Moving a Muslim community centre and place of worship from its planned location near the site of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York could fuel extremist violence, the imam behind the project said late Wednesday.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf said America's national security was at stake in how it handles the so-called Cordoba House, a $100 million centre which has stirred raw emotions in the United States.

He warned that Muslims worldwide could react more violently than the bloody riots that followed the publication of Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, strengthen extremists' ability to recruit followers and increase violence against Americans.

"If we move from that location, the story will be the radicals have taken over the discourse," the imam told CNN in his first televised interview since returning from a two-week State Department-sponsored cooperation tour of the Middle East.

"The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack."

But he opened the door to compromise, saying that "nothing is off the table" when it comes to moving the site of the planned centre.

"We are consulting, talking to various people about how to do this so that we negotiate the best and safest option."

Acknowledging the uproar that has swelled over the Muslim cultural centre planned to be set up just two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood, the imam said he would have reconsidered the plan if he had foreseen the scale of the controversy.

"If I knew this would happen, this would cause this kind of pain, I wouldn't have done it," he said, without specifying whether he would have changed the location.

"We would not have done something that would create more divisiveness."

Abdul Rauf portrayed his group's fight to set up the centre as a battle between the "moderates" and "radicals" on both sides of the debate.

He also urged a small Florida church to reconsider its plans to go ahead with a Quran burning ceremony to mark Saturday's ninth anniversary of 9/11, a move that has fueled growing fears it will ignite a fresh wave of anti-Muslim sentiment and extremist violence that could endanger US troops.

"It is something that is not the right thing to do," the imam said.

"With freedom comes responsibility," he added. "This is dangerous to our national security and is also the un-Christian thing to do.... Jesus said to love your enemy.

We are not your enemy."

Poll against centre

Most Americans say the planned Muslim community centre and place of worship should not be built in Lower Manhattan, with the sensitive locale being their overwhelming objection, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Two-thirds of those polled object to the prospective Cordoba House complex near the site of the former twin towers, including a slim majority who express strongly negative views.

The new results come alongside increasingly critical public views of Islam: 49 per cent of all Americans say they have generally unfavorable opinions of Islam, compared with 37 per cent who say they have favourable ones.

That's the most negative split on the question in Post-ABC polls dating to October 2001.