Free Republic

Yet another news flash on the whereabouts of the self-described “bridge-building” couple behind the Ground Zero mosque:Last week, Daisy Khan was poised to travel to the Middle East, planning a $12,000 taxpayer-funded jaunt to join her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, in the United Arab Emirates, Aug. 29-Sept. 2, courtesy of the State Department. But she didn’t go. According to a staffer at the Manhattan office shared by Khan and Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative and American Society for Muslim Advancement, Khan is still in New York, though when I called she was unavailable for questions because she was “in a meeting.” The U.S. Embassy in the UAE...

Great article by Victor Davis Hanson on the Ground Zero Mosque today focusing on Mayor Bloomberg's scolding of those who oppose the mosque, and the vast gulf between the elite and us regular folk: We’ve had nearly a month now of fruitless acrimony over the Ground Zero mosque. About everything that can be said has been said. Little-read Newsweek and Time have published a near dozen “I accuse” essays about America’s supposedly yokel intolerance — as if we did not get their message at about screed two. The past inflammatory statements and hypocrisies of the Janus Mr. Rauf have been...

He's the religious leader of the planned, controversial Ground Zero mosque -- but across the Hudson, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is known as an alleged slumlord. At buildings in Union City and Palisades Park, where Rauf reportedly got tax dollars to renovate low-income apartments, tenants yesterday said their gripes about their lousy housing conditions have been ignored. "Why doesn't he help the tenants he has before he builds a new place, claiming he wants to help people?" said a disgusted Jamie Barillas, who lives in a Rauf-owned apartment at 2206 Central Ave. in Union City... Tenant Vilma Then chided Rauf...

I had all my notes ready for this week's column and grabbed them to think in peace and quiet in the Georgetown Rathskeller, one of the few non-tarted-up boites left in this growing-ever-richer Capital City. I can't work in an atmosphere of botoxed babes hustling the latest mango-pomegranatetinis at brightly lit granite bars.

Hamas is a shibboleth. If you want to know whether an ostensible Muslim “moderate” is really moderate, ask him if Hamas is a terrorist organization. It is really not a hard question, even if Feisal Rauf can’t — or won’t — answer it. Rauf, the would-be imam of the controversial Ground Zero mosque, is also a stud in the State Department’s stable of ready-to-travel-on-your-dime “moderates.” That same State Department has branded Hamas a terrorist organization, and we can’t even get it to say that about the Taliban, the guys we’re fighting in the overseas contingency operation formerly known as the...

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but it can erode credibility, particularly if the imitators are old enough to know better. “The cleric who wants to build a mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero claims that ideas from his book were incorporated into President Obama’s landmark Cairo address to the Muslim world last year by one of the drafters of the speech,” Patrick Goodenough reported on CNSNews.com. “Feisal Abdul Rauf made the remarks during two media interviews in Egypt last February.” “I am not going to hide from you that one of those who participated in writing...

In a stunning revelation, it appears that the controversial Imam Rauf has been quite instrumental in the crafting of the speech that Obama gave in Cairo. This report comes from Walid Shoebat who speaks fluent Arabic. It is a shocking audio recording of Rauf's own voice boasting in Arabic that Obama's historic speech in Cairo was provided by the Imam's work with the Cordova Initiative. Once a terrorist, Walid Shoebat is now an American citizen and lives in the USA under this assumed name. He has a unique insight into the world of terror from the perspective of someone who...

There's a great deal of confusion about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the founder of the Ground Zero mosque. His fiercest critics, like Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online, say he's intent on muddying the meaning of 9/11 and using it to further the goals of worldwide political Islam. There are those who hear in his words and even see in his writings -- I'm referring to Todd Gitlin here, writing at the New Republic's site -- the mystic chords of the Declaration of Independence itself. I hear something else, and it may help explain why secularists from Gitlin to Mayor...

In a stunning revelation, it appears that the controversial Imam Rauf has been quite instrumental in the crafting of the speech that Obama gave in Cairo. This report comes from Walid Shoebat who speaks fluent Arabic. It is a shocking audio recording of Rauf's own voice boasting in Arabic that Obama's historic speech in Cairo was provided by the Imam's work with the Cordova Initiative. Once a terrorist, Walid Shoebat is now an American citizen and lives in the USA under this assumed name. He has a unique insight into the world of terror from the perspective of someone who...

There's no contest. Of all the major religions, the Muslims have the most graphic view of heaven. It's refreshing, in fact. They don't mess around invoking vague spaces of peace and light; they come through with Relais et Châteaux specifics. One imam tells Barbara Walters on her ABC special tonight: "We will be in comfortable homes, reclining on silk couches. We will have people coming - servants, lovely servants, young youths to regale you, Barbara. Residing in gardens beyond which rivers flow." Yes - to cut to the chase - there will be virgins, too. Even for women. (Barbara's "youths.")...

They aim to dominate the West and are active in ninety countries, where they promote a doctrine of both violent jihad and stealth jihad. Violent jihad is the terrorism we see throughout the world today. Stealth jihad is, in part, the manipulation of the press and the government in order to topple a target society or a nation from within. Imam Rauf defends Wahhabism, calls for Sharia law in America, and the elimination of the state of Israel (one state final solution). He also has defended Bin Laden by claiming that America made him into the terrorist that he is....

As US President Barack Hussein Obama continues on his seemingly endless quest to appease Muslims, with instructions to NASA to ‘find a way’ to reach them, Iftar dinners at the White House and the US State Dept.’s sponsorship of Ground Zero Mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s forthcoming ’speaking tour’ of Muslim countries (without knowledge of what exactly he’ll be talking about); it emerges that that his administration is also planning to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on the restoration of dozens of Muslim sites around the world... Throughout his administration, Obama has been fervent in his support of Islam and...

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave remarks last night at an Iftar dinner he hosted at Gracie Mansion, with Daisy Khan, wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and Ground Zero mosque developer Sharif el-Gamal in attendance. In part, Bloomberg said this: "If we say that a mosque and community center should not be built near the perimeter of the World Trade Center site ... we would undercut the values and principles that so many heroes died protecting. We would send a signal around the world that Muslim-Americans may be equal in the eyes of the law, but separate in the...

WEBTODAY EXCLUSIVE (August 24, 2010)-- QUESTION: Who really was speaking on that historic day of June 4th 2009 in Cairo, Egypt? President Obama or the Imam of the proposed Ground Zero Mosque, Feisal Abdul Rauf? ANSWER: Feisal Abdul Rauf! Link to audio of Rauf's admission The Shoebat Foundation obtained this shocking audio recording of Rauf's own voice boasting in Arabic that Obama’s historic Cairo speech was provided by the Imam and the Cordova Initiative in what the Imam called “The Blue Print” which he said was the solution to the Islamic-American divide. Rauf claimed Chapter 6 of the Imam’s work...

Hear Islamic leader propose plan Israel says will bring about its disintegration JERUSALEM – The controversial imam behind a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero has advocated a plan that is widely regarded here as promoting the eradication of Israel as a Jewish state. In uncovered audio, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf pushes for a "one state" solution of Jews and Arabs sharing the same country. While the idea may sound moderate to those unfamiliar with Mideast politics, such a proposal, which has been touted by Palestinian leaders, is seen by Israel as pressing for its destruction...

The imam heading up this $100 million project, Faisal Abdul Rauf, enjoys the full support of the sympathizing left-leaning media, and together they have attempted to frame this fight as a First Amendment issue. They’ve worked to cast the opponents of the project — including the 9/11 families — as bigots bent on denying “peaceful Muslims” the “right” to build a facility on their own property. All of this is sheer nonsense, because as many commentators already noted this week, the right to build the mosque was never in question — only the appropriateness of putting it near Ground Zero....

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, chairman of the soi-disant Cordoba Initiative, has gotten all the attention he deserves for his astonishingly insensitive attempt to build a 13-story mosque and community center at the site of Ground Zero. Rauf has largely escaped attention for his efforts to build a sawed-off version of the same on the grounds of the venerable and historically Christian Chautauqua Institution in western New York State. Although the resistance to Rauf at Chautauqua has not made the news, it is deeply felt, and it is coming from both Christians and Jews. As shall be seen, the forced feeding...

Yes, fresh from denouncing America on national television as a place rife with “hate of Muslims,” a place so Islamophobic that “it’s beyond Islamopobia,” Daisy Khan, co-planner of the Ground Zero mosque project, will soon be hopping a plane at taxpayer expense, courtesy of the State Department, to jet from New York to the United Arab Emirates and deliver to the Emiratis her views about Muslim life in America. This is what the State Department calls “public diplomacy” — a program that enlists about 1,200 Americans each year to fly with plenty of leg room to foreign lands and tell...

New audio has surfaced of the imam behind the controversial mosque near Ground Zero allegedly telling an audience overseas that the United States has been far more deadly 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," Feisal Abdul Rauf said at a 2005 lecture sponsored by the University of South Australia. After discussing the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Rauf went on to argue that America is to blame for its testy relationship with Islamic countries.

This is sweet, sweet music to the ears of his liberal backers… “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. You may remember that the US lead sanction against Iraq lead to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. The West needs to begin to see themselves through the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world, and when you do you will see the predicament that exists within the Muslim community.” (Note: He uses Michael Moore’s propoganda film “Fahrenheit...