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Hitchens and the Ground Zero mosque imam

Christopher Hitchens has a few choice words about the imam,
A Test of Tolerance
The “Ground Zero mosque” debate is about tolerance—and a whole lot more (emphasis added)

I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy. The letterhead of the statement, incidentally, describes him as the Cordoba Initiative’s “Founder and Visionary.” Why does that not delight me, either?

Emboldened by the crass nature of the opposition to the center, its defenders have started to talk as if it represented no problem at all and as if the question were solely one of religious tolerance. It would be nice if this were true. But tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything “offensive” to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

As for the gorgeous mosaic of religious pluralism, it’s easy enough to find mosque Web sites and DVDs that peddle the most disgusting attacks on Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and other Muslims—to say nothing of insane diatribes about women and homosexuals. This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be “phobic.” A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational.

From my window, I can see the beautiful minaret of the Washington, D.C., mosque on Massachusetts Avenue. It is situated at the heart of the capital city’s diplomatic quarter, and it is where President Bush went immediately after 9/11 to make his gesture toward the “religion of peace.” A short while ago, the wife of a new ambassador told me that she had been taking her dog for a walk when a bearded man accosted her and brusquely warned her not to take the animal so close to the sacred precincts. Muslim cabdrivers in other American cities have already refused to take passengers with “unclean” canines.

Another feature of my local mosque that I don’t entirely like is the display of flags outside, purportedly showing all those nations that are already Muslim. Some of these flags are of countries like Malaysia, where Islam barely has a majority, or of Turkey, which still has a secular constitution. At the United Nations, the voting bloc of the Organization of the Islamic Conference nations is already proposing a resolution that would circumscribe any criticism of religion in general and of Islam in particular. So, before he is used by our State Department on any more goodwill missions overseas, I would like to see Imam Rauf asked a few searching questions about his support for clerical dictatorship in, just for now, Iran. Let us by all means make the “Ground Zero” debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance.

As you may recall from yesterday’s post, the imam believes the US is worse than al-Qaeda; The imam is the guy the State Department calls

“a moderate Muslim figure here in the United States” who preaches “religious tolerance throughout the world.”

As Ron Radosh states

Rauf is the Obama administration’s and the State Department’s man in the Middle East, sent to assure his audiences that the US will be sensitive to their needs, and is ever ready to appease them in the interests of “peace.” We do all this, while the Imam tells his audiences quite the opposite .” Like them, he wants the destruction of Israel, rationalizes terrorism and accuses the United States of real terrorism against Muslims, while seeking to have his fellow Americans accept the Islamic theocracy as the regime he says is favored by the people of Iran.

How much longer can the fiction be maintained that this man and his proposed Ground Zero mosque is a moderate and a man of peace?

Ryan Mauro looks at other Ground Zero mosque supporters,

Another signatory of the letter is Suhail Khan, a long-time associate of Norquist’s. Khan’s father served as Vice President of the Muslim Students Association, founded by the Brotherhood. His father also served as an official of the Islamic Society of North America, another Brotherhood-tied group currently listed by the government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Holy Land Foundation trial, a designation shared with the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Khan’s mother served on the board of CAIR’s California branch and Khan accused critics of CAIR of exploiting the Fort Hood shooting for their “political partisan and worse, for their racist ends.” Frank Gaffney, President of the Center for Security Policy, told me that an FBI Special Agent involved in terrorism investigations informed him that Khan is indeed a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Imam’s wife is also traveling on US taxpayer’s dime. Claudia Rosett explains how the two are Cashing In On Ground Zero

Among the prime planners of a $100 million Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero, it’s not just Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who is visiting the Middle East this summer at U.S. taxpayer expense. The State Department is also about to send Rauf’s wife and Cordoba Initiative fellow director, Daisy Khan, on her own taxpayer-funded “public diplomacy” trip to the United Arab Emirates. Khan is scheduled to visit the UAE from Aug. 29 to Sept. 2, overlapping there with Rauf, for whom it will be the final leg of a three-country trip including Bahrain and Qatar.

