The debate about whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should build Park51, also known as the “ground zero mosque,” is just awful, disgusting and at the end of it, there will be no winners.

But what’s interesting to me is how this story ever got national attention at all. I mean there are mosques in this neighborhood already. There are synagogues, churches and strip clubs, so why did this one story take off? The short answer is Rupert Murdoch, but Salon’s Justin Elliott did some digging and pinpointed where it all began.

Elliott tracked this story to its source and exposed the anti-Muslim hate-mongers that started it and promoted it.

On December 8, 2009, The New York Times wrote a glowing front page story headlined: “Muslim Prayers and Renewal Near Ground Zero.” In the story, reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Sharaf Mowjood quoted Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the cleric leading the project, saying, “We want to push back against the extremists.”

The Times story reported that Mayor Bloomberg, a local Rabbi and a spokeswoman for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum all praised Imam Feisal and the Cordoba House project.

And then on December 21, 2009, Fox News conservative commentator Laura Ingraham interviewed Imam Feisal’s wife Daisy Khan. Ingraham told Khan, “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it.” At the end of the interview she said, “I like what you’re trying to do.”

In his story, Elliott notes that this Fox News interview is the first time the inaccurate phrase “ground zero mosque” is used.

And then, according to Elliott’s reporting, there’s not another story about the Cordoba House project for five and a half months.

But in May of this year, rightwing nutjobs latched onto the story, Murdoch’s New York Post and Fox News picked it up and things just got way out of hand, really quickly.

On May 2, 2010, according to Elliott:

After a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project, the AP runs a story. It quotes relatives of 9/11 victims (called by the reporter), who offer differing opinions. The New York Post, meanwhile, runs a story under the inaccurate headline, “Panel Approves ‘WTC’ Mosque.” Geller is less subtle, titling her post that day, “Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction.” She writes on her Atlas Shrugs blog, “This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” (To get an idea of where Geller is coming from, she once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama’s real father. Seriously.)

Pamela Geller

Who’s Geller? Pamela Geller is a rightwing nut-job who I wrote a story about her a couple of weeks ago. She has setup a group called Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). Her goal is to scare people into thinking that Muslims are trying to take over America and that we should all hate Muslims. It reminds me of someone I met in the ’80s who was convinced that African Americans were purposely having lots of children so that they can be the majority in America and reap vengeance on white people for slavery. Yeah, pretty crazy right? Well, those people are still out there, but now they have Murdoch’s media empire to spread their vitriol.

On May 8, Geller’s group announced a protest for May 29 to stop the “911 monster mosque.”

In her announcement, Geller said:

It will also serve to remember May 29, 1453, the Ottoman forces led by the Sultan Mehmet II broke through the Byzantine defenses against the Muslim siege of Constantinople. This was the end of the Eastern Roman (a.k.a. Byzantine) Empire. The Muslims entered the city and slaughtered people wholesale. The Sultan entered the Hagia Sophia Cathedral and ordered that it be converted into a mosque. This is known among Greeks and other Eastern Christians as Black Tuesday, or “The Last Day of the World.”

Also at the same time, New York Post columnist and resident loon, Andrea Peyser said a couple of days later, “there are better places to put a mosque.” And then on May 13, Peyser ratchets up the rhetoric about the Cordoba House with a full column dedicated to it. It’s headline: “Mosque madness at Ground Zero.”

Andrea Peyser

Elliott reports that it’s Peyser’s column that brings the anti-Muslim rhetoric to the mainstream. “It’s the first newspaper article that frames the project as inherently wrong and suspect, in the way that Geller has been framing it for months. Peyser in fact quotes Geller at length and promotes the anti-mosque protest of Stop Islamization of America, which Peyser describes as a ‘human-rights group.’ Peyser also reports — falsely — that Cordoba House’s opening date will be Sept. 11, 2011,” Elliott said.

And once Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had legitimized this story in the minds of the conservative media establishment, the story went national. Fox News went full bore. The New York Post assigned reporters to dig into the Cordoba House. Murdoch’s propaganda machine went into full swing.

Rudy Giuliani called it a “desecration.” Sarah Palin asked Muslims to “refudiate” the Cordoba House. Newt Gingrich compared Imam Feisal to Hitler, and the discussion continues to sink to the lowest depths imaginable.

And for another take on how bad this anti-Muslim fervor is, read Frank Rich’s column.

Fox News Glenn Beck

Rightbloggers, Fox News and conservative politicians are purposely conflating Al Qaeda with Islam. While it’s true that Al Qaeda members claim to be living the lives of righteous Muslims – the fact is that they are terrorists. Members of the Ku Klux Klan make similar claims about Protestant Christianity, but they are terrorists too.

Many religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, attract a lot of crazy fundamentalists – people who claim to be the “real” Christians or the “purist” practitioners of Islam. But these groups are nothing but ignorant terrorists whose hearts are filled with hate.

While this has been going on for a long time, what’s disturbing is that this equating of a terrorist organization to the entire religion of Islam has reached mainstream American politics. The current uproar is over the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” which isn’t a mosque and it’s not located at ground zero.

Interestingly, when George W. Bush was president, there seemed to be a concerted effort to keep this type of hate-filled rhetoric on the sidelines, but not anymore.

Politicians, rightbloggers and Fox News have latched onto to this ground zero mosque issue to spread hatred of all Muslims. They’re equating Muslims, such as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to Osama bin Laden. He’s a radical. He’s a fundamentalist. They’re doing this to spread fear. They’re doing this to divide the nation – to pit us against them. They want Muslims to be seen as the “other,” someone Americans should hate.

