The First Ground Zero Mosque - The Original World Trade Towers!

An article in Slate illustrates the profound conceptual disconnect most people have between what the actual World Trade Towers were and its relation to Bin Laden and the 9-11 attacks.  Given the ignominious and bigoted diatribe offered by both the right and left on the subject of the Cordoba House Project in New York City near ground zero (discussed here, here, and here), this is a welcome anodyne.

The original towers were designed by Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese American, who gained popularity with the House of Saud (The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) in the early 1950's.  Many of his designs, including the entire World Trade Tower complex as constructed in the 1970's, used Islamic themes and architectural conceits.  The article outlines a few of these elements in the overall WTC design:

• At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above.
• Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.
• The dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca.

The author of the Slate article infers that the Bin Laden family's construction company were intimately associated with many of the projects that occurred in Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden, himself, would have been well aware of Yamaski's utilization of Islamic themes.  She then postulates that one of the rationals, although not necessarily the primary reason, for Bin Laden to attack the WTC towers, was that the buildings represented an intermixing of the Islam, modernity, and international capitalism. 

To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.

It should also be understood, that the attack on 9-11, contrary to the facile arguments posited by the MSM and the Bush Administration, were not merely an attack on America.  Michael Scheuer, former CIA counter-terrorism expert on Bin Laden, explained in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, that the attacks were meant to provoke the US to expand their presence in the Middle East and engage in a clash of the civilizations battle with Islam that would destabilize apostate and pro-American regimes, eventually forcing the Americans and their lackeys into permanent retreat; like that of the Soviet Union during their Afghan conflict.  Bin Laden, in 2007, stated that if people wanted to understand the conflict, that they should, "read the book of Michael Scheuer in this regard."