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The ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee accused the imam behind the mosque project near Ground Zero of arm-twisting and "blackmailing" to push Park51 through. "To me, it's almost as if he's blackmailing and threatening the United States that somehow if the mosque is not approved or people speak out against his mosque, you have to worry about being attacked by Islamic terrorists," Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on Fox Business Network on Friday. King said that the Islamic center was being "put their to make a statement, not to build bridges, but...

Rauf on the Ropes An Islamic community center at Ground Zero seems increasingly unlikely. 13 September 2010 The white flag hasn’t reached the top of the flagpole yet, but Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf all but surrendered on Monday morning in his battle to build a Muslim interfaith community center with a prayer room two blocks from Ground Zero. At an unusual meeting Monday morning at the Council on Foreign Relations in midtown Manhattan, Rauf said that he wanted to find a “solution” to the furious imbroglio over the planned center, which opponents say is inappropriate, insensitive to the memory of...

There is nothing "nuanced" about Imam Feisal Rauf's belief in the primacy of Sharia (Islamic Law) in society -- any society. Rauf, in his 2004 "What's Right With Islam"-released in Malaysia as, "A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Da'wah From the Heart of America Post-9/11," asserts that the US is in a state of "readiness" for the Sharia: ...the American political structure is Shariah compliant, for a state inhabited predominantly by Muslims neither defines nor makes it synonymous with an Islamic state. And Rauf also charts how the US could evolve toward what is clearly...

Imam Feisal Rauf, the central figure in the coterie planning a huge mosque just off Ground Zero, is a full-throated champion of the very same Muslim theologians and jurists identified in a landmark NYPD report as central to promoting the Islamic religious bigotry that fuels modern jihad terrorism. This fact alone should compel Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg to withdraw their support for the proposed mosque. In August 2007, the NYPD released "Radicalization in the West -- The Homegrown Threat." This landmark 90-page report looked at the threat that had become apparent since 9/11, analyzing the roots of...