The Imam & Mrs are on a roll,

For Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan, Ground Zero has become a bonanza. Since their plans hit the headlines this spring, they have achieved celebrity status on a scale that millions in advertising, or less abrasive “outreach” efforts, could not buy. Their names are all over the news. Their project has become a fixture on the summer talk shows. In the escalating furor, along with the criticisms , they have received de facto endorsements from such prominent folks as New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama (whose supportive remarks about their project, delivered at an Aug. 13 Iftar dinner at the White House, are now featured on U.S. embassy websites worldwide; but whose later waffling is not). Their real-estate partner, El-Gamal, has told the press, “This might become the most famous community center in the world.” Whatever comes of this, Rauf, Khan and El-Gamal are likely to dine out on it–and well–for a long time.

And make no mistake. While the Cordoba Initiative is now implying on its website that the mosque and Islamic center is mainly about serving a neighborhood, and “is not located at Ground Zero,” Rauf himself told a very different tale to the New York Times last December. Back then, Rauf said the location’s chief attraction was its proximity to Ground Zero–so close that it is, as he noted, “Where a piece of the wreckage fell.” In Rauf’s view, that made for an ideal venue to make “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

And, by the way, Claudia Rosett made the trip on far less than $12,000,

Hmmm. I flew out to the UAE this spring, spent more time there than they plan to, spent another two weeks in Turkey, stayed in some very pleasant hotels, hired cars, ate well, and somehow it all came to significantly less than Khan’s trip alone… next time, I’ve got to get this right.

But then, Claudia wasn’t flying at US taxpayers’ expense.

The question remains, Why Are We ‘Driving Ms. Daisy’? And her husband, too?

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Imam Feisal and the one-state solution

A lot of people have been posting on Imam Feisal’s statement saying the USA is worse than al-Qaeda,

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: “We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it.

Bad enough, yes.
But there’s also this, which Andy McCarthy noticed,

We now have post-Zionism movements in Israel. We have a very broad spectrum of people in Israel who regard Israel as a nation state, as a secular state, as a multicultural state. The very fabric and demographic, and I would say even identity, of Israel has shifted enormously in the last 60 years since its founding. . . .

The differences, perhaps, may lie on whether the solution lies in the two-state solution or in a one-state solution. I believe that you had someone here recently who spoke about having a “one land and two peoples” solution to Israel. And I personally — my own personal analysis tells me that a one-state solution is a more coherent one than a two-state solution.

No, he is not talking about Israel being the “one state”; to the contrary. What it means is, as McCarthy explains,

This is the “solution to Israel” preferred by the Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Israel Left.

For the Islamists, the terror campaign of Hamas (which is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch) is a method of keeping up the pressure. It is not something they believe will, by itself, destroy Israel. Terrorism is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. The end in question here is the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Hamas is pledged to use violent jihad, but the important thing is accomplishing the mission, not how it is accomplished.

The idea is that once Israel’s status as a Jewish state is delegitimized and democratically overturned, the Palestinian territories can be formally joined to Israel, and it will soon become a Palestinian Islamic state — at which point there will be no further need for democracy. That’s the one-state political solution. It just happens to be the same as Hamas’s terrorist solution: No more Israel.

McCarthy also wants to know why is the State Department paying for the Imam’s tour of the Middle East?

For anyone who has studied how the Brotherhood operates, taken note of Rauf’s Brotherhood associations, and listened to the imam’s slippery answers to simple questions such as Do you believe Hamas is a terrorist organization?, none of this is surprising. But it does raise a question for the Obama administration as it pressures Israel to return to the negotiating table: If the official policy of the United States is that Hamas is a terrorist organization and that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “two states living side-by-side in peace,” how can the State Department be using, for diplomatic missions to Arab states, an emissary who doesn’t believe Hamas is a terrorist organization and who favors a one-state solution in which the Jewish state is disappeared?

Good question.

For more of the Imam’s words, go to Pamela’s post. Here’s the video, but you must read the rest,

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Today’s Ground Zero mosque roundup with VIDEO

(will be adding to this post throughout the day)

Charles Krauthammer spells out the Moral myopia at Ground Zero

Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers — according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., more than 80 million souls — it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.

Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.

No Sheeples Here has the video as part of a great post,

Scott Johnson has the latest about Rauf on the road

Claudia Rosett has taken a professional interest in the taxpayer-funded travels of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. For reasons that escape me, Rosett is apparently alone in her efforts. In any event, in a dispatch posted late last night, Rosett reports:

[L]ate Thursday night, New York time — Thursday morning in the Middle East — I phoned the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain, the first stop on Rauf’s “public diplomacy” tour.

Asked if the imam had arrived in Bahrain, an embassy official told me: “Yes, that’s correct.”

And that, folks, is the sum total right now of the information available to the American public about the taxpayer-funded public outreach activities these next few days of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in Bahrain. I had more questions. But Imam Feisal evidently moves in circles in which inquiries about whom he’s meeting overseas, what he’s telling them, or where he plans to get $100 million for his mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero are seen by both Rauf and his hosts as an extraordinary intrusion on his public outreach and bridge-building endeavors. The U.S. Embassy in Bahrain would offer nothing further on the record about Ambassador Adam Ereli’s controversial guest. There is so far no reply to queries I emailed to the U.S. embassies in Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE.

Jammie links to a NY Daily News article on the unions – no building goes up in New York City without union work: The workers are even wearing stickers on their hardhats,

They won’t build it! Hardhats vow not to work on controversial mosque near Ground Zero

A growing number of New York construction workers are vowing not to work on the mosque planned near Ground Zero.
…
The grass-roots movement is gaining momentum on the Internet. One construction worker created the “Hard Hat Pledge” on his blog and asked others to vow not to work on the project if it stays on Park Place.

“Thousands of people are signing up from all over the country,” said creator Andy Sullivan, a construction worker from Brooklyn. “People who sell glass, steel, lumber, insurance. They are all refusing to do work if they build there.”

Darleen has the cartoon (click on it for larger image),

And one of this year’s greatest ironies, Ground Zero Mosque Proponents Now Seeking Support of … George W. Bush

El Cid Versus the Mosque, Part 1

As a counterweight to Imam Rauf’s propaganda coup, The El Cid Project aims to establish a different narrative around the hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan. The Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, popularly known as “El Cid”, led a successful campaign in the 11th century against the Moors. He is a hero of the Reconquista, the centuries-long Christian struggle to drive the Muslims out of Iberia.

In 1961 El Cid was made into a movie starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. It’s a gorgeous production — they don’t make movies like that anymore. Just imagine: Christian soldiers marching proudly into battle under the banner of the Cross — in a Hollywood movie!

What a difference fifty years makes.

The El Cid Project proposes screening the movie near the Ground Zero site. We’ll do our part by showing a YouTube version of it here in seventeen installments

Here is part 1,

Watch the rest here.

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Today’s “WTF?” moment belongs to Russell Simmons

Russell Simmons on Ground Zero mosque: We didn’t blame all Christians for the first WTC bombing, did we?

We certainly shouldn’t, Russell, since that was Muslims, too. Andrew McCarthy will tell you all you need to know (and more!) about the attack.

If Russell had in mind the Oklahoma City bombing and mispoke, he should also be advised that Timothy McVeigh was not a Christian terrorist. Indeed, McVeigh was “an avowed agnostic“.

Hat tip: First saw the link at Ace’s, who posted it in his Email Response to a Rightie Suggesting We Support the Ground Zero Mosque.

And two more things:
1. Contrary to what AP would like to believe, The Ground Zero Mosque actually is at Ground Zero. On September 11, 2001, this part of the JetBombs fell on the Burlington Coat Factory building:

This part of the planes that crashed on the World Trade Center buildings actually fell on the Burlington Coat Factory building and damaged it.

In a conversation this morning with Jeff Dunetz, we both discussed whether the building has been checked for human remains that scattered all through the neighborhood, and whether any would be found in a search. I don’t know the answer to that.

