Radical Imam Rauf and Daisy the Khan Propose
Second Ground Zero “Islamic Center”

Like a junkie without a fix, the radical Ra-oof and his shifty wife, Daisy the Con, desperate for attention, are threatening to build another Ground Zero mosque "islamic center" if the thug devleoper El-Gamal won't put them back center stage. Craving the love of the dhimmedia, Rauf and the Con threaten to build a second mosque if El-Gamal doesn't give them the limelight, again. That would mean both El-Gamal and Rauf/Daisy would be competing for jihad donations, taxpayer dollars, jiyza and public bonds.

Khan and Rauf want to turn the "Ground Zero mosque" into a Ground Zero interfaith center, one focused on inter-religious dialogue and conflict resolution more than prayer.

That's a bogus distinction without a difference.

I would love to know what really happened between Rauf and El-Gamal. El-Gamal is a front man for the money, "he could never have outfoxed Santino." Who is really pulling the strings?

Could New York's most controversial unbuilt house of worship already be undergoing a major makeover? According to public comments made by Daisy Khan, who along with her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, co-founded the planned Park51 Islamic community center that burned up the cable news airwaves last summer, a new plan is in the works. Khan and Rauf wants to turn the "Ground Zero mosque" into a Ground Zero interfaith center, one focused on inter-religious dialogue and conflict resolution more than prayer. But will there still be a swimming pool? Unclear, as are the chances for this Park51 shift. The property's owner, developer Sharif el-Gamal, had a major falling out with Rauf and Khan, though they still think they'll be able to negotiate with him. Both visions for Park51 have one thing in common: They each need around $100 million to even get started. In el-Gamal's case, Park51 was registered as a charitable organization with the state—which would give it the ability to solicit tax-deductible donations—but the application has been under review for six months. In the meantime, the building is just an unidentified old Burlington Coat Factory.

Doesn't the media get tired of being played? They are beyond silly, they look stupid.

Here is more from the NY Times:

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.

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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 new project that was “larger in concept” than what is now proposed at 51 Park Place.

The new project would be interfaith in character, rather than predominantly Islamic, she said, and it would include a center for inter-religious conflict resolution.

Ms. Khan’s comments, made at a luncheon held by the women’s magazine More and attended by reporters, were the first in which the couple indicated a willingness to put their names behind a different religious mission in the city.

“Once we are ready to announce our new vision, we will talk to the property owner and see if it is the right location for us,” she said, referring to Sharif el-Gamal, the real estate developer and onetime protégé of Mr. Abul Rauf’s. Mr. Gamal announced in January that Ms. Khan and the imam, who first conceived the idea of a downtown Muslim community center, would no longer speak or raise money for the planned project, known as Park51, though the imam would remain on its board of directors.

“We had the vision. We still have the dream,” Ms. Khan said. “The location is not the dream, my friend.”

A spokesman for Mr. Gamal said the developer had no comment.

Whether either alternative comes to fruition will depend on the ability of each camp to raise the estimated $100 million in public and private funds needed. Since plans for Park51 were announced last summer, and drew angry protests from some politicians and families of 9/11 victims who considered it insensitive to build a Muslim center so close to ground zero, no management staff has been hired, no members have been named to the project’s board and no money has been raised.

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Park51 was registered as a charitable organization with the state attorney general’s office. But its application to the Internal Revenue Service for designation as a tax-exempt organization — crucial to its ability to solicit tax-deductible donations — has been under review for six months without a decision.

The rift between the two factions is partly personal, and partly based on differences of vision, spokesmen for the two sides have said. Mr. Abdul-Rauf and Ms. Khan initially conceived the project, which they referred to as Cordoba House, as a community center for the neighborhood grafted to a kind of world headquarters for interfaith dialogue — a place where tourists from around the globe might come to learn about other people’s religions.

