The imam behind the Park51 mosque planned two blocks from Ground Zero said he would find a different spot if he could do it all over again.
“I would never have done it,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf replied when asked by Christiane Amanpour if he would have planned the mosque if he knew the divisiveness it would cause.
Rauf told ABC’s “This Week” in an interview that aired yesterday that the mosque’s goal was to promote peace not “provoke controversy.”
But now that the project has become a heated national and international debate, any changes to the plan have to consider “what is best for everybody,” he said
The debate over the mosque has been taken over by radicals on both sides of the dispute, he said.
“My major concern with moving it is that the headline in the Muslim world will be ‘Islam is under attack in America,’” he added.
