American Thinker makes news in Buffalo

By Jack Cashill

Citing an American Thinker article as its source, YNN News out of Buffalo sent a camera crew to the landmark Chautauqua Institution an hour south of the city to investigate claims that Ground Zero Imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, was planning to build a mosque on the grounds of the historically Christian institution.

Although the reporter handled the story as superficially as one might expect for a local news station, YNN did at least put Chautauqua on notice and force the Institution to defend its intentions on camera.

The Chautauqua spokesman explained that the inclusion of Muslims was part of the Institution's commitment to civil dialogue among the three great religions. Among Rauf's contributions to that civility was his preposterous and recently surfaced slander:

"We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children."

Although Islam represents one of the "three legs of the stool" in Chautauqua's force-fed Abrahamic Initiative, its spokesman took pains to insist that the proposed Islamic center was something other than a "mosque"-not, as Seinfeld might say, that there is anything wrong with that.