Free Republic

Our current state of counterterrorism is such that Robert Spencer, Steven Emerson, Patrick Poole, Dave Reaboi, John Rossomando, Stephen Coughlin, or Philip Haney would be extremely unlikely to be invited as experts on terrorism. The wife of the Ground Zero Mosque Imam though? Sure. Come on down and tell us that ISIS supporters don't understand Islam. ... why is the defense bringing in Khan to testify as to whether an ISIS supporter properly understands Islam? Is this really about helping the defendant or about allowing Khan to promote a particular narrative?

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities. So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling...

The backers of the controversial "Ground Zero Mosque" have won a court fight clearing the way for them to build the mosque and community center complex two blocks from the site of the 9/11 terror attack. In a decision on Friday that was made public today, New York State Supreme Justice Paul Feinman dismissed a lawsuit by former firefighter Timothy Brown who argued that New York City was wrong to allow the destruction of a 150-year-old building to make way for the Islamic center.

Two co-founders of the plan to build a Muslim community center and mosque in downtown Manhattan have begun exploring a new, and possibly competing, project: an interfaith cultural center that they said might be located at the currently proposed site, two blocks from ground zero, or elsewhere in the neighborhood. Daisy Khan, the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said on Tuesday that she and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, two co-founders whose involvement in the controversial community center plan was curtailed this year after a falling out with their real estate partner, might develop a...

My earlier prediction from September:Imam Rauf decided to pick a spot near Ground Zero so that there would be an outcry… and he’ll keep stringing this along until one day when he’ll do the “honorable” and “right thing”: announce that instead of an Islamic Community Center which promotes Interfaith Understanding, he’ll build an Interfaith Center devoted equally to all religions… and the crowds will cheer and people will actually be happy about an Interfaith Center… maybe for the first time ever...recent article from March 30:Two co-founders of the controversial plan to build an Islamic cultural center and mosque two blocks...

The imam and his wife behind a controversial plan to build a Muslim cultural center and mosque near the site of New York's September 11 attack are stepping down as leaders of the project, the center said on Friday.... "Imam Feisal and Daisy Khan will not be speaking on behalf of Park51, nor will they be raising funds for the project," Park51 said in a statement.

The wife of Ground Zero mosque developer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, says she and her husband are receiving death threats, the AP reported today: "For the record, my life is under threat," Daisy Khan said Sunday during a town hall debate on Islam broadcast on ABC's "This Week" news program. Khan said her husband's life also is under threat but, "We do not walk around with bodyguards because we love this country." It goes without saying that any U.S. citizen who issues death threats to another individual deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law. However, there...

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...

THE ISSUE: Khan's equating of anti-Semitism with opposition to her mosque plans. *** Daisy Khan has the audacity to refer to opposition to the Ground Zero mosque as "hate of Muslims" and to compare it to discrimination against Jews (" 'Same as Anti-Semitism' -- Kahn: Yanks Hate Muslims," Aug. 23). It's nice to know that Khan opposes anti-Semitism. Does this mean that she and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, will now condemn the genocidal terrorist group Hamas or Islamic clerics who slander Jews in hate sermons? Will we hear a denunciation of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi for his infamous remarks...

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has achieved fame and notoriety in America based on his effort to build a mosque at a Ground Zero site that sustained damage from the attack. If we take him at his word, that his intention is build bridges not to aggravate tensions, then his rise illustrates the Peter Principle. The 1969 bestselling book The Peter Principle contends that people get promoted at work until they finally are assigned a job they cannot grow into, resulting in competent people eventually becoming incompetent as they rise, ironically, to a position of failure. Readily available data suggests this...

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...

A test of tolerance, or a grating exercise in self-promotion? Among the prime planners of a $100 million Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero, it's not just Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who is visiting the Middle East this summer at U.S. taxpayer expense. The State Department is also about to send Rauf's wife and Cordoba Initiative fellow director, Daisy Khan, on her own taxpayer-funded "public diplomacy" trip to the United Arab Emirates. ... The U.S. Embassy in the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi has posted on its website an announcement of the impending visit by this husband-wife team. Rauf...

One of the leaders of the proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero has spent years trying to amplify the voices of educated women within Islam. In this way, Daisy Khan epitomizes the so-called "moderate Muslim" and modernizing force from within Islam that some Americans are impatient to see. .... As I wrote at the time, their idea was "to ensure that women's perspectives on Islamic law become part of religious deliberation in the Muslim world – particularly on issues such as domestic violence, divorce, and inheritance." ... Khan explained to me the muftia effort, saying: "Islam is a...

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.

In an exclusive interview on "This Week," Daisy Khan, one of the main backers of the mosque and Islamic community center near ground zero, told Christiane Amanpour that moving the project to another site is not currently an option they are considering. "So is moving [the center] on the table still?" Amanpour asked. "Right now it's not until we consult with all our stakeholders," Khan said. Amanpour asked Khan if America was Islamophobic. "This is like a metastasized anti-Semitism, that's what we feel right now," Khan said. "It's not even Islamophobia, it's beyond Islamophobia; it's hate of Muslims. And we...

Daisy Khan is shocked. In a phone conversation with her minutes ago she said she couldn't believe that what had started out as "a community center for everyone in the neighborhood, to scale up and build up people of all religions has become so skewed. It's hard for us to imagine we are in the thick of a controversy like this. The Republicans are really going after us." Daisy Khan, along with her husband Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is one of the co-founders of Cordoba House, which has proposed to build a mosque more than two blocks from Ground Zero,...

Where exactly is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the $100 million Ground Zero mosque project? I keep asking because weeks after he stopped answering any questions about his “Cordoba House” plans, there is still no answer. By now, there is information in Rauf’s silence. He launched his Ground Zero mosque and Islamic center project in the name of “dialogue,” “outreach” and “bridge-building” in lower Manhattan. In doing so, he trampled on raw feelings, and set off a divisive debate. Rauf’s apparent dismissal of public questions as not worth his time, while he travels to the Middle East on U.S. taxpayer money, suggests enormous contempt for the American public.Rauf dropped out of sight...

Mysterious Group Buys Building Next to Ground Zero For Mosque Wednesday, December 16, 2009 Jim Hoft A mysterous Muslim group with unknown sponsors has purchased a building steps away from Ground Zero. Hudson New York reported: An identified group with unknown sponsors has purchased building steps away from where the WorldTrade Center once stood — to turn it into potentially one of the largest New York City mosques. At the moment the building, the old Burlington Coat Factory, already serves as a mini-mosque: an iron grill lifts every Friday afternoon for a little known Imam leading prayers a few yards...

For a man whom one would hope has nothing to hide, the imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project sure has dropped out of sight. Having triggered an uproar in the U.S., Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf ducked out of the country weeks ago and, apart from a potted statement last week praising his own project, has pretty much clammed up. In New York Rauf has become a sort of phantom celebrity. His name is plastered all over the public debate, but Rauf himself has been absent and oddly unavailable, even by phone or e-mail, to answer questions. From his New...

May 14, 2010 - by Alyssa A. Lappen Share | The prospective developer of a $100 million, 13-story mosque 600 feet from Ground Zero presents himself as a Muslim moderate (1). Yet Kuwait-born Faisal Abdul Rauf also boasts of his issue from an “Egyptian family steeped in religious scholarship” (2). Indeed, Feisal Rauf’s Muslim Brotherhood provenance, radical by definition, is as authentic as it gets. Rauf’s father, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Rauf (1917-2004) — an Egyptian contemporary of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna — conveyed to Feisal his family’s long tradition of radicalism, which he acquired at Islam’s closest equivalent...