Mr. Gamal, a businessman, had always favored a more down-to-earth approach, focused on providing much-needed downtown facilities like an indoor swimming pool, and prayer space for the large population of Muslims who work in the financial district.

On Tuesday, Ms. Khan said that since last summer, she and her husband had been meeting privately with family members of 9/11 victims and first responders in an effort to understand the source of some of the opposition to the original idea. She said that as a result of those meetings, the story of the 9/11 families “will be housed in our center.”

Let's review what we know about the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the initial leader of the mosque effort, and still a member of the mosque initiative’s Advisory Board. Rauf has such a sterling reputation as a moderate that both the Bush and Obama Administrations sent him on goodwill tours to Muslim countries. Yet it is clear that Rauf and other mosque leaders are not as moderate as they claim to be. Rauf has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that is dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” while those who claim he is moderate just keep telling us that he is without giving us evidence.

Rauf’s book What’s Right with Islam says on the copyright page that “this edition was made possible through a joint effort of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the office of Interfaith and Community Alliance of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Funding for this project was provided by IIIT.” Both IIIT and ISNA are Muslim Brotherhood fronts, and ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case.

The mosque organizers, the America Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), have worked hard in the media to portray themselves as Islamic moderates working for peace on the exact spot where their belligerent coreligionists perpetrated murder and mayhem in the name of their religion. They claimed that the Ground Zero Mosque would offer “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.” Rauf has also said: “We need to take the 9/11 tragedy and turn it into something very positive.”

Something positive? For whom? Islamic jihad? How does building a giant mosque at Ground Zero address the problem of moderate Muslims not speaking out against terrorism? How does this mosque honor those who were “harmed” – i.e., brutally murdered — on September 11? Whom does a mosque at 9/11 really honor: the Americans who lost their lives, or the jihadis who murdered them?

Meanwhile, Rauf’s words and deeds suggested a more ominous reality: he was a master of deceptive, Orwellian use of language, manifesting a deep contempt for non-Muslims and full accord with the supremacist goals of the 9/11 hijackers. Rauf’s group gave this statement to the Mike Huckabee radio show:

For over a decade, the Cordoba Initiative and American Society for Muslim Advancement have worked tirelessly to build bridges with other faiths, while condemning violence, extremism, and prejudice of any sort. Our mission is to be a beacon of hope, peace, understanding and harmony to those who join us in condemning hatred and violence of any kind. Too often the question arises of why moderate, peace-loving Muslims do not speak out. We cannot think of a more wonderful expression of our religion than the Cordoba House, where American Muslims stand together with our fellow citizens to condemn extremism and terror. It is a project to honor those who were harmed on September 11th. It is a project to proclaim our patriotism to this country and to stand side-by-side all men and women of peace.

Orwell would be proud.

It’s understandable that many have greeted such words with skepticism. Even the name of the initiative – Cordoba – spoke volumes. While Islamic Spain is held up today as a proto-multiculturalist paradise, in reality non-Muslims there suffered under the discrimination prescribed in Islamic law for dhimmis, non-believers who were subjugated as inferiors and denied equality of rights. When we started calling attention to the true meaning of the name Cordoba, the name of the mosque initiative suddenly changed to Park51 – with the media lapdogs immediately falling into line. They never mentioned Cordoba again, just like that.

They ignored all the evidence of Rauf’s jihadist sentiments. Rauf has blamed the West, rather than Islamic jihadists, for terrorism on several occasions. He has said, according to Australia’s Sun-Herald, that “the US and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end.” He has also claimed that “Western active involvement in shaping the internal affairs of Islamic societies have contributed to the creation of terrorism done in the name of Islam.”

Rauf has said: “We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims.” Revealing his true beliefs, Rauf said on 60 Minutes shortly after 9/11 that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA,” and that the U.S. was ultimately responsible for the jihad attacks of that day, because its foreign policy victimized Muslims.

