Rauf’s Road Trip for Idiots

This is patently untrue. The big media decided to silence the voices of opposition against the Ground Zero mosquestrosity. We are fighting and will continue to fight, alongside millions of Americans, for years to come.

But the imam behind the project has decided to risk reigniting that opposition by setting out on a nationwide speaking tour next month to promote the planned center and to foster dialogue about Muslim life in America.

“Controversy has never been a problem for me,” said the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose proposal to build the high-rise community center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero made him the prime target last summer of opponents who viewed the plan, known as Park51 [Cordoba supremacism] for its address on Park Place, as a Trojan horse for Muslim triumphalism. “I think the controversy of last summer helped initiate a discourse that has been very good for the country. I’m an American, and I believe that Americans are problem solvers. So I believe further discussion can only be good.”

The tour, which he described in an interview on Wednesday, is scheduled to begin in Detroit, the city with the largest Muslim population in the United States. It will include stops in Chicago, Washington, San Antonio and several college campuses, starting with Harvard, Yale, Georgetown and the University of North Carolina.

Because of death threats that the imam has received, none of his addresses will be open to the general public, though the local news media in each place will be invited to attend, and to ask questions afterward, he said.

Poppycock! We all have real death threats and we go, we speak. We don't piss and moan about it like this simpering stealth woolie bully. Imam Rauf is so thin-skinned, he has to have a stacked deck, a "propaganda performance."

"A betrayal of this great opportunity," yes, to twist the knife deeply, viciously.

Conversations with Rauf:

Imam Rauf: Okay good, I mean things have been done for example, I didn’t want to say it on your show but, you know with for example Madeleine Albright’s book when she approached me last fall and she said I’d like you to review the Islam section for any corrections and we did that and she invited me to write a blurb for her book and she is now pushing these ideas in many places, she is in constant communication with me, or continual communication with me about certain things, we have been in touch with her, with Karen Hughes, and the issue of Hamas, and how America should really engage with them and not just push them out of the picture, but bring them, make them responsible for creating positive change because if you don’t do that, you know we’ve even mapped out, what the downside would be if they didn’t do that, because you push Hamas out, and you force them into the arms of the Syrians and the Iranians, and they will be a proxy for Iran and the region, you’re creating more of a mess!

– So we’ve tried to unpack for them the chessboard or it’s like you know when football coaches when they create these circles and lines and so forth so you can see what’s happening very often we, people don’t think of the situation in a dynamic way, they tend to think of it statically. 

– You don’t realize when you do something, you create a web of reactions, to your action, and with the United States you create a multi, the reaction even multiply more. You know, if you are a third rate country, or a third rate power, you’re not going to create much of a ripple. But when the United States does something there is an enormous ripple effect.

Mark Sommer: You are likening it to chess, I often feel that while much of the world plays chess, a diplomatic version of chess, the United States plays checkers.

Imam Rauf:  That’s why I use the imagery of football. Cause football is like chess in motion. You see the nice thing about football is that, is that football is a very good analogy of what is happening in the world. It is strategy in motion, and you have plays, you know you have to design your plays, and you have to design your plays knowing that the other side is not going to be passive. While you’re throwing the ball, they will try to make you fumble the ball, they will try to catch the ball from you, in fact they will try to prevent you. So part of achieving your objective is you have to be strategic, you have to do all the requisite blocking, and tackling, because there are vested interests, who are vested against your success.

– One of the things you have to do in strategic thinking is think 6 moves down the line, and many directions at once because it is such a multi-dimensional world.

– Preciously, in other words the analogy with American football is that your defense team, your offense team, and kick off team, are all on the field simultaneously. – Uhhuh

– Its not like one team is on the field and the other team is off. They are all on the field, and the field has many sectors to it. And there are different geographies, different subject areas, so we have designed our Cordoba Initiative to be designed, in order words we have 5 major areas of our program. So we have foreign policy, is one area, you have communications is another area, you have education as the third area, for example, you have intra-Islamic issues is the fourth area, arts and culture is the fifth area. And lets say this Abrahamic pathwalk may be in the arts and culture, a blend of the arts and culture and you know maybe the religious aspect in some respect, but it’s kind of an interfaith type of activity. Now in the area of foreign policy, you have different issues, number one is the Palestinian conflict, cause if you heal that, you will have contributed a lot. If the entertainment media, the news media, was broadcasted in print, describe and speak about the issues in a different way it can help change perceptions profoundly, because it’s the media, which helps shape perceptions to a great degree. So if we have strategic action plays, designed plays, in the area of foreign policy, in the area of healing the divide, and then you unpack and give up  Israel, and then what do you do, what are the specific actions that you might do, because things are always moving, things are always happening, so you have to analyze the situation constantly, and you have to have your just like you have your offense coach, defensive coaching staff, and you have your head coach and so forth, we think of ourselves as an analogy of that. We had to have our head coaching staff, we had to have our foreign policy head coach, our Palestinian head coach etcetera, and then you design plays for that

– Interestingly enough it doesn’t mean that the head coach is necessarily the President, because, of whatever country, or Prime Minister, because they may not be, they may still be, trapped by various constraints in an old game.

