Mark Helprin, one of America's greatest novelists--and a veteran of the Israeli Air Force--weighs in on the Ground Zero Mosque controversy in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant.

Disregarding pleas to build it at a sufficient remove so as not to be linked to an abomination committed, widely praised, and throughout the world seldom condemned in the name of Islam, the militant proponents of the World Trade Center mosque are guilty of a poorly concealed provocation. They dare Americans to appear anti-Islamic and intolerant or just to roll over.

But the opposition to what they propose is no more anti-Islamic or intolerant than to protest a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor or Nanjing would be anti-Shinto or even anti-Japanese. How about a statue of Wagner at Auschwitz, a Russian war memorial in the Katyn Forest, or a monument to British and American air power at Dresden? The indecency of such things would be neither camouflaged nor burned away by the freedoms of expression and religion. And that is what the controversy is about, decency and indecency, not the freedom to worship, which no one denies.

Helprin explains that the Constitution also gives voice to those who, in protest, can refuse to build the mosque, and for citizens of good conscience not to cross picket lines manned by 9-11 families, firemen, police, and various construction guilds.

Read the full piece here.

And by the way, let us not forget that under Obamanomics federal spending is growing at an unprecedented pace. We are adding $4.8 billion--I cannot even imagine that number--to the national debt every day.

So it's not much of a surprise to learn that our tax dollars are being used to help fund The Muslim Brotherhood.