The Arabic translation of Rauf’s book is a call to conversion from the pile of human remains at Ground Zero, disturbingly entitled, A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of Post-9/11 America. In line with this revealing alternate title, Rauf has stated that he wants to bring people to convert to Islam by means of this Ground Zero mosque.

Journalist Alyssa A. Lappen reports that “Rauf promoted the book in December 2007 at a Kuala Lumpur gathering of Hizb ut Tahrir — an organization banned in Germany since 2003, and also outlawed in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, among other places — and ideologically akin to the MB. Both seek to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law (sharia), and eventually impose Islam and sharia law worldwide.” The “MB” is the Muslim Brotherhood.

In his book, Rauf supports and justifies Sharia law, and calls for restrictions on free speech in America. He has written another book that has gotten little notice: Islam: A Sacred Law—What Every Muslim Should Know About Sharia. In it he explains why God’s law is superior to manmade law, or that is, why Sharia is better than democracy:

God places a high premium on judging in accord with His dictates, and for developing a nation where laws apply to all equally, and where those who are in charge of upholding the law do not set themselves or any other group above the law—for them corruption sets in. The corruption of the individual or a society that abandons Sacred Law is amplified in one of the key Koranic passages regarding the relevance, evolution and meaning of Divine Law, (5:41-50) where Allah speaks frequently of the act of “judging.” In this passage, God criticizes previous generations who “raced toward disbelief, among those who say with their mouths ‘We believe’ while their hearts done believe;” who “altered God’s Words from their placements;” indicating somehow that they altered their divinely ordained Shari’ah, placing their own values above that which God had established. The Koran continues to describe them as “listeners of lies, devourers of ill-gotten property,” an accusation that a Muslim tries carefully to avoid incurring.

This passage is based on a section of the Koran (5:41-50) that talks about “judging” peoples. It’s clear from the context that the “previous generations” are Jews and Christians who have now become “listeners of lies, devourers of ill-gotten property.” In other words, Rauf was condemning Jews and Christians in America and arguing obliquely that America should ditch the Constitution and adopt Sharia.

Rauf describes himself almost relentlessly as a “bridge builder,” Indeed. Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb explains what bridge-building means to Islamic supremacists in his jihadist manifesto Milestones: “The chasm between Islam and Jahiliyyah is great, and a bridge is not to be built across it so that the people of the two sides may mix with each other, but rather only so that the people of Jahiliyyah may come over to Islam.”

Rauf has also called Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ endorsement of the implementation of Sharia courts in Britain “forward thinking” – despite Sharia’s denial of basic freedoms including the freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and equality of rights of all people before the law. He has called upon Barack Obama to emphasize “the commonality of Western and Islamic values,” claiming that “if the United States lives up to the values in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and if Muslims can live up to the principles of Islamic law, then we will find we have fewer points of conflict and more common ground.” Then all will be well: “Muslims no longer will fear Western domination and the West no longer will fear Islamic expansion.”

Does Rauf really think that the devaluation of a woman’s testimony and the institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslims, both mandated by Sharia, are really compatible with the Bill of Rights? Does he really think that stoning people to death for adultery or amputating their hands for theft are compatible with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments?

Whatever he thinks of those elements of the Constitution, he doesn’t appear overly fond of the freedom of speech. Rauf has compared the West unfavorably to the Islamic world, since the West “protects the right to say anything, no matter how insensitive or scandalous,” while Islamic cultures “balance freedom of expression with respect for elders, traditions and modesty. The idea of respect and honor to elders is deeply ingrained in their psyches.” He has criticized the Swiss ban on minarets as a restriction on religious freedom, without saying a word about the severe restrictions on non-Muslim religious practice in Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and Sudan.

The morphing mosque narrative

Rauf and Daisy Khan were also repeatedly deceptive about whether the Ground Zero Mosque would be a mosque at all. Initially, the Cordoba Initiative’s website stated forthrightly that it would be a mosque, and Daisy Khan said the same thing at the Community Board One meeting: “There are