The imam behind a proposed mosque near Ground Zero is a prominent member of a group that helped sponsor the pro-Palestinian activists who clashed violently with Israeli commandos at sea this week. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a key figure in Malaysian-based Perdana Global Peace Organization, according to its Website. Perdana is the single biggest donor ($366,000) so far to the Free Gaza Movement, a key organizer of the six-ship flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip Monday.
Nine passengers aboard the largest ship died in clashes with Israeli commandos, and a new confrontation loomed today, when another Free Gaza Movement ship was due to reach Gaza waters in defiance of Israel.
Efforts to reach Imam Abdul Rauf yesterday for comment were unsuccessful.
Debra Burlingame, the sister of the American Airlines pilot whose hijacked plane struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, said the indirect ties of the imam to the protesters who confronted Israeli forces Monday were not surprising. “I think it goes to show he is not the man he represents himself to be. We have two Imam Raufs,” she said. “We have the anti-Israel, anti-democratic imam, and we have the smiling, soft-spoken moderate Muslim who says ‘Why can’t we all get along?'”
Screen shot of Perdana Global Peace Organization web site page for Rauf:
Click image to enlarge
Stop Islamization of America is conducting a rally noon to 3 PM, Sunday, June 6, 2010, at the corner of Church and Liberty Street in lower Manhattan to protest the sharia-compliant mosque, “fun center,” and “party space,” aka Cordoba House, being built within Ground Zero’s kill zone.
That is quite a headline ‘NYers wage jihad vs. WTC mosque’ in the New York Post this morning with their third report on last night’s Community Board 1 meeting. Things got a little heated. But then, “things” were really heated on 9/11, in the Towers, and down in the Pit; 2,752 were murdered and 1,100 families have yet to receive even one speck of human remains after sharia-compliant Muslims slaughtered their loved ones.
Debra Burlingame addressed the board last night, “I am actually, in a way, glad that this has happened, this controversy, because finally, maybe, Americans, New Yorkers will start asking questions. Top of the list: What is Shariah?”
Was it political correctness, ignorance, or submissiveness to political Islam that led 29 board members (with one ‘nay’ and 10 abstentions) to vote in favor of Imam Rauf’s proposed Cordoba House?
The New York Post reports:
“We are Americans, we are Muslim Americans,” Rauf said. “Many of us were born in the United States. We have no higher aspirations than to bring up our children in peace and harmony in this country.”
But the crowd got ugly when he added, “Freedom of assembly is the right of all Americans.”
Amid boos, one woman shouted, “Not at the World Trade Center!”
Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, followed him to the microphone to pitched the planned community facility as “much needed party space and much needed venue space” for the area.
She was roundly booed.
Some audience members preached tolerance for the Muslim leaders.
Finally, a liberal politician we can agree with: Scott Stringer.
We reject the outright bigotry, oppression, and the savagery of Shariah that Imam Rauf and the money-men inside this Trojan Horse rolling towards sacred ground want imposed here in America upon women, gays, and all non-believers of Islam. And that is why we oppose a sharia-compliant “cultural and Muslim fun center” at Ground Zero two blocks north of the World Trade Center.
“Imam Rauf is now publicly stating in a professionally-organized PR campaign that the building will be a community center, “not a mosque.” However, [property owner] Mr. El-Gamal showed 9/11 [Families for a Safe & Strong America] members architectural renderings in which a mosque, located on the top floor of the 15-story building, would have a commanding view of the entire Ground Zero neighborhood.”
Some “cooler heads” preached tolerance last night. It is a good thing to hear the Word, especially from within ones own heart guiding each of us in our actions. We wish those men and women of God well as they bring their various faiths to Riyadh, Waziristan, Sana’a, Kuala Lumpur, Tehran, and Medina and openly preach to the people there. Godspeed!
Our friend Michelle Malkin linked over and weighs in with a reminder of an elevator ride now forever gone.
Imam Rauf, via his allies the editors of the New York Daily News, was ready with his spin this morning. He has already received a lot of feedback in the comments. (Couldn’t the News have blown Rauf up (figuratively) a little larger in its graphic? Remember the grieving Lebanese mother in her black hijab showing up in front of more than one destroyed house during the last Israel-Lebanon war, each time claiming her home had been bombed by Israel? The News should have Photoshopped her in, along with a backdrop of the destroyed WTC, and had Rauf holding a sign saying “Backlash against Muslims; 300 murdered; ‘United States policies were an accessory to the crime.'”)
As I noted at 12:49 PM today in the comments to Rauf’s op-ed:
[The Cordoba House would be] two blocks from WTC 7, within the Ground Zero kill zone. Have you forgotten? A strut from UAL 175 crashed through the coat factory’s roof and the street and building were a foot deep with debris containing the shattered human remains of many. Representatives of 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America … saw their Power Point, shown to them last Monday by building owner Sharif el-Gamal; it is 15-stories, not 13, and the renderings showed a 2-story mosque at the top of it. They continue to literally hide (and rhetorically deny) from the public that the faithful would overlook Ground Zero. The[y] have the legal right to build it there yet that does not make it right.