– No we’ve created a different concept a different model, Mark. I’m the head coach of this strategic initiative, and the President of the United States, or the President of Malaysia, or the President of England, is like a player you want to bring in for particular plays.

– They are members of the team that you want to bring in, because if we are looking at it exactly like American football, you want to gain yardage, so you just want to keep scoring first downs. So what’s the first down that we can score based upon where we are on the field, where would we like to be, what’s realistic, what can we obtain? Can we obtain 3 yards, can we obtain 10 yards, can we obtain 7 yards? Let’s try and get those 7 yards. And whom do you need to bring for that? So the the name of the game then becomes, how do you move the ball forward, and who are players you can bring in to help move that ball forward on a particular issue, at a particular moment in time. – But the irony is that in this case, you don’t really have, I mean the other team, who’s the other team? Because if fundamentally you’re trying to bring people together, so who’s the enemy there? 1-3-15

– There are interests one has to make sure do not push back. You have to make sure you have enough power on your side to be able to push the ball forward.

– Right, but at the same time as you’ve written elsewhere, “peace requires the cooperation of your enemy,” so in a certain sense to move the ball forward, in this case, is rather paradoxical, it’s not a linear strategy. It’s actually…

– Yeah, but let me give you a very specific for instance, one very specific example is that we need to move forward on the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations process,for a finalization of borders. Now, Ehud Olmert has been pushing the notion of unilateral designation of borders by Israel. In November, of the last election he didn’t win completely, he had to develop the coalition government with other people. As of a month ago, our Palestinian expert, who is very tied into Abu Mazen and Saeb Erekat and those people told me that Saeb Erekat who is a lead negotiator on the Palestinian side, has gotten the commitment of 35 members of the Knesset, that the negotiation process should be bilateral not unilateral. Okay, that’s an important strategic thing, so to get people of the Knesset in agreement with you on certain issues, are critical for certain aspects and certain specific intermediate milestones which are important towards that particular milestone. That’s an example of being strategic, and using people who are sympathetic to your position, who have the traction and capability to bring about that particular end result that you want at this point in time on the particular issue, which is a stepping-stone to the next stepping-stone of that issue. Sounds complicated, but I think you get the idea

Mark Sommer: No, I understand, you know I wanted to ask you I did say this is off the record, and we’ll keep it all off the record if you wish. But the analogy to football is probably a useful one for a lay audience, and I wondered whether you’d allow us to use some of that

Imam Rauf: Yes, I would, because I use it all the time. Look did I use, did I use, did I say anything right now that is potentially off the record?

Mark Sommer:  Well I wouldn’t use anything I suppose about Madeleine Albright

– Yeah that part would be talking out of, I can say this in private to you – Yes

– Um, and the fact that, I think there is a blurb by me in the back of her book. So, and she herself has publicly stated that she has benefited by her conversation with me, and Rabbi …oh my god, that’s so embarrassing, Rabbi uh…Saperstein, – Oh yeah. David Saperstein

– David Saperstein and others from the Christian tradition as well, in helping her understand the importance of the role of religion. I mean look, we supported a Jewish state in the Middle East, why not support an Islamic State? But give it a meaning, which you can live with.

– Yeah within the parameters of an acceptance of other …

– Right, and this purpose exists, because they are part of our … In Islamic theology, in Islamic jurisprudence, those norms exist. You just have to extract them, and put them on the table, and say these are the valid reasons. I don’t want a demographic Islamic state, a demographic Islamic state is not part of tradition, never was, until recently. Until the mid 20th century, we were very pluralistic societies. Egypt had 4… Alexandria had 400,000 Greeks, it was a Greek town. Until 1923-24 vast tracks, of what is today modern Turkey, were Greek. Neighborhoods were Greek areas. Izmir, which is ancient Smyrna, was a Greek town. Cappadocia has large sections of Greek communities. What happened with the rise of the nation state idea, was virtually this geography had to be homogeneous. Now, that’s not apart of our assigned tradition of theology, not our tradition, not our theology, not our jurisprudence. What happened was, the 20th century, we bought into the nation state idea, we created the notion of demographic nation states. We had to be of one type, so you had massive movements, and a lot of killings between people, with the creation of the Otto-Turkish state, you had Greek-Turkish conflict existing before Israel and all of that, where as before they were all living together.

Here he says "I don't want a demographic Islamic state" — it's clear that he DOES want an Islamic state. And that he doesn't have to have a Muslim majority to have one here. It's stealth jihad.

More extreme "moderation" from Imam Rauf on what he thought when he heard the news of the attack on twin towers on 911:

Imam Rauf: …this may have been a result of what turned out to be the, the um, many decades of rising hostility between and tension between the West and the Islamic World, particularly on certain political issues and geopolitical issues.

Question: Did you find that uh, 9-1-1 dramatically shifted your efforts? Did it make them go more difficult, but also more important than ever from the point of view of, not only of, uh your own community but of the broader society.

Imam Rauf: No doubt, I mean 9/11 was a watershed, was a major milestone, and a major catalytic force in, in catalyzing the attention towards the issue of Islam, it’s presence in the West, and it brought into much greater prominence our work and the importance of our work. Initially after 9/11, you know like many Muslims, we were invited to speak at countless temples, houses of worship, synagogues,churches as well as institutions, academic, even companies who were interesting in learning about it