Why are they doing? In the short-term, it’s for political gain. They’re trying to get Democrats, and liberals, to appear to be supporting terrorists by standing up for the 1st Amendment so that they can take back Congress this year. In the long-term, they’re banking on this being a great wedge issue, similar to gay marriage, abortion and immigration – something that makes one American hate another American.

Conservatives have always sought policies to divide and conquer. The GOP has never encouraged Americans to work together. The whole notion of the GOP being a “big tent” party was a running joke. They will always embrace divisiveness because it’s easier to manipulate a population that is fighting among themselves, rather than working together to solve actual problems.

If Americans are fighting about abortion, immigration, Muslims, etc, they aren’t organizing for higher wages, health care or better pensions.

Let’s call these haters what they are, they’re cheap labor conservatives.

Cheap labor conservatives want you distracted from the real issues while you fight their phony ones. If you’re doing that, you won’t complain so much, if and when you realize that real wages for Americans have plummeted since the 1950s when one income could support an entire family. It’s worth noting that during the ’50s and ’60s was also when organized labor was the strongest. So while you’re hating Muslims and liberals, you probably won’t notice that income inequality has now reached pre-Great Depression levels, and that those tax cuts, they aren’t for you.

The real enemy isn’t Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, it’s conservatives such as Glenn Beck, rightbloggers like Pamela Geller, and presidential wannabes Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.

The real problems facing America are jobs, higher wages, health care, tax cuts for the wealthy, affordable education and putting the brakes on a runaway military industrial complex.

Conservatives like things the way they are. They like their money and big tax cuts. They like desperate workers willing to accept low wages, no health care and no pension. They like their kids’ private education. They’re fine with the defense budget funneling trillions of dollars from the Treasury into the coffers of defense contractors. That works well for them, but is it working for us?

Feisal Abdul Rauf

Sooner or later, a lot of the people spreading lies and smearing the reputation of Feisal Abdul Rauf will regret their bellicose rhetoric and feel shame. Not all of them will be capable of humility. Firebrand screamers such as Glenn Beck don’t blink an eye at slamming someone he’s decided is the enemy, but some of them will regret their decision to fan the flames of fear and to try to destroy a good man.

My greatest fear though, is  that someone will get hurt or killed because of this unbelievable irresponsible hate-speech that’s coming from the right, so far, we’ve been relatively lucky, but fear is a powerful weapon when directed at the gullible masses.

The current target of the right’s unsubstantiated charges is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The right claims that he’s a radical cleric because he’s trying to build a community center a few blocks from “Ground Zero.” It was called the Cordoba House, and it will be open to everyone, but some are trying to make political hay out of its Islamic prayer room. Buckling under the enormous weight of the phony outrage by the right, the Cordoba House has been renamed to Park 51. Some on the right claimed that naming it Cordoba House was an insult to Christianity? Yeah, I don’t get it either.

The real injustice of all of this spurious rage, is that a peaceful and good man, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is being dragged through the mud. He’s being called a radical, an extremist, a terrorist sympathizer.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Rauf worked with the Bush administration, the FBI, Madelyn Albright, Bush’s friend Karen Hughes, and countless others in spreading peace and cooperation between Christians, Muslims and Jews. But to the Glenn Beck’s and the radical right, he’s a terrorist. But who really is terrorizing whom here?

It’s disgusting how Fox News and other rightwing media outlets have no desire to seek the truth. What they seek are short-term political wins with a complete and utter disregard for the truth.

It saddens me, and it should sadden you too. To learn more about Feisal Abdul Rauf, please read Sam Stein’s story about him on the Huffington Post. Stay informed. Spread the truth. Battle the lies any way you can. You must remain diligent.

Fox News Megyn Kelly

Fox News “American Live w/ Megyn Kelly” is supposed to be a “fair and balanced” news program. On Saturday May 8, Kelly did a “news” report on a script for a television show Comedy Central is considering in which the main character is Jesus Christ.

Kelly said that there’s a double standard at Comedy Central, which she says has no problem poking fun of Jesus, but the prophet Mohammed is off-limits.

There’s an extremist element of Islam, Kelly said, that believes that any depiction of Mohammed is blasphemy and they’ve issued death threats to anyone who does this.

“Christians really aren’t dangerous,” Kelly explained, “and they’re not going to go out and hurt people.”

Really? Tell that to all the people that have been killed in the name of Jesus over the last 2,000 years.

Read the complete story on Examiner.com

Jon Stewart

For the second time this week, Jon Stewart has had to sing his “Go F@ck Yourself” song. This time it’s directed at the Revolution Muslim group that threatened the creators of “South Park” because they were going to depict the prophet Muhammad in their cartoon.

Web site slogan: "Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive"

Crazy people do the craziest things, but this plot by a Christian Militia called Hutaree in Michigan to murder police officers sounds more like Baghdad than the upper midwest – well maybe Detroit.

It’s interesting that in the US we call these people militia members, but if they were in Iraq they’re called terrorists.

Evidently the group planned to murder one police officer and then launch another full-blown attack during the funeral using IEDs.

According to the indictment, “the Hutaree would attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession with Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles, which, according to the indictment, constitute weapons of mass destruction.”

TPMMuckraker Justin Elliott has the story.

Nine members of the Christian militia group Hutaree have been indicted on multiple charges involving an alleged plot to attack police, including seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. Attorney in Michigan announced this morning.

“Six Michigan residents, along with two residents of Ohio and a resident of Indiana, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit on charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence,” according to the government’s press release, which you can read in full below.

Read the complete story on TPMMuckraker