Also at Ground Zero was St Nicholas Church, which has been denied permission to rebuild.

2. The Mosque is intended to be a magnet center for Muslims and Sharia – particularly in its location at the financial center, as a vehicle for Sharia finance; The area is already served by two other mosques. How many Muslims are in the area now? Sultan Knish did the numbers:

Imam Rauf and his media defenders have compared this to building a Jewish community center. But there are over 25,000 Jewish household in Lower Manhattan, or almost 20 percent of the population. There is no statistically significant Muslim population in the area. The 2000 census showed 3,522 people living in the Ground Zero mosque zip code, 375 of whom identified as Asian. Considering the proximity of Chinatown, it’s likely that they actually are Asian, as opposed to Pakistani or Bangladeshi. (And the director of Al Arabiya has confirmed that: “there are no practicing Muslims in the area who need a place to worship“.) What the census numbers also show is that the mosque is being built in an area with a small residential population, that is heavily commercial, with far more offices than homes. Even if everyone living in that zip code were a Muslim, Rauf would still be proposing to spend nearly 30,000 dollars per Muslim on the mosque. But since they are not Muslims, what Rauf is proposing is a 100 million dollar expansion in an area whose Muslims are outside commuters and generally use basement and storefront mosques.

Building a 100 million dollar facility for Muslims that most of them can only use on their lunch break or briefly after work, before they go home to Brooklyn or New Jersey, is not about serving the community. It’s about making a statement. There would be no way to raise that kind of money otherwise. Rauf is not building a facility that local Muslims need. His flock comes from different boroughs and states entirely. They hang around Lower Manhattan as part of the Hallal Mafia, peddling unhygienic burned food from carts, or in storefronts selling cheap knockoffs of brand name merchandise, pirated DVD’s and used clothes below Broadway. Some of them work as financial analysts helping Wall Street get the whole Sharia Finance thing right.

There might be a call for a 100 million dollar facility aimed at Muslims in Jersey City or off Atlantic Avenue, but no need or use for it near Ground Zero. There is no reason to build a Mosque there, except to make a statement. Rauf admitted as much early on, billing the mosque as part of a campaign of tolerance or healing. knowing that most liberals would not look past such euphemisms and enthusiastically embrace the project to showcase their vaunted tolerance, and rejection of “right wing extremists”. That Rauf himself is quite the extremist has not interested them at all. The same Time Magazine which wrings its hands over the “politicization” of Ground Zero has whitewashed Rauf and his own plans to politicize the site. Just as the rest of the media has ignored the inconsistencies in Rauf’s changing story, questions about where the money is coming from, and the most elementary question– who actually needs the Ground Zero Mosque.

In today’s news, Iran cash might fund Ground Zero mosque, as the developers of the Ground Zero mosque are refusing to flat out reject Iranian funds for the project.

Russell won’t blame the Christians for that, we hope.

(post re-edited to include several omitted paragraphs and links)

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Pelosi wants to investigate the Ground Zero mosque opposition UPDATED

Not the funding sources (one doesn’t just come up with $100,000,000 out of the blue, outside of Nancy’s world), not the whereabouts of the traveling Imam, not even the destinations to which his taxpayer-bankrolled tickets will take him (to use Claudia Rosett’s phrase) or who approved his trip at the State Department. No.
Rep. Pelosi calls for investigation of WTC mosque opposition (emphasis added)

“There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” she said

Nice Deb has the audio,

Dan Blatt wonders Has Nancy Pelosi Read the First Amendment?

Now, an investigation of a political protest movement may pass constitutional muster, but it certainly smacks of authoritarianism.  An investigation does not mean she favors abridging freedom or speech or curtailing “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” which is what opponents of the “Ground Zero Mosque” have been doing.  But, she sure doesn’t seem comfortable with it.

Why, may I ask, does she need to know how this is being “ginned up”?  Why can’t she jut take issue with their arguments without casting aspersions at their motives?

