At ground zero, Sept. 11 gets political....

[one_voice]

NEW YORK — For the first time in nine years, the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks became a day of protest, as a circus-like clash of demonstrations — ostensibly over the Cordoba House mosque — filled the streets of lower Manhattan on Saturday for several hours following the somber reading of the litany of the lost.

The blocks around ground zero, on anniversaries past, have been relatively quiet and a bit ghostly as the official ceremony has been conducted, with four moments of silence marking two planes striking two towers that collapsed upon impact.

But construction at the World Trade Center site has advanced far enough that the ceremony has been forced blocks away, and moments after the reading of the names of the dead finished, more than 2,000 people crowded outside City Hall for a pro-Cordoba House rally.

Hours later, more than 1,500 gathered for an anti-mosque rally two blocks west, organized by conservative blogger Pamela Geller and featuring a video from former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton and a relatively tame speech by anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

In between, on the streets near ground zero, anger frothed over with ugly exchanges. An elderly woman was knocked down and was tended to by police, a Muslim man with a small child in a stroller was shouted at for several minutes by an anti-mosque protester, and an attention-seeking man ripped and burned pages of the Quran.

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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42016.html