Rauf’s article is so jammed with flim-flam that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s take just a few samples of what he’s just dished out from his op-ed pulpit:
September 7, 2010 - by Claudia Rosett“Many people wondered why I did not speak out more, and sooner, about this project. I felt that it would not be right to comment from abroad.”
Really? And why, with such controversy going on in the U.S. over his project, was it such a high priority for Rauf to spend the entire summer abroad, much of that incommunicado in Malaysia; and such a low priority — as in nonexistent — for Rauf to answer questions from Americans back home?After summering in Malaysia and assorted petro-capitals of the Arabian Gulf, the imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is back in America — though not for long. His Cordoba Initiative web site now features a newsletter which mentions that this month Rauf will be off again, this time to Australia … apparently there is now some urgent “bridge-building” to be done in Perth.
But while transiting New York, site of his proposed $100 million-plus Cordoba House, Rauf has taken time to publish an op-ed in the New York Times. The op-ed itself, “Building on Faith,” is such a feat of unmitigated self-puffery that it really belongs in the paid ad section. But let’s not focus here on the eccentricities of the Times. Keep your eye on the elusive imam.
Because what he’s doing here is trying to hijack the meaning and commemoration of Sept. 11th — Rauf being now the righteous and self-appointed arbiter of how Americans should remember that day. If you strip away his New-Age-cum-United-Nations jargon, his message is that unless you join a collective group hug to exalt what he, Feisal Abdul Rauf, happens to want, you must be some sort of low-life insensitive rube — one of the legion of bigots whom his wife recently described on national television as putting America “beyond Islamophobia.” And what Rauf wants is a 15-story mosque-plus-amenities Islamic center, right up the road from where the Twin Towers were destroyed in the name of Islam.
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