Imam Threatens U.S., Says If Mosque Moves, Terror Will 'Explode'

(ABC News) - A Muslim imam behind a proposed cultural center two blocks from New York's Ground Zero said he must build there despite angry protests in order to defend America and its citizens against a "danger from the radicals in the Muslim world to our national security."

If he could start over, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf said, he would propose a different site for his project.

"If I knew this would happen, that this would cause this kind of pain, I wouldn't have done it," Rauf, 61, said in an interview with CNN's Soledad O'Brien on "Larry King Live" Wednesday evening. "My life has been dedicated to peacemaking."

But, capping a daylong rhetorical offensive that began Wednesday morning with an opinion piece in The New York Times, Rauf said he intends to go ahead with the "multifaith" center near the site where Islamic terrorists killed nearly 2,800 people because not doing so would unleash fury abroad.

"If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse," Rauf told CNN. "The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack.

"There is a certain anger here [in America], no doubt," he said later in the interview. "But if we don't do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world. If we don't do things correctly, this crisis could become much bigger than the Danish cartoon crisis [over images depicting the Prophet Mohammed], which resulted in attacks on Danish embassies in various parts of the Muslim world. And we have a much bigger footprint in the Muslim world."