You can try spinning the Cordoba House incident all you want but the fact is that the neighborhood building committee composed of a mixture of races, religions and ethnicities voted for the building.They saw it as a true community center and the NYC board responsible for authorizing new buildings also voted for the center. The matter was settled until Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer started their anti-center campaign.The nation got involved solely because of Pamela Geller's anti-Muslim blog AtlasShrugs. She posted outright lies about the entire Cordoba House project and posted her vitriol on her's and other anti-muslim websites.
(time line from SPLC on Ms Geller's successful attempts to get Muslim-haters marching against the Cordoba house project.
"A proposal by a New York City imam and his financier partner to renovate an abandoned building in lower Manhattan into a 13-story mosque and community center would prove to be Geller's ticket to anti-Muslim superstardom. Geller first blogged about the project, originally known as Cordoba House but later called the Park51 project, in December 2009. Four months later, she and longtime anti-Muslim extremist Robert Spencer joined forces, taking over the organization Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), then an unexciting adjunct of a Denmark-based group called Stop Islamization of Europe (SIOE), founded by Anders Gravers. One of SIOA's first projects was to purchase controversial bus ads in New York and Miami inviting Muslims to reject Islam.
In June 2010, just two months after taking over SIOA, Geller and Spencer staged a rally in Lower Manhattan to oppose the Park51 project which drew thousands of demonstrators and plenty of media coverage. As they did with Almontaser, Geller and Spencer led an effort to depict the project's planners as extremists. They insinuated — with little evidence — that the project's financing might be tied to terrorists. They absurdly described the project as an Islamic "victory mosque" to celebrate the 9/11 attacks, modeled after Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, though no Muslim had ever suggested such a thing. Geller and Spencer were able to build SIOA into a propaganda powerhouse that SPLC listed as an anti-Muslim hate group in 2010.
By mid-2010, the telegenic Geller was a virtual fixture on Fox News, invited to comment not only on the supposed threat posed by Muslims and Shariah law in America but also on popular unrest in Arabic countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Through her website, Geller has promulgated some of the most bizarre conspiracy theories found on the extreme right, including claims that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X; that Obama was once involved with a "crack whore"; that his birth certificate is a forgery; that his late mother posed nude for pornographic photos; and that he was a Muslim in his youth who never renounced Islam. She has described Obama as beholden to his "Islamic overlords" and said that he wants jihad to be victorious in America. In April 2011, Geller accused Obama of withholding evidence in the then-upcoming trial of accused Fort Hood mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan."