I have to admit, I have a certain admiration for the Ground Zero Mosque Imam, Feisal Rauf. Whether he's telling the government that his wife's apartment is a mosque that seats 500 in order to get religious tax exemptions or writing absolute lies and prevarication in Pravda-on-the-Hudson in order to fool the gullible and disguise himself, I have to give him credit for utter shamelessness and sheer nerve.
In his latest performance, entitled 'Building On Faith' he starts out by talking about how he was speaking abroad to different 'religious leaders' (he doesn't mention they were all Muslims) when to his shock and surprise, all this ill feeling broke out over the Cordoba House...which he now plans to build, regardless.
Notice two things here. First, he's again referring to it as the Cordoba House, dropping the Park 51 euphemism and retaining the name that's symbolic of Islam's triumphant conquest of Spain. And he now says that he's definitely going to build it no matter what. That tells me his mission to the Middle East on the US State Department's dime to get the funding for the mosque was a success and he feels he no longer has to dissemble about it. Far from 'building bridges' the good Imam just collectively flipped the American people and New Yorkers the bird.
He still claims that Cordoba was this great center of inter-faith tolerance (it wasn't) and that the Mosque will also be an 'inter-faith community center’ (it won't. No mosque is, and non-Muslims are only allowed in under sufferance or special arrangement).
The imam cleverly mentions solving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as an example of how ' members of all faiths must work together if we are ever going to succeed in fostering understanding and peace.' This is in sharp contrast to his actual feelings about Israel, which he wants reduced to a Jewish minority living under Muslim heel. But the sort of people who constitute the Time’s readership will likely never know that.
Then comes the elegantly worded threat. If Imam Rauf is not allowed to finish the Ground Zero Mosque, the ‘radicals’ will know America is an Islamophobic country and take revenge. While if we allow this monstrosity to be erected, we’ll be left in peace. Meanwhile, we had better all shut up, or as the Imam puts it ‘ tone down the vitriol and rhetoric.’
He then finishes with the final lie, that the word Islam ‘comes from the word cognate to shalom, which means peace in Hebrew.'
Actually it doesn’t come from salaam, the Arabic word for peace but from aslama, which means 'submission'.
And that's very different.
(via Memeorandum
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