Is there any credit limit on that card?

[The Taj Mahal in India. Notice that all the great mosques, Hagia Sophia, Dome of the Rock, Cordoba, and so on, are all in what was previously someone else's country. How did that happen?]

From Agence France Press of August 9 -

German Authorities Shut '9/11 Mosque'

German police shut down a mosque in the northern city of Hamburg on Monday that was frequented by suicide hijackers from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and suspected of recruiting jihadists, authorities said.

An affiliated cultural center called Taiba was also closed.

"Hamburg must not become a cradle of violent Islamists," the city-state's chief interior affairs official Christoph Ahlhaus said. "We closed the Taiba mosque today because young men were converted to religious fanatics there. A purported cultural association shamelessly exploited the freedoms of our democratic state under the rule of law to recruit for holy war behind the scenes."

Three of the Sept. 11 hijackers -- including their ringleader Mohammed Atta, who piloted the first plane into New York's World Trade Center -- met regularly at the mosque before moving to the U.S.

Authorities said it served for several years as a recruitment center for fellow jihadists, including accomplices of the hijackers, and offered logistical and financial assistance to Islamic militants. Twenty police officers searched the mosque and homes of the association's leaders in the early morning raid Monday and confiscated funds from the group.

A group of 10 men from the mosque traveled to Pakistan or Afghanistan in March last year, probably to attend militant training camps, security officials said. At least one of the men joined the radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in Pakistan and later appeared in a German-language propaganda video for the group, in which he called for Muslims to take part in holy war.

"The association continuously promoted jihadist, aggressive and anti-democratic ideology and religious views in recent years," Ahlhaus said. "We do not tolerate organizations that are leveled against the constitutional order and the idea of understanding between cultures in an aggressive, militant way. But I underline that these measures are not targeted against the majority of the peace-loving, law-abiding Muslims in Hamburg."

Ahlhaus said the association had a sophisticated program of courses, sermons, seminars and online publications to whip up hatred of "non-believers."

One assumes that when the Hamburg mosque and cultural center were being established there were the usual assurances that the people establishing the mosque and cultural center were "peaceful law-abiding moderates". And the usual chant of the local social-democrats that it is important to encourage the moderates. And the familiar song that anything and everything is OK once Muslims have played the religion card.

In all likelihood the chain of events at the Hamburg mosque are the same ones that will also take place at the Ground Zero mosque, just a few years earlier. Probably the liberal New York authorities will fool themselves more insistently and for longer than the Germans did.

The difference is that the Germans have some experience with what happens when fanatic anti-semitic, anti-Western groups are allowed to flourish.

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