The controversial imam at the center of the debate over the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero says his goal is to create coalitions across the religious divide, but during a 2005 conference in Australia, he said America may be worse than Al Qaeda.
"We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims," said Imam Fiesal Abdul Rauf, speaking at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Center during a question and answer session dedicated to what sponsors say was a dialogue to improve relations between America and the Muslim world.
"You may remember that the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations," said Rauf, who called himself a spokesman for Islam. Why Did The UNITED NATIONS Place Sanction???????
But diplomats and others, including former President Bill Clinton, have said that sentiment is wrong. Saddam Hussein's regime corrupted then-U.N. sanctions and denied humanitarian aid to his own people.
In a Nov. 8, 2000, interview on Pacifica Radio, Clinton said if any child is without food or medicine, then Saddam is to blame because the dictator is "lying to the world and claiming the mean, old United States is killing his children."
He explained that frustration and emotions can lead to terrorism, actions he condemned.
"Acts like the London bombing are completely against Islamic law," Rauf said. "Suicide bombing, completely against Islamic law, 100 percent, but the facts of the matter is that people, I have discovered, are more motivated by emotion than logic. If their emotions are in one place and their logic is behind, their emotions will drive their decisions more often than not."'
Raud added that having homes and lives destroyed does not justify "bombing innocent civilians" or "actions of terrorism."
"But after 50 years of -- in many cases -- oppression, of U.S. support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?" Rauf asked, explaining, "I'm just providing you with the arguments that are happening intra-Islamically by those who feel the emotion of pain."
The center that sponsored the discussion says the imam was presented in the interest of open debate and discussion. Rauf's office has not yet responded to a request for reaction about his earlier comment.
The imam is currently on a taxpayer-funded State Department trip to the Mideast, where he is serving as a representative of the United States.
Eric Shawn contributed to this report.
EXPLOSIVE: Masking Mega Mosque Terror Ties, New Jihadist Same As the Old Jihadist, Only Worse
A screenshot of the Perdana page on the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Perdana is the single largest funder of the IHH jihad warship convoy (aka flotilla): Imam Rauf is a prominent figure in this hate group and terror sponsor. He is ranked second, right behind Mahathir Mohammed, the notorious Jew hater from Malaysia who famously said: "Jews control the world by proxy"."
Too much has been exposed about Imam Rauf's deceit, terror ties and real agenda, with much still to be revealed. And so the morphing mosque narrative is taking on a new direction. I debate these shadowy figures, and the narrative changes everyday.
The new front for the Islamic Supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero is Sharif El-Gamal, the developer of Soho Properties. The Imam is "out of town," or at least that's what New York news outlets have been told.
The new face is the businessman and pragmatist, Sharif El-Gamal. But on preliminary analysis, Sharif El-Gamal may be worse than Rauf.
Suleyman Schwartz in this week's Weekly Standard exposes and debunks all the Muslim lies. He got the goods on Rauf, Daisy Con and SOHO (the developer). Sharif El-Gamal is CEO of Soho Properties, Inc., a commercial real estate investment firm he founded in 2003. His partner is Nour Mousa, another guiding figure in the Ground Zero mosque effort and the nephew of Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League. Amr Moussa was the first major Arab leader to go to Gaza and affirm support for Hamas.
This should sink the project, once and for all. Enough. Over at the Weekly Standard: (hat tip Armaros)
Rauf scheme is also associated with financing and support from other doubtful individuals and entities in addition to Perdana, which is led by the notorious Jew-baiter Mahathir bin Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia.
The idea of building an Islamic peace memorial in lower Manhattan was circulating as early as 2003. Its early proponents were two Iranian brothers, M. Jafar "Amir" Mahallati, who served as ambassador of the Iranian Islamic Republic to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989, and M. Hossein Mahallati. Amir Mahallati had served with Rauf in the leadership of an obscure nonprofit, the Interfaith Center of New York, for which Rauf was a vice chair and Mahallati a board member. The two had also participated in a 2006 radio program, "From Turmoil to Tourism: Following the Path of Abraham."
Hossein Mahallati had experience of his own in the intersecting New York worlds of charitable giving and property management. He was director from 1983 to 1992 of the Alavi Foundation, set up in 1973 by the government of the shah of Iran as the Pahlavi Foundation, but taken over and renamed after the Khomeini revolution. The Alavi Foundation is currently the subject of a federal civil action seeking forfeiture of assets, including an office building at 650 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and four Shia mosques and schools in New York, California, Maryland, and Texas.
While U.S. sanctions on the Alavi Foundation, announced in 2009, received little notice, the government's charges are disturbing. They include control of Alavi by the Tehran dictatorship through its diplomats at the United Nations, and transfer of income from the office building at 650 Fifth Avenue to Bank Melli, the Iranian national financial institution. Bank Melli had been designated a "Weapons of Mass Destruction proliferator" by the U.S. Treasury Department. Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey noted, "The international community has recognized the proliferation risks posed by Iran's Bank Melli." In late 2009, the Alavi Foundation's last head, Farshid Jahedi, pled guilty to two felony counts of obstruction of justice for destroying documents about the Alavi-Melli relationship that had been subpoenaed in the investigation, which continues. Jahedi was sentenced on April 29 to three months' imprisonment, six months' supervised release, and a $3,000 fine.
Hossein Mahallati was the subject of an unsuccessful federal inquiry in 1992 regarding an alleged conspiracy to export biological warfare materials to Iran. His predecessor as Alavi director, Manoucher Shafie, who managed the foundation's transition from serving the shah's government to that of Ayatollah Khomeini, was charged with conspiring to export prohibited U.S. technology to Iran. Neither was prosecuted.
Hossein Mahallati remains an enthusiastic supporter of Rauf's Ground Zero enterprise, especially since an Egyptian property developer, Sharif El-Gamal, who appears to be the real leader of the effort, using Rauf as his public face, put up $4.85 million in cash to purchase the location. El-Gamal is chief executive officer of Soho Properties, Inc., a commercial real estate investment firm he founded in 2003. His partner is Nour Mousa, another guiding figure in the Ground Zero mosque effort and the nephew of Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League. Amr Moussa was the first major Arab leader to go to Gaza and affirm support for Hamas, in mid-June, after the recent blockade-running assault.
El-Gamal has kept a low profile in the dispute over the appearance of an Islamic institution near Ground Zero, although last week he appeared before a hearing of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to announce that Cordoba House will now be known as Park51. He and Rauf have both taken to downplaying the religious character of the proposal, preferring that the building be called a "community center."
So far, then, the Ground Zero Islamic facility rests on a support network linked to the anti-Jewish Mahathir and the Perdana-supported Gaza raiders, some notable servants of the Iranian clerical dictatorship, and an Egyptian property developer associated with the pro-Hamas chief of the Arab League.
But the questionable aspects of the Ground Zero Islamic project do not end there. Feisal Abdul Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan, executive director of ASMA, has been one of the most assiduous promoters of the lower Manhattan mega-mosque. She spoke on July 6 to the Chautauqua Institution, celebrating the double heritage she claims: "The first, the American faith-based social activism, a legacy that included the abolitionists, women's suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement. Second, I have inherited the tradition of my faith, a faith that has inspired positive social change for over 1,400 years."
Hundreds of millions slaughtered........ is not my idea of positive social change -- unless you are an Islamic supremacist.
Rauf's wife failed to mention another feature of her background: She is the niece of Dr. Farooq Khan, formerly a leader of the Westbury Mosque on Long Island, which is a center for Islamic radicals and links on its website to the paramilitary Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the front on American soil for the Pakistani jihadist Jamaat e-Islami.
Born in Kuwait in 1948, Feisal Abdul Rauf is the Imam of Masjid al-Farah, a New York City mosque. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Columbia University. His father was the late Muhammad Abdul Rauf (1917-2004).
In 1990 Feisal Abdul Rauf opened al-Farah Mosque in lower Manhattan. Seven years later, he established the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), a New-York based nonprofit organization which has been run by Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan, since 2005.
Rauf is a permanent trustee of an Islamic Cultural Center (ICC) which his father founded in New York City. Until September 28, 2001 -- seventeen days after 9/11 -- the ICC employed Imam Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha, who later said that “only the Jews” could have perpetrated the 9/11 attacks; that if Americans only knew about this Jewish culpability, “they would have done to Jews what Hitler did”; and that Jews “disseminate corruption in the land” and spread “heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs.” Gemeaha’s successor at the ICC, Omar Saleem Abu-Namous, said there was no “conclusive evidence” proving that Muslims were responsible for 9/11.
In a 60 Minutes interview that aired on September 30, 2001, Rauf said that the 9/11 attacks were part of a larger Islamic “reaction against the U.S. government politically, where we [the U.S.] espouse principles of democracy and human rights, and [yet] where we ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these countries.” "I wouldn't say that the United States deserved what happened," Rauf elaborated, "but United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened." Rauf further stated that “because we [Americans] have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world,” it could be said that “[i]n fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.”
On another occasion, Rauf took up this theme again: "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."
Rauf has clearly suggested that terrorism is an understandable, even if unjustified, response to American actions in Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere in the Middle East:
"How do you tell people whose homes have been destroyed, whose lives have been destroyed, that this does not justify your actions of terrorism. It's hard. Yes, it is true that it does not justify the acts of bombing innocent civilians, that does not solve the problem, but after 50 years of, in many cases, oppression, of U.S. support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?
Rauf has praised Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a Muslim scholar who supports Palestinian suicide bombings, as "a very, very well known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world." He has also expressed respect for the late Egyptian cleric Muhammad Tantawi (who likewise endorsed suicide bombings) and Egypt's Chief Mufti, Sheikh Ali Gomaa (who has endorsed Hezbollah and defended Islam's use of the death penalty for apostasy).
Rauf, who has been entrusted with the task of conducting post-9/11 sensitivity training for the FBI, contends that Muslims have been unfairly targeted by law-enforcement authorities in recent years. "There's no doubt we've been profiled since 9/11," he said in 2005. "The Patriot Act has kind of made Muslims -- there's a sense of 'guilty till proven innocent' rather than the other way around."
In the summer of 2002, Rauf began lecturing on Islam at the 750-acre campus of Chautauqua Institution, located in western New York State. Around that time, he also befriended Karen Armstrong, who later wrote the foreword for Rauf's 2004 book, What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America.
Rauf's book suggests that the “American Constitution and system of governance uphold the core principles of Islamic law” (i.e., sharia). The author concludes, therefore, that the “American political structure is sharia-compliant.” In December 2007 Rauf promoted What's Right with Islam at a Malaysia gathering of Hizb ut Tahrir, which seeks to impose sharia on the United States and other countries worldwide.
In July 2010, journalist Andrew McCarthy revealed that What's Right with Islam was originally published in Malaysia under a different title: A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11. What's Right with Islam was a “special, non-commercial edition” of the book and was produced after the original, with Feisal’s cooperation, by the Islamic Society of North America and the International Institute of Islamic Thought. Both of those organizations are American tentacles of the Muslim Brotherhood. McCarthy explains the meaning of the term dawa, from the book's title:
"Dawa, whether done from the rubble of the World Trade Center or elsewhere, is the missionary work by which Islam is spread.... [D]awa is proselytism, but not involving only spiritual elements — for Islam is not merely a religion, and spiritual elements are just a small part of its doctrine. In truth, Islam is a comprehensive political, social, and economic system with its own authoritarian legal framework, sharia, which aspires to govern all aspects of life....
"The purpose of dawa, like the purpose of jihad, is to implement, spread, and defend sharia. Scholar Robert Spencer incisively refers to dawa practices as 'stealth jihad,' the advancement of the sharia agenda through means other than violence and agents other than terrorists. These include extortion, cultivation of sympathizers in the media and the universities, exploitation of our legal system and tradition of religious liberty, infiltration of our political system, and fundraising. This is why Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and the world’s most influential Islamic cleric, boldly promises that Islam will 'conquer America' and 'conquer Europe' through dawa."
Rauf depicts jihad as the Islamic world's defensive reaction to Western provocations, rather than as a seminal Islamic tradition of aggression that long predated any Muslim interactions with the West. In March 2004 the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Rauf as saying: “The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians. But it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.” In one particularly significant passage, the Herald article stated: “Imam Feisal ... said there could be little progress [in American-Islamic relations] until the U.S. acknowledged backing dictators and the U.S. President gave an 'America Culpa' speech to the Muslim world.”
In a June 2005 interview, Rauf was asked whether non-Muslims should be troubled by the Qur'an's assertion that people from other religious traditions should be mistreated, subjugated, or killed. Rauf replied that “many of these verses were revealed in certain contexts where the Prophet [Muhammad] and his followers were not allowed to practice their religion,” and thus “permission was granted to the Muslims to fight those who fought them for that reason.” “The vast history of Islam through the 14 centuries of history,” Rauf added, “has proven that except for certain moments in history, the predominant attitude of Muslims toward non-Muslims, especially to Jews and Christians, was one of friendship, was one of engagement.” In 2009, Rauf took up this theme again, writing: “Religious freedom is at the core of Islam.”
Rauf believes that Muslim charities have been subject to undue scrutiny since 9/11. In 2005 an interviewer asked him to comment on the fact that “some Islamic charities are being investigated for terrorist ties.” Rauf replied: “We believe that a certain portion of every [Islamic] charity has been legitimate. To say that you have connections with terrorism is a very gray area. It's like the accusation that Saddam Hussein had links to Osama bin Laden. Well, America had links to Osama bin Laden – does that mean that America is a terrorist country or has ties to terrorism? It's that type of logic.”
In 2008 Rauf revisited the question of whether sharia could be effectively incorporated into Western legal and political systems. He hailed Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams for the “forward thinking” that had led Williams to advocate on behalf of “plural jurisdiction,” which would permit Muslim enclaves in Britain to be governed by a separate set of laws consistent with sharia. In March 2009, Rauf said that “Islamic law and American democratic principles have many things in common,” and he claimed that sharia's endorsement of “political justice” and “economic justice … for the weak and impoverished” is a creed that “sounds suspiciously like the Declaration of Independence.”
Rauf contends that authentic Islam is highly respectful of women's rights and freedoms. In a 2009 piece he penned for the Huffington Post, Rauf stated: “The Prophet Muhammad has been known as the first feminist. … Gender equality is an intrinsic part of Islamic belief.” In response to suggestions that Islam could benefit from a movement to purge the faith of its unsavory elements, Rauf has said flatly: "Islam does not need a reformation."
In a May 7, 2010 sermon he delivered in New York City, Rauf seemed to suggest that the perpetrators of 9/11 may not actually have been Muslims. “Some people say it was Muslims who attacked [the U.S.] on 9/11,” he said, before drifting into another topic.
In a June 2010 interview with newsman Aaron Klein on New York's WABC Radio, Rauf was asked whether he agreed with the State Department's designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization. Rauf replied:
"I'm not a politician. I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.... I'm a bridge builder. I define my work as a bridge builder. I do not want to be placed, nor do I accept to be placed in a position of being put in a position where I am the target of one side or another."
In recent years, Rauf and ASMA have pursued a project known as the Cordoba Initiative, whose mission is to recapture an “atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and respect” in “Muslim-West relations.” Funded by numerous countries that are members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, this Initiative aims to build a 13-story, $100 million mosque/Islamic Center just 600 feet from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. The proposed name of the structure -- "Cordoba House" -- implies conquest. Indeed, the first Cordoba mosque was built in the Spanish city of Cordoba after the Muslim conquest of Christian Spain in the 8th century AD.
In August 2010, the State Department announced that it would be sending Rauf on a taxpayer-funded trip (costing $16,000) through the Middle East to foster "greater understanding" about Islam and Muslim life in the United States. The Washington Times observed:
“Mr. Rauf is scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar, the usual stops for Gulf-based fundraising.... [The trip] gives Mr. Rauf not only access but imprimatur to gather up foreign cash. And because Mr. Rauf has refused to reveal how he plans to finance his costly venture, the American public is left with the impression it will be a wholly foreign enterprise.”
This was Rauf's fourth U.S.-sponsored trip to the region. The first two took place in 2007 (during the Bush administration), and the third was in early 2010. State Department spokesman Darby Holladay stated that while Rauf "has been advised not to engage in fund-raising activity" during his August 2010 trip, the Department had "no information" regarding the specifics of Rauf's activities while traveling.
Rauf had previously said that he would seek funds from overseas to finance the $100 million mosque project but offered no specifics. A spokesman for the project refused to say whether Rauf would accept money from Iran.
In addition to his work with ASMA, the New York-based Rauf teaches Islam and Sufism at the Center for Religious Inquiry at St. Bartholomew's Church. He also is a member of the World Economic Forum Council of 100 Leaders (Islamic West dialogue); sits on the board of trustees of the Islamic Center of New York; and serves as an adviser to the Interfaith Center of New York.
Moreover, Rauf is a key member in the Malaysian-based Perdana Global Peace Organization, the single biggest donor ($366,000 as of June 2010) to the Free Gaza Movement.
