By Aaron Bandler

Back in August, plans for a mosque to be built two blocks away from Ground Zero, the site of the September 11 terrorist attacks obtained approval from the New York City commission, sparking intense debate among the American people.

Proponents of the mosque say that the mosque promotes tolerance between Islam and the American people, and it should be allowed because the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion.

While legally the mosque is allowed to be built, the mosque should not be built at the Ground Zero site. If the Muslims agreed to move the mosque, it would be promoting tolerance, and the imam funding the mosque is a shady figure who shouldn’t be building mosques anywhere in America.

It would show tolerance for the Muslims to relocate the mosque to a different location, as the mosque is distressing to the families of 9/11 victims.

Debra Burlingame, who lost her brother Charles in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is the co-founder of the Keep America Safe Web site, said  that the families of the 9/11 victims are experiencing “raw anguish” at the mosque’s location because the Ground Zero site is like a sacred graveyard to them.

Similarly, back in 1984, Cardinal Macharski, archbishop of Cracow, planned on building a convent in Auschwitz in memory of the Catholics who had suffered there.

However, the Jewish community felt that while other people suffered at Auschwitz, the concentration camp was mainly a symbol for the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust, and a convent on Auschwitz would take away that image.

The Jews requested that the convent be built elsewhere, and Macharski took the tolerant route and agreed to move it to a different location, because they realized it was a sensitive issue to the Jews.

Likewise, the Muslims should do the same with the Ground Zero Mosque.

Furthermore, the person behind the building of the mosque is not a peaceful Muslim.

The funding of the mosque has been linked to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who claims to be a proponent of peace, but has been linked as an Islamic extremist to spread harsh Shariah law.

An audio clip from the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library has Rauf saying that the United States has “more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of non-innocent Muslims” and that “after 50 years of, in many cases, oppression of U.S. support in authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?”

It’s pretty clear that Rauf is framing the U.S. as if we are the bad guys instead of al-Qaeda.

Furthermore, Walid Shoebat’s book God’s War on Terror quotes Rauf as saying that it is important “to establish the general fundamentals of Shariah that are required to govern” into the U.S.

Under Shariah law, women are second class citizens. For example, they can’t drive or legally file for a divorce, and if they get raped they need to have four male adult witnesses to back up their case or else get stoned for “adultery.”

Plus, Shariah law follows the eye-for-an-eye punishment. For example, if a person were to paralyze another person in a car crash, then the person would have his or her spinal cord severed and become paralyzed.

Therefore, Shariah law is not compliant with the U.S. Constitution, so the fact that Rauf wants to establish Shariah law in the U.S. is troubling.

Also, the mosque is labeled as the Cordoba House, a reference to Cordoba, Spain, where the Muslims built a mosque to display their conquest of the Christian Spaniards. Considering that the mosque is being funded by an Islamic extremist, it could very well be a symbol of victory for the radical Islams that they could use as a base for recruitment.

The mosque could be built anywhere, just not in Ground Zero. And because Rauf is an Islamic extremist, he should not be allowed to build a mosque anywhere in the U.S.

The majority of the American people agree. According to CBS.com, 71% of Americans believe that the mosque should not be built at Ground Zero.

For the sake of the families of the 9/11 victims, the mosque should not be built at Ground Zero.