Razing the Rauf: Ground Zero Mosque Imam, et al, Hazard to the Jews

Wall Street Journal:  Imam Rauf's calls for interfaith  understanding  are “hard to square with his support for a strategy of 'peace' in the service of Israel's long-term destruction.”
Feisal Abdul Rauf, the enigma who until yesterday was the driving force and public face of  the controversial Ground Zero Mosque, will be in Detroit tonight  to keynote the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) Diversity conference.  The conference is being co-hosted by the Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan (CIOM), an umbrella organization of Detroit area Muslim groups, none of which condemned the hateful anti-Semitic rants of Helen Thomas at a local Arab American and Muslim forum last month. And that includes CIOM head Victor Begg with whom our Jewish Relations Community Council recently collaborated.   In fact, several of CIOM’s affiliates and area Muslim leaders voiced strong public support for Thomas and protested Wayne State University’s decision to retire an award named in her honor.

 

That alone should keep our communal Jewish leadership on the warning track away from the ISNA conference.  The Anti-Defamation League,  Simon Wiesenthal Center and Zionist Organization of America are among leading Jewish organizations that have come out in opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque project and the American Jewish Committee has raised troubling questions about the project, its backers and its financing that continue to remain unanswered.  

 If that were not enough, even more troubling is that  ISNA is a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate and unindicted co-conspirator in Hamas terror-financing trial, at which the Holy Land Foundation and five  defendants were found guilty on all 108 charges -- including conspiracy to commit money laundering -- of routing millions to Hamas, a designated terror organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.  ISNA’s attempt to have the designation removed was denied by a judge who ruled in July 2009 that the government produced “ample evidence” to keep it intact.  According to a Justice Department memorandum  submitted in the HLF case: 

During the early years of HLF’s operation, HLF raised money and supported Hamas through a bank account it held with ISNA. . . . Indeed, HLF (under its former name, OLF) operated from within ISNA, in Plainfield, Illinois. . . .  ISNA checks deposited into the ISNA/[North American Islamic Trust] account for the HLF were often made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahideen,” the original name for the Hamas military wing. . . .  From the ISNA/NAIT account, the HLF sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook . . . and a number of other individuals associated with Hamas.

 ISNA, as documented by the Investigative Project on Terrorism and cited in an earlier Talking Tachlis post,  continues to host toxically anti-Semitic speakers and unabashed supporters and apologists for the terror organizations.   AJC ‘s Yehudit Barsky is but one of scores of terrorism experts within Jewish  organizations and those recognized nationally and internationally who have warned about ISNA’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia and the North American Islamic Trust responsible for accelerating extremist Wahabbi-inspired mosque-building activity in the US.  ISNA is an outgrowth of the  The Muslim Student Association which according to the ADL, is  "responsible for organizing many of the most extreme anti-Israel events on campuses across the country over the past few years.

Both ISNA and the Islamic Institute of Thought (IIT), which is another allied organization of the Muslim Brotherhood as listed in its own documents, co-published a “special, non-commercial” edition of  Rauf’s book, initially released in Malaysia as Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post 9-11. According to Andrew McCarthy, “Both ISNA and IIIT have been up to their necks in the promotion of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ruthless Palestinian branch, pledged by charter to the destruction of Israel.”  In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood morphed the MSA into ISNA and created the IIT as a Washington-area think tank dedicated to what it describes as “the Islamicization of knowledge.”

McCarthy’s analysis of Rauf’s  roots with the Muslim Brotherhood and its interlocking tentacles of  ISNA, IIT, Hamas, et al is a MUST-read to understand the Islamist agenda in this country and why the Ground Zero Mosque ,aka Cordoba House, aka Park 51 project is but an iconic symbol of a much grander plan steeped in a history of virulent and violent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic ideology.  As an assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, McCarthy led the prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other NYC landmarks.  He also assisted in the prosecutions of the bombers of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.  Following 9/11, he supervised the US Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Command Post in NYC.

Rauf originally refused to recognize the US designation of Hamas as a terror organization, though asked three times in a WABC radio interview.  It was only after a PR recalculus  in the wake of the uproar of his failure to condemn Hamas that he wisely “reconsidered.”  Just as troubling, he favors a “one-state solution,” code for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.  Speaking to an audience in Australia in 2005, he said, “And I personally – my own personally analysis tells me that a one-state solution is a more coherent one than a two state solution.  Blogger Pamela Geller exposed Rauf’s radical statements in an exclusive Atlas Shrugs post:

A Wall Street Journal editorial this past September sheds light on Rauf’s  anti-Israel postures and pro-Israel posturing.  Encouraging his fellow Muslims in a 1977 letter to the New York Times to embrace Sadat’s historic peace overtures with Israel, Rauf  recalled the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, a 10-year hudna that eventually led to conquest.  In the same letter, the Journal points out, Rauf said:  "In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. . . . In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority."

