While Americans have been asking questions about the Ground Zero Mosque and why in the world the State Department is funding Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s trip to the Middle East, few Americans are aware that U.S. taxpayer money is funding mosque development around the world.
A search by The Daily Caller of the State Department’s list of “projects” revealed 26 examples of federal funds going to fund construction, renovation, and rehabilitation of various mosques abroad. The countries receiving our money include Bulgaria, Pakistan, Mali, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Benin, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Egypt, Tunisia, the Maldives, Yemen, Turkmenistan, Tanzania, Uganda, Azerbaijan, Sudan, Serbia and Montenegro.
The U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP), claiming it is putting millions toward “heritage preservation” projects in the Muslim world , used American money to finance mosque-related projects in all the aforementioned countries.
For example, in Montenegro, the State Department used our money in an effort to restore and conserve the Shadrvan (Fountain) of the Old Mosque in Pljevlja. The State Department’s website claims that without needed repairs there would not be a sufficient place for ritual washing before prayer.
The state department describes our previously-unknown benevolency thusly:
To support the restoration of a fountain at a 16th-century mosque concurrent with the restoration of the mosque itself. Used for ritual ablutions before prayer, the fountain has deteriorated over time and needs a new wooden octagonal roof, pipes, water-taps, and pavement.
According to Nicole Thompson, a State Department spokeswoman, the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation is a type of diplomatic effort and outreach, what she says Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “soft power.”
Soft-headed is more like it.
Per Ms. Thompson:
It is helping to preserve our cultural heritage. It is not just to preserve religious structures. It is not to preserve a religion. It is to help us as global inhabitants preserve cultures.
Indiana Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, received a document on Monday from the State Department explaining that the practice of funding such projects became acceptable in 2003 when the Justice Department declared that the U.S. Constitution’s Establishment Clause did not preclude federal funds from going to preserve religious structures if they had cultural importance:
That advice is provided in the following paragraph that appears in every AFCP request for grant proposals… ‘The establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution permits the government to include religious objects and sites within an aid program under certain conditions. For example, an item with a religious connection (including a place of worship) may be the subject of a cultural preservation grant if the item derives its primary significance and is nominated solely on the basis of architectural, artistic, historical or other cultural (not religious) criteria.’
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has also spent millions reconstructing and financing multiple mosques in Cairo and Cyprus, as well as providing computers for imams in Tajikistan and Mali.
The funny thing is, the Code of Federal Regulations says:
USAID funds may not be used for the acquisition, construction, or rehabilitation of structures to the extent that those structures are used for inherently religious activities.
USAID press officer Annette Aulton told The Daily Caller that the code did not apply to the mosque construction and the imam computer projects as they were done for ostensibly secular concerns.
Aulton wrote in an e-mail:
Historic and cultural preservation activities have a clearly secular purpose as do activities to promote tourism. With respect to the computer center in the mosque in Tajikistan, this activity seems to be part of a larger program aimed at reducing social conflict.
…[W]ith respect to the computer equipment provided to the Imam in Mali, there really isn’t enough information to do an analysis. There are references to promotion of the town’s historical, cultural and religious heritage, which sounds like a secular purpose.
Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, opines:
I think it is disastrously wrongheaded and unconstitutional. It is not going to accomplish what they hope it will. They are not going to win hearts and minds. It is not as if they are going to say ’the Americans built this mosque for us so we shouldn’t wage jihad on them.
Spencer also believes that the State Department will often explain that it provides funds for cultural reasons, “but a mosque is a mosque is a mosque. It is where prayer happens. That is a religious installation.”
Bingo.
Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) disagreed (I’m shocked). He claims that such projects can help improve relations with the Muslim world:
Anytime the United States is seen as being on the side of Muslims, of their aspirations and their needs and goals, that can only help our image and interests around the world.
The National Director of the Islamic Society of North America Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances, Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed, agreed with Hooper, claiming that it is worthwhile to preserve centuries old historical and cultural structures and funding these projects could help America build bridges in the Muslim world:
It is an erroneous image that America is singling Muslims out as their target. So to some extent this could help.
I’m shocked again.
Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, disagrees. He says that such initiatives are problematic because they often lack oversight and “quality control”:
Part of the problem is the State Department really has no definition of what radical means and they also have no coherent strategy when it comes to dealing with extremist Islam. As a result you have young junior officers who are adjudicating grants and are basically approving them on the basis of what the grantee says rather than doing a deeper check behind who they are affiliated with or what their mission is.
…Unfortunately Muslim Brotherhood type groups are the ones which are the slickest when it comes to PR and have the greatest ability to reach out.
The president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, says that despite American efforts to reach out to Muslims around the world, a recent Zogby poll found that in the Muslim world, the percentage of the population which views America favorably still hovers around 18%:
We have always felt this type of outreach is completely ineffective and that ultimately we have to approach it like the Cold War where we are fighting an ideology and we have to be poignantly open about what part of political Islam we are trying to change and modify. If we are going to have this long war of ideas we cannot fund these religious institutions. We can fund anti-Islamist institutions based in liberty.
The president of Hudson Institute, Herbert London, is extremely troubled by the use of government funds for religious purposes:
I wouldn’t be okay with it if these were synagogues that they were funding.
According to the State Department’s document that they sent to Sen. Lugar, there are zero construction efforts occurring on historic Jewish synagogues, though there is funding of some Jewish related projects such as the “preservation of the Main Gate and Tombstones in the Jewish Cemetery in Sarajevo [Bosnia-Herzegovina].” The document also gives examples of the State Department funding churches, cathedrals and Buddhist and Hindu temples abroad.
Meanwhile, back in New York City, at the scene of the greatest Islamic Terrorist attack ever on American soil, a Greek Orthodox church, destroyed on Sept. 11, has yet to be rebuilt.
According to the World Trade Center site’s owner, a deal to help rebuild St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was offered and rejected, after years of negotiations, over money and other issues.
Supporters, including George Pataki, New York’s governor at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, have wondered why public officials have not addressed St. Nicholas’ future while they lead a debate on whether and where The Cordoba Project should be built.
Father Alex Karloutsos, assistant to the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, plaintively asks:
What about us? Why have they forgotten or abandoned their commitment to us? When I see them raising issues about the mosque and not thinking about the church that was destroyed, it does bother us.
You’re not alone, Father.
Kingsjester's Blog 
Thank KJ!! I didn’t know about this soft power that is being spread around the world.
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Dems = Useful Idiots
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Our tax dollars are rebuilding mosques areound the world, the GZ mosque (yeah, I said it!) Will be built in a year, but 9 years later GZ is still a huge hole in the ground. Downright embarrassing for the country that first put a man on the moon.
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You made my head explode, KJ!
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I guess that in order to work at the U.S. State Dept one must be related to Neville Chamberlain…
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Why isn’t “news” of this sort not found anywhere in the major newspapers or news stations…? Do you think it could be because it might just upset a few clear thinking Americans…?
Thank you very much for the “news” regarding our US State Department
projects and missions!
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