The leaders of the initiative to build an Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero insist that central to their objective is dialogue with people of other faiths and healing of the wound jihadists inflicted upon New York and the nation on September 11, 2001. But belying their soothing words is an ever-lengthening record of dishonesty.
Besides being an open advocate for Sharia and restrictions on the freedom of speech in his book What’s Right with Islam, Daisy Khan’s husband, the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, has refused to denounce Hamas. He has lied about his commitment to religious dialogue. He has lied about whether the Islamic center planned for the Ground Zero site will contain a mosque or not. And he has lied about whether or not the project is getting foreign funding. He is involved with a group that helped fund the jihad flotilla against Israel.
And now the courageous ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan reveals that Daisy Khan has openly lied about her, claiming that she invited her to conferences when she didn’t. A similar thing has happened to me: a few years back the noted Islamic scholar Akbar Ahmed said this about me to C-Span’s Brian Lamb: “I know the work of Dr. Spencer and I know a lot of these arguments because I’ve been a scholar of Islam for the last several decades. So, I’m very aware with all my friends and colleagues. And we interact with them. We debate. We discuss.” But this wasn’t true. He has never interacted, debated, or discussed anything with me, and has actually never responded to numerous invitations from me to discuss or debate relevant issues — invitations I have conveyed publicly here at Jihad Watch, in email, and through some of his students who came to one of my university talks.
It is, of course, useful for Daisy Khan, and probably Akbar Ahmed also, to pretend to Infidel audiences that they have engaged the points that people like Wafa Sultan and me make. But in reality, they haven’t. All that Daisy Khan and the other leaders of the Ground Zero mega-mosque initiative can do in regard to their opponents’ arguments is lie and smear them personally. Some “dialogue.”
“Daisy’s Con: Ground Zero Mosque Imam’s Wife Tells Whopper About Me,” by Wafa Sultan at Pajamas Media, August 11 (thanks to all who sent this in):
I recently received a transcript of a Q&A session with Daisy Khan which occured this past July at the Chautauqua Institution. Khan is the wife of the infamous Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — the man behind the highly controversial Islamic supremacist mega-mosque scheduled to be built blocks away from the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Here is the transcript of the question involving me, and Daisy Khan’s response:
Q: There is a woman from the west coast I believe, I’m not sure of her name, her family name is Sultan I think, and maybe something like …
DK: Wafa Sultan.
Q: Yeah. And I’m wondering if you can speak to her, how should I put this … her views are somewhat different and more anti-Islamic, I believe. She has testified in some freedom of speech trial in the Netherlands recently, and I wonder if you can speak about her views and how it all fits together.
DK: Yeah. Umm, the little I know about Wafa Sultan is that she was traumatized as a child, umm, when she was in school, and there was a band of extremists that came in and shot a whole bunch of students in school, and she actually witnessed that. So when you have such a negative memory of religious people, or people doing something (like that) in the name of religion, it is a deep trauma, and I personally believe that this trauma is working through her own work in the United States.
Much of what she says is deeply incoherent. I’m happy to engage with people if they are truly struggling to understand, but you cannot remove 1400 years of evolution of a faith and just call it a bad religion. You know, people like me that are Muslims, and there are millions and billions of Muslims that are good, honorable people. And when you throw the baby out with the bathwater you know that it is just an absolute rejection, and there are people like that exist in every community, and certainly we have our share, uh, but I have a hard time engaging her.
I’ve invited her to several of my conferences, because I try to reach out to people like that, but she has always refused to come.
Although, I did write an article in May of this year exposing Daisy’s husband, Imam Rauf, I have never received a single communication from her and she has never invited me to any of her conferences.
It’s very disturbing that Daisy would lie about having invited me to discuss what is written plainly in the Koran. If she can be so overtly deceptive in front of hundreds of people in the audience about such a trivial matter as an invitation to a conference, surely her credibility is damaged by such a performance, and her integrity has been severely compromised. She lies about offering an invitation to me and misrepresents Islam when addressing audiences about interfaith unity.
I have devoted my life to exposing the brutality and political, totalitarian nature of Islam. This is why Khan tries to demonize me, and why she labors so diligently to obscure the truth.
It’s clear that Daisy Khan has no problem evading the indisputable historical evidence within Islamic doctrine that demands the subjugation of all non-Muslims to its tenets, and the punishment given to all who reject its authority. This is the source of Daisy’s problem with me, judging from her accusations against me and her evaluation of what she considers my anti-Islamic sentiments. Apparently, she — like her husband — is skilled in the practice of taqiyyah: lying when dealing with non-Muslims, a practice fully sanctioned and promoted within Islam.
As the point-men for the proposed Ground Zero mosque, both Daisy and Imam Rauf demonstrate how agile they can be at deflecting legitimate scrutiny of their actions and obscuring their true intentions. Daisy Khan’s dishonesty about having invited me to attend her conferences is characteristic of the kind of maneuvering and manipulation she engages in with her audiences.
As for my understanding of Islam: unlike Daisy Khan, I grew up in Syria, studying Islamic texts in Arabic. Daisy Kahn, on the other hand, was born in Kashmir, where Arabic is not her first language. That makes me better qualified to understand Islam than Daisy.
My “trauma” is not merely the result of isolated childhood experiences, or one incident that occurred when I was in medical school. The trauma built up as a result of countless acts of vicious violence and cruelty which I witnessed during my thirty-two years living in Syria. These crimes were committed in particular against women.
My niece was eleven years old when she was forced to marry a man in his forties. She suffered tremendously and endured horrific abuse and humiliation — behavior not only taught under the prescriptions for the treatment of women and wives in particular, but mandated under Islamic Law, or sharia. Although she pleaded with her father to escape from the hell she suffered under her abusive husband, she was not allowed to end the marriage.
She was twenty-eight when she finally gave up and committed suicide.
During my practice as a physician, I have treated numerous abused women who were severely beaten and raped. If that weren’t enough, now that I have left Islam, I too am subjected to the cruel death penalty sanctioned by sharia against apostates….