My latest in PJ Media:

The pet projects of the left never die; they just get put on the back burner until the media looks the other way. One of the most notorious of those projects, a huge mosque at Ground Zero that would inevitably be regarded in the Islamic world as a triumphal mosque celebrating the 9/11 attacks, is now back in the works in lower Manhattan. For years it looked as if this project was dead. It wasn’t. It was just waiting for the massive number of Americans who opposed it to forget about the whole thing.

Pamela Geller, who defeated the Ground Zero Mosque initiative the first time around, broke the news Monday: “The news was buried under two dense paragraphs and five large photos in an article in New York YIMBY about a different project: ‘Construction has also yet to begin on 51 Park Place, which is slated to become a 71-foot-tall, 16,000-square-foot Islamic cultural center.’”

Wait a minute. That “Islamic cultural center” at Ground Zero was supposed to have been built years ago. The New York Post told us in December 2012 that “the Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero…opened with great fanfare a year ago.” You missed that? That’s because it didn’t actually happen. The media was hyping a couple of minor events at a tiny, unmarked mosque in a building that had been extensively damaged in the 9/11 attacks so as to save face after Geller’s rallies, which I helped out on, marshaled public opinion to beat the 16-story mega-mosque project.

But one thing that conservatives could learn from the Left is never to give up, ever, under any circumstances. That “Islamic cultural center” is set to be built now, even if construction is stalled for the moment.

It’s only set to be three stories high, thirteen fewer than originally planned, but it’s likely that the shifty developer behind the project, Sharif El-Gamal, still hopes it will become, as he once boasted about the larger project, “the most famous community center in the whole world.” Back in those days, El-Gamal was hardly the only one boasting: everyone from then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Barack Obama himself hailed the Ground Zero Mosque as an emblem of national healing.

Sure. Just like a shrine to state Shinto and the Japanese Empire would be an emblem of healing at Pearl Harbor.

There is much more. Read the rest here.