the attack led the FBI to a mosque in Jersey City, N.J., where core members involved in the plot worshipped and where blind Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman sometimes led prayers. Rahman later was convicted in the bombing.

King said he would call for churches or synagogues to undergo the same kind of scrutiny of their finances if there was evidence that terrorist plots were originating from them.

Developers of the Islamic center have pledged to hire security consultants to review potential contributors.

Sharif El-Gamal released a statement Aug. 31 saying the center ?will not be receiving any funding from organizations, entities or countries that are hostile to America or embody un-American values.?

El-Gamal leads a real estate investment firm that owns the lower Manhattan building where the center, known as Park51, would open.

It is common for the finances of religious groups to come under scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service, law enforcement or government agencies that protect consumers against fraud.

Religious nonprofits operate under a complex system of IRS rules on compensation, spending and governance. The IRS can revoke the nonprofit status of any group found to be violating the regulations.

Muslim charities have come under especially intense scrutiny under U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Federal prosecutors have brought cases against several American-based Muslim nonprofits, and in a separate case last year they seized U.S. mosques whose property is owned by a foundation federal officials say is secretly controlled by the Iranian government.

Full post as published by First Amendment Center on September 01, 2010 (boomark / email).