Wonder if she also wants to investigate her Senate counterpart, Harry Reid who thinks the mosque should be built elsewhere?  Guess she’ll also be calling for an investigation of Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid, director of Al-Arabiya TV who wrote  that the “last thing Muslims want today is to build just a religious center out of defiance to the others, or a symbolic mosque that people visit as a museum next to a cemetery.“

My sense is that an investigation will find that opposition to the mosque hasn’t been ginned up (as Mrs. Pelosi might put it) by some dark and sinister (in Pelosi speak, read conservative) forces, but is merely the grassroots opposition of a good number of Americans who don’t think it appropriate to build such a center so close to Ground Zero site, as Charles Krauthammer so eloquently put it, “of the greatest mass murder in American history — perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.“

It’s not just that, a number of opponents (of the mosque) have raised questions about its funding, the leader of the project, even the rationale behind its name.  Their opposition is not based on animosity against Islam per se, but based on serious questions about the project’s purpose.

Particularly when the project is named Cordoba Initiative.

UPDATE
Whoa! – I almost missed this, but Gates of Vienna has the link,
Ground Zero Mosque’s Hidden Websites: Follow the Shariah

Do the math.  The 15 floors planned for the Ground Zero Mosque just don’t add up.
…
Why don’t the 15 floors add up? How many floors does Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf need for the mosque portion of this triumphal Islamic command center planned for the two building sites at 45-47 Park Place in New York City?  Think about it: maybe 2 floors for the mosque itself and related offices.  A 3rd floor for the swimming pool, a 4th for the 500 seat auditorium, a 5th for the halal restaurant and halal culinary school, a 6th for the art studios, the childcare center and library, a 7th for the gym and basketball court.  Add an 8th floor for miscellaneous storage and offices.  And then add a 9th floor for the September 11 memorial, an after-thought that was recently added to the Imam’s plan, although that may in fact be more of a room off to one side than a whole floor.

That leaves six mystery floors empty – or dedicated to other activities. Six floors – that’s a lot of offices, a lot of employees, maybe more than half of the 150 full-time and 500 part-time jobs the Imam says he’ll bring to Lower Manhattan.   What are Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s plans for those six mystery floors?

Follow the Shariah Index Project to solve the puzzle of the 6 mystery floors: We found two hidden websites with  copiously deleted information, all about the Imam’s Cordoba Institute Shariah Index Project.  For reference, here’s the Imam’s most recent hidden website (also available here as a pdf).  And here’s the Imam’s earlier hidden website (also available here as a pdf).  The information on those websites – information that the Imam tried to hide with a new whitewashed version – suggests that the six mystery floors of the Ground Zero Mosque will be dedicated to the Imam’s long-term goal: the Shariah Index Project, designed to benchmark Shariah compliance, to distribute Shariah propaganda, and to enforce Shariah law in America and worldwide.

Drawing from those hidden webpages and other sites, we’ve constructed a timeline for the Shariah Index Project and a partial list of Rauf’s partners in the Project.  In Part 2, we’ll reveal the disturbing background and views of those partners.  And in Part 3, we’ll present the bottom line – how this all ties together as a historic Islamist effort to market and to enforce Shariah in America, starting from Ground Zero.

Numbered Documents, for everyone’s convenience! Below, from the hidden websites, is the evidence Rauf tried to cover-up.  We’ve even numbered the Shariah Index Project documents he mentioned, to make it easy for the Imam and his staff – for example, Courtney Erwin, attorney and director of the Shariah Index Project and corporate contact for the Cordoba Institute –  to provide copies to the American public.

Go read it all.

If Nancy wants an investigation, she ought to start there.

Bonus link:
Who’s writing the Tweets? (h/t Drudge, as if he needs my traffic)

UPDATE 2
In case you’re wondering what the hey Nancy was talking about when she wondered off to “Treasure Island”, Michelle Malkin has the details:
Pelosi and the Treasure Island land grab

Pelosi has used her power to push the crony-infested project for years. She pushed aggressively for legislative language that would have forced the military to fork over high-value property at no cost to local communities. And as the Washington Times recounted last fall, she presided over a “den of corruption” to secure the coveted property

That’s only the start. Go read the rest.

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