The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Bottom Stories of the Day

  • “City Council to Meet Tonight, Weigh Matters”–headline, Desert Sun (Palm Springs, Calif.), Sept. 8
  • “New Taco Truck Hits the D.C. Lunch Scene”–headline, WTOP-FM website (Washington), Sept. 8

Protection Racket
The man behind the Ground Zero mosque plan has finally surfaced after a months-long overseas tour “building bridges” with the Muslim world on the American taxpayer’s dime. ABC News reports on an interview he gave last night:

If he could start over, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf said, he would propose a different site for his project.

“If I knew this would happen, that this would cause this kind of pain, I wouldn’t have done it,” Rauf, 61, said in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien on “Larry King Live” Wednesday evening. “My life has been dedicated to peacemaking.”

But, capping a daylong rhetorical offensive that began Wednesday morning with an opinion piece in The New York Times, Rauf said he intends to go ahead with the “multifaith” center near the site where Islamic terrorists killed nearly 2,800 people because not doing so would unleash fury abroad.

“If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse,” Rauf told CNN. “The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack.

“There is a certain anger here [in America], no doubt,” he said later in the interview. “But if we don’t do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world. If we don’t do things correctly, this crisis could become much bigger than the Danish cartoon crisis [over images depicting the Prophet Mohammed], which resulted in attacks on Danish embassies in various parts of the Muslim world. And we have a much bigger footprint in the Muslim world.”

What was initially marketed as a gesture of conciliation has turned into a protection racket: Give Rauf what he wants, he tells us, or there’s no telling what those angry Muslim extremists might do. Rauf’s outrageous comments ought to erase all doubt that the construction of the Ground Zero mosque would be a victory for terrorism.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.