More On: "Not a Mosque"?? "Not AT Ground Zero"???

Late last year (December 8, 2009, to be precise), the New York Times ran a predictably kumbaya-esqe puff-piece about how wonderful an idea it was to build a Mosque at Ground Zero, written by Ralph Blumenthal and Sharaf Mowjood. Therein, the authors described what had happened to the the Burlington Coat Factory building on September 11, 2001:

On that still-quiet Tuesday morning, the sales staff was in a basement room eating breakfast, waiting to open the doors to the first shoppers at 10 a.m.

There was no immediate sign of the fiery cataclysm that erupted overhead starting at 8:46. But out of a baby-blue sky suddenly stained with smoke, a plane’s landing-gear assembly the size of a World War II torpedo crashed through the roof and down through two empty selling floors of the Burlington Coat Factory.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attack killed 2,752 people downtown and doomed the five-story building at 45 Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center, keeping it abandoned for eight years.

After that, Blumenthal and Mowjood go on to describe how the building was already, seven months ago, being used as a make-shift Mosque, and how "these modest beginnings point to a far grander vision: an Islamic center near the city’s most hallowed piece of land that would stand as one of ground zero’s more unexpected and striking neighbors." And then we read:

The location was precisely a key selling point for the group of Muslims who bought the building in July. A presence so close to the World Trade Center, “where a piece of the wreckage fell,” said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the cleric leading the project, “sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

“We want to push back against the extremists,” added Imam Feisal, 61.

Although organizers have sought to avoid publicizing their project because they say plans are too preliminary, it has drawn early encouragement from city officials and the surrounding neighborhood.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said through a spokesman that Imam Feisal told him of the project last September at a celebration to observe the end of Ramadan. As for whether Mr. Bloomberg supported it, the spokesman, Andrew Brent, said, “If it’s legal, the building owners have a right to do what they want.”

In today's Huffington Post, Matt Sledge (Associate Blog Editor) poses the (apparently literally) blindingly stupid question "Just How Far Is the 'Ground Zero Mosque' From Ground Zero?"

In fact, Sledge shows us "just how far" removed from reality "progressive" apologists of Islam are. He insists that we should pretend that since "you can't see Ground Zero -- the former site of the World Trade Center -- from the future site of the Cordoba House" that there is no there there. He even provides us a map (to the right) with a helpful "walking tour" from point A, the Ground Zero Mosque, to point B, the former site of the Twin Towers.

Gee, golly, everybody, it's two full city blocks! Sledge, being the investigative journalist type, took the walking tour for himself and found that it takes "pretty much two minutes exactly" to walk from A to B. Oh, and you have to turn a corner, which is why you can't see B from A.

Personally, I couldn't help but think there was something missing from the very nice "walking tour" aerial photo that Matt Sledge provided to illustrate his point. I thought about this for some time, and I finally decided that perhaps a somewhat different aerial photo, also showing the proximity of the proposed Mosque location to Ground Zero, reveals what Sledge and the Mosque-boosters are overlooking: