The slick and smug imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, former front man and continuing board member for the Ground Zero mosque project, and the posturing adolescent Reza Aslan, appeared together last night at UCLA. It was a revealing harmonic convergence of stealth Islamic supremacists. If I weren't speaking in Ohio tonight, I would have been there to ask some pointed questions of both of them.
Dishonesty and disingenuousness are the golden threads running through the careers and public statements of both Rauf and Aslan. Rauf is the self-proclaimed "man of peace" who has won such renown as a "moderate" that both Bush and Obama sent him to Muslim countries on goodwill missions. But as Pamela Geller has explained:
It is clear that Rauf and other mosque leaders are not as moderate as they claim to be. Rauf has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood...The Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated, according to a captured internal document, to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” Rauf’s book What’s Right with Islam says on the copyright page that “this edition was made possible through a joint effort of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the office of Interfaith and Community Alliance of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Funding for this project was provided by IIIT.” Both IIIT and ISNA are Muslim Brotherhood fronts, and ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case.
Rauf refused to condemn Hamas until the public outcry became too great for him to ignore. He was a prominent member of the Perdana organization, which bankrolled the jihad flotilla sent against Israel last year, on which the "peaceful" passengers were chanting a genocidal and antisemitic Islamic jihad chant.
Also, Rauf has said that “the US and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end.” He has claimed that “Western active involvement in shaping the internal affairs of Islamic societies have contributed to the creation of terrorism done in the name of Islam.” In other words, defending ourselves against jihad terrorism just creates jihad terrorism, so we should stop defending ourselves.
Rauf has carried his blame game even farther, claiming: “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.” He even said on 60 Minutes shortly after 9/11 that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA."
The Arabic translation of Rauf’s book What's Right with Islam is disturbingly entitled A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of Post-9/11 America. This indicates that he has planned for years to spread Islam and Sharia from the site of the 9/11 attacks -- belying his more recent claims that he intends the mosque to be a center for reconciliation and peace.
Geller adds: "In his book, Rauf supports and justifies Sharia law, and calls for restrictions on free speech in America. He has written another book that has gotten little notice: Islam: A Sacred Law—What Every Muslim Should Know About Sharia. In it he explains why God’s law is superior to manmade law, or that is, why Sharia is better than democracy."
Geller also notes that Rauf "snagged more than $2 million in public financing to renovate low-income apartments" that he owned in New Jersey, but never made the renovations. Where is that money?
He has also been completely dishonest about the mosque project itself. Now it is a community center nowhere near Ground Zero, but when it was initially announced Rauf was forthright, saying: “New York is the capital of the world, and this location close to 9/11 is iconic.” That statement has now been scrubbed from the online version of the New York Times article in which it initially appeared.
Rauf even threatened America over this project, saying that if the mosque were not built, “if we don’t do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world....If we don’t handle this crisis correctly, it could become something very dangerous indeed.”
Aslan, for his part, is no less unsavory. Despite his pretentious puffery and literary mummery, he has revealed himself to be a arrogant gutter-minded buffoon who appears incapable of staking out or defending a coherent intellectual position, and instead (like Rauf) retails tired and oft-retreaded Islamic supremacist talking points about Muslim victimhood.
His Islamic supremacist ties and proclivities are becoming more ill-concealed by the day; nonetheless, he remains a heralded and media-saturated "moderate" Muslim. In reality, Aslan is a Board member of the National Iranian American Council, a group that genuine Iranian pro-democracy forces regard as an apologetic vehicle for the Islamic Republic of Iran. He has tried to pass off Iran's genocidally-minded President Ahmadinejad as a liberal reformer. He has called on the U.S. Government to negotiate with Ahmadinejad himself, as well as with Hamas -- that is, with two of the most barbaric and murderous adherents of Sharia.
Aslan has even praised the jihad terror group Hizballah as "the most dynamic political and social organization in Lebanon," as well as the Jew-hating, women-hating, kuffar-hating Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated in its own words to "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within" -- including, presumably, the works of Andy Warhol. Aslan wrote: "The Muslim Brotherhood will have a significant role to play in post-Mubarak Egypt. And that is good thing." If, in 1932, someone had written that "the National Socialist Party will have a significant role to play in post-Weimar Germany, and that is a good thing," he would have rightly been called a Nazi sympathizer.
Aslan has also spoken at events sponsored by the Muslim Students Association, a Brotherhood group, and at an event co-sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of Hamas-linked CAIR, and moderated by the notorious Edina Lekovic, the Muslim Public Affairs Council flack whom Steve Emerson caught lying on national television, denying she was editor of a Muslim student publication that praised Osama bin Laden as a great mujahid. Emerson produced copies of the rag showing Lekovic's name on the masthead as editor on the very same page on which the praise for Osama appeared.
These guys are speaking at UCLA tonight. I hope patriots will be there too, ready with courteous, polite, and pointed questions.
"Celebrated Imam to Speak at UCLA," by Brantley Watson for the Westwood-Century City Patch, May 3:
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, which seeks to develop projects that mend conflict between Western and Islamic communities, is scheduled to be the subject of a Q & A segment at Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA Wednesday night. [...]Wednesday’s Q & A will begin at 8 p.m. and will be moderated by Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American activist, as well as an internationally recognized scholar and writer. Tickets are free and available at the UCLA Central Ticket Office, or the Royce Hall box office on Wednesday evening beginning at 7pm. Tickets are also available at the Hammer Museum in Westwood at the front desk.
RSS Feed
In other words, defending ourselves against jihad terrorism just creates jihad terrorism, so we should stop defending ourselves.
.........................
Yes.