See, weird thing on this...
I agree with her that its unnecessary provocation. As I've said before, these people building the mosque are either needed to be nominated for the biggest douchebag in the universe award OR are the most obtuse dumbasses this side of Washington and regardless of which of those two things they are they are unquestionably lacking in tact.
I have no issue with her having a problem with it either. I laugh when people are saying essentially "Shut up Palin, you're not FROM New York, its not your business!" when many of those people are the type to get angry when a European or Canadian poster is dismissed for having an opinion on something going on in America. At least in this case its actually something affecting her country. Many of these people seem to also be ones that have zero issue having an opinion on Arizona without living there. Nothing says American's can't have opinions on things going on in other states.
That said, there's nothing New York can or really should do as a government. If the people buy the land and want to build something that's legally zoned to be built there then more power to them. The only way this should, and could, be stopped imho would be from the citizens themselves protesting and doing legal actions that cause such bad publicity that it makes it useless to build if the intent REALLY is to "build bridges" and do "outreach". People protesting this would be no worse or more wrong then those protesting for amnesty or were protesting the wars.
In regards to the comparisons, the KKK one is crappy and is a poor one all together. A better example would be buying up the land and building a bar on the site of a wreck caused by drunk driving that killed 13 people from the town. Is all alcohol to blame for that car crash? No. But that car crash happened in large part due to alcohol and thus for those in the town affected by it seeing a building dedicated to the thing that helped cause those deaths would be inflamatory. Similarly, while Islam as a whole is not to blame for 9/11, its undeniable to suggest that Islam did not have a large part in the why and the how that it was carried out.
Or opening up a "History of Japan" museum next to Pearl Harbor 10 years after WWII ended. 10 years later was ALL Japanese people in general our enemies? No. Were the individual citizens, who at that time were hardly a democratic country, directly responsable for the attacks on Pearl Harbor or even to a man agreed with it? No. Yet despite that, only 10 years after the fact, would something like that so close to wreckage not be inflammatory for many?
I've said it before and I have yet to see a reason to leave from this thought process. If their goal was HONESTLY to build bridges then they'd have bought land farther away from ground zero and advertise it from there. You don't have to "build bridges" to people that don't have an issue with you, your religion, or what happened with 9/11 because those bridges already exist. You don't "build bridges" to places you're already connected to. The whole point of "building bridges" is to connect to people who are apart from you...people who have a negative view, distrusting view, or outright oppositional view towards Islam. Those are the type of people that if someone is "building bridges" that they'd be reaching out to. And those are the people that are most being bothered/annoyed, upset, or pissed off about the location of this mosque.
To equate it with something elses, this is like trying to "make friends" with someone who you've generally not gotten along with and for your initial action in trying to do that you flick them off.