Ground Zero Mosque

An initiative to build a 13-storey Islamic cultural centre and mosque in New York, several hundred feet away from the site of the Twin Towers, looks set to go ahead after the Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected calls to ban development by achieving landmark status for the current building.

The planned centre and mosque to be called Cordoba House is a project of Cordoba Initiative, run by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who along with his wife, Daisy Khan, have created a number of projects and initiatives post September 11^th.

The mosque project has caused much negative reaction: TV adverts were rejected, Sarah Palin, some 9/11 victims families and the influential ADL have called for the centre not to be built on the site. However New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg; other 9/11 victims families and civil liberties groups have said the mosque should go ahead as a matter of principle.

What do you think? Is it insensitive and tasteless of the Cordoba Initiative to attempt to build the mosque so close to Ground Zero? Or should principle win out, for no one behind the mosque project sanctions in any way the horrors of 9/11? Can the mosque be a place for healing as its planners suggest, or is it a wound in the flesh of so much sorrow?