By now there can be few people in this country who have not heard about what has come to be known as the Ground Zero Mosque, the name given metonymically to that planned skyscraper that one Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife plan to build just around the corner from the site of what was once the World Trade Center for a Muslim center, complete with mosque. Feisal Abdul Rauf says the whole thing will cost $100 million, but not to worry - somehow the money, he is sure, will be raised.

Do you know of anyone putting up a church or community complex costing an estimated $100 million who is quite so certain that the funding will be found? But since we know where that money is coming from - and it is not coming from taxi drivers and ice cream truck salesmen in Brooklyn and the Bronx - we understand Feisal Abdul Rauf's confidence.

And even now he is apparently off in Saudi Arabia, on a trip paid for by the American State Department, where no doubt he will be speaking to interested parties about this mosque-and-meeting-room complex. He will be telling them their "support" would be a good way to demonstrate to the world's Muslims that even in the heart of the most powerful Infidel state, even a stone's throw, or a metal shard's throw, from the greatest attack by foreigners on American soil, a mosque can rise. And those foreigners were Muslims from Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

But if they had been devout Muslims from the United States, would they be any less foreign to everything that the United States is about? Would their attaining of citizenship mean that they had been transformed, that they had ceased to do their duty, to participate, in any way they knew how and found effective, in the Jihad to undo the legal and political institutions and social arrangements of this country, because they are flatly contradicted by the letter and spirit of the Shari'a, the Holy Law of Islam?