Ok, and IF your funding theory pans out then the tiny minority of the people protesting this mosque for reasons of funding alone might turn out not to have been bigots.
So what exactly is the concern about the funding? Is it simply against the law for particular foreign groups or foreign countries to fund or partially fund the construction of a house of worship in the United States? And I would hazard a guess that such particular groups would include those listed as terrorist groups on the State Department's list. If that (or something close to it) is the case, I can understand why that funding should be blocked.
Or is the concern that the funding from a totalitarian group or government will:
1.) come with strings
2.) by which the totalitarian contributors will demand that
their kind of imam take the pulpit
3.) on a regular or permanent basis,
4.) and that this future preacher will promote an anti-American message
5.) and incite violence, sedition, and terrorist tactics,
6.) but these comments will not noticed by New York law enforcement or the FBI,
7.) or challenged by anti-terrorist Muslims who attend the mosque,
8.) and these incitements will then be acted upon,
9.) leading to new terrorist attacks in the U.S. and the harming of Americans,
10.) deaths and injuries that could have been prevented if the Cordoba House had not been built.
This sort of thing must have happened before, in either the U.S. or Britain. An example of an earlier chain of events would help me accept the claim.
If I have all this right, I next have to ask how much funding (in absolute dollar amounts or as a percentage of the entire project) is necessary to buy this kind of control? And knowing that the current imam is not one of their own, how would the Islamic supremacists guarantee that he wouldn't just take the money and give them the brush-off? Are the anti-mosque folks worried that Imam Rauf, or his family, might be intimidated by terrorists who want to enforce a quid-pro-quo, so the protesters are actually trying to protect they imam from such an eventuality?
Meanwhile, in the case of the Saudis' usual propaganda efforts, I have to ask this question: Why would the Wahhabist government in Saudi Arabia support a community center in New York headed by an American Sufi? Aren't these two sects very much at odds? Wouldn't that be like R.J. Rushdoony or Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., sending a few thousand bucks to a Unitarian-Universalist church in France?
I'm not trying to be a smart-aleck. These are genuine questions. I'm trying to wrap my head around the opponents' concerns, as well as gauge the weight of their reality and likelihood.
