PDF Daily News -BY Celeste Katz
Family members who lost loved ones in the 9/11 terror attacks say they’re not zealots who scorn the Constitution because they oppose the so-called Ground Zero mosque.
Our Alison Gendar reports:
Geraldine Davie said she can feel her daughter’s presence any time she visits the World Trade Center site.
To Davie, the downtown location, including the former Burlington Coat Factory where a mosque and cultural center is proposed, is a gravesite.
“We know this is a country of laws, and that the mosque has a legal right to build there. But what we also are is a country of respect, and we are asking those who want to build, to build elsewhere — out of respect,” said Davie, whose 23-year-old daughter, Amy O’Doherty, was killed as she worked her first job after college at Cantor Fitzgerald.
Davie and other families came to the U.S. Capitol yesterday for a screening of “Sacrificed Survivors: The Untold Story of the Ground Zero Mega-Mosque.”
The documentary, co-produced by the Christian Action Network, will be shown in four locations in New York City through next Tuesday.
“They are building a sharia-compliant mosque on the graves of [families'] loved ones,” said Martin Mawyer, network president.
Supporters have said the project, Park51, would be an Islamic center that would increase understanding.
“They have a legal right to build there. What we are talking about is the moral right,” said Alice Hoagland, whose son, Mark Bingham, led an effort to take back United Flight 93 after it was taken over by the hijackers.
“We are asking that they show us the respect and build someplace else,” Hoagland said.
Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) hosted the film’s screening, arguing that turning a blind eye to a mosque’s real intent was a case of “multiculturalism on steroids.”
“If 10 years or 9 years after Pearl Harbor, the county of Japan had come to the United States of America and said, ‘We want to erect a memorial to Japanese naval seamanship at Pearl Harbor,’ what would we have said?”
