Opinion: Couple Behind ‘Ground Zero’ Mosque Promote Tolerance, not Terror

The husband and wife promoting a mosque in Lower Manhattan are committed to religious tolerance and open discussions, an official with an interfaith organization writes in a column for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Walter Ruby, of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, writes that his group has worked for three years with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan and their organization, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, to promote Muslim-Jewish ties and he supports their plan for an Islamic center and mosque two blocks from the former World Trade Center site.

The couple is “unequivocally opposed to violence and terrorism and deeply committed to the American values of democracy and pluralism,” Mr. Ruby said.

A new poll shows New York voters are opposed by a more than 2-to-1 margin to building the Islamic center near the site of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bloomberg reports.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents to the Siena College Research Institute survey said the developers have a constitutional right to build the mosque, but only 27 percent supported putting the project at the proposed location.