The Wall Street Journal challenges Rauf’s calls for interfaith harmony as “hard to square with his support for a strategy of "peace" in the service of Israel's long-term destruction.”

Rauf’s comments on Iran have also raised great concern.  Following Iran’s rigged election in June 2009 and the torture and killing of  dissidents that followed, Rauf proclaimed the “official” results of an Ahmadinejad landslide. Iran expert Michael Ledeen quotes Rauf as saying:  “Just as American democracy developed over many years, the United States recognizes that this election is part of the process of an evolving democracy in Iran.”  Notes Ledeen:  “That’s pure appeasement of Iranian tyranny.”

Rauf, he says, recommended to President Obama: 

He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution — to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, that establishes the rule of law.

Ledeen concludes that Rauf’s vision of bridge-building is “simple and straightforward:  applaud the murderers in Tehran.”

Rauf’s statements, coupled with his refusal in a recent ABC interview to rule out possible funding for his mosque development from Iran and many other recently reported connections to Iran, cast great suspicion on his motives for Ground Zero mosque/Islamic center and his  global outreach mission.

ZOA President Morton Klein has also called attention to the “time-honored Muslim supremacist tradition” of erecting mosques over or near hallowed ground of other faiths and cultures.  He cites the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques built atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, where the former Jewish temples once stood, as two examples stretching across lands conquered by Muslims.  Klein also calls out Rauf’s wife and partner in this initiative, Daisy Khan, for comparing opposition to the mosque to a “metastasized anti-Semitim.”  

With this, Ms. Khan told a double untruth: she used the horror of anti-Semitism to malign legitimate opponents as bigots and perverted the meaning of anti-Semitism beyond recognition,” Klein charged. 9/11 mosque opponents are not dehumanizing Muslims. They are not advocating their forcible suppression or elimination. They are not opposing the construction of mosques and the practice of Muslim worship. Rather, they oppose a deeply suspect and breathtakingly insensitive proposal to build this mosque in this place.

Neither Jews nor Christians have committed any assaults upon Saudis - to the contrary, in 1990, U.S. servicemen came to their defense. Yet Saudi Arabia refuses to permit the building of a single church or synagogue and the practice of Christianity or Judaism anywhere in the country. That is genuine anti-Semitism and anti-Christian bigotry, pure and metastasized. But Ms. Khan has never seen fit to summon up outrage, or even interest, in that subject.

Given the recently released FBI hate crime statistics indicating once again that religiously motivated hate crimes directed at Jews top the list by an overwhelming margin (72percent) and given calls in the wake of the horrific shooting rampage in Tuscon for more modulated civil discourse,  our Jewish leaders should not only stay far away from tonight’s  ISNA (Jew)bash, they should also have used their influence as enthusiastic  boosters of the City of Detroit to prevail upon Mayor Dave Bing to reconsider his invitation to deliver welcoming remarks  to the ISNA program. 

[Pretend that a Jewish reporter had delivered a harangue slandering black Americans as racist as Helen Thomas’ Jew-bashing tirades.  Now imagine that no one in Jewish leadership denounced such hateful speech and on the contrary, defended it vigorously.  And now, pretend there was a  Jewish organization federal prosecutors linked to  groups designated by our government as terror organizations calling for the death of blacks.  Would Mayor Bing pander to such a crowd??]

Unless  there has been a philosophical course correction – and there are no indications to suggest so – it is likely that our Jewish leadership has been mute on this, eerily and dangerously reminiscent of the Jewish communal silence when then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrck and Detroit City Council presented the Key to the City and Spirit of Love Award to arch anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan in 2005.

Rauf,  an industrial filter salesman with no formal training as a Muslim cleric has, with US government and international choreography, masterfully packaged himself as the messiah of moderation. But critics point to his extremist connections, radical comments belying his unctuous dissembling and stubborn refusal to budge on the location of the Ground Zero Mosque, despite the anguished appeals of the survivors and families of 9-11 victims.  Rauf, who  is hailed by his admirers as the prince  of outreach, spurned outreach by the Archbishop of New York, former NY Governor  David Paterson,  Donald Trump, and the Russian head of the World Chess Federation, among others offering lucrative deals and appeals to common decency to move the mosque from Ground Zero.

Peter King, new chair of the Homeland Security Committee, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, reassuming her post as Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, blasted Rauf as an "anti-American radical, not a moderate" in a letter they sent to the Secretary of State protesting Rauf's trip to the Mideast as an enovy of the Department's Bureau of International Information Programs.

"Rauf's anti-American rhetoric and equivocation regarding violent extremism should render him unsuitable to conduct outreach for Amercia overseas…Abdul Rauf’s publicly-expressed views make clear that he is an anti-American radical, not a moderate. The United States should not be using our public diplomacy programs around te world to combat such extremism, not endorse it.”

--MT Beadle