Topic: WorldNetDaily
Pamela Geller opines in her July 26 WorldNetDaily column:
This will make your blood boil. While New York City officials rush to build the Ground Zero mosquestrosity, a 15-story middle finger to America, they've allowed the rebuilding of the 95-year-old St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which stood at the base of the World Trade Center towers and was destroyed by Muslim terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, to be mired in obstruction and endless red tape.
The church has fought a 10-year-long sisyphean battle to rebuild that magnificent icon, but still can't rebuild, while the Islamic supremacist grifters behind the Ground Zero mosque have been helped by city officials to clear all obstacles.In a letter to Christopher O. Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, CeCe Heil, senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, charged that the Port Authority had "misrepresented the nature of its preliminary agreement with St. Nicholas Church, engaged in fraud while moving away from negotiations, relied upon defamation to mask its activities, and trespassed on St. Nicholas Church property without warrant or legal justification." Heil added that "the Port Authority's activities are a violation of St. Nicholas Church's rights under federal law 42 U.S.C. §1983 and the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution."
Missing from Geller's column is the Port Authority's side of the story, which tells quite a different story than Geller does about the church negotiations From an August 2010 Fox News article:
The Port Authority has claimed the church was making additional demands -- like wanting the $20 million up front and wanting to review plans for the surrounding area. They say the church can still proceed on its own if it wishes.
"St. Nicholas Orthodox Church has always had and will continue to have the right to rebuild on its original location. The question was whether public money would be spent to build a much larger church at a separate location on the site and ensuring that construction wouldn't delay the World Trade Center further," spokesman Stephen Sigmund said in a written statement. "On that question, we worked for many years to reach an agreement and offered up to 60 million dollars of public money to build that much larger new church. After reaching what we believed was an agreement in 2008, representatives of the church wanted even more public commitments, including unacceptable approvals on the design of the Vehicle Security Center that threatened to further delay the construction on the World Trade Center and the potential for another $20 million of public funds."
Sigmund said the "final offer" was made last year, which again included $60 million.
"They rejected that offer," he said.
If Geller were more interested in telling the truth than demogoguing the issue, she might have told both sides of the story. But she's as dishonest as the rest of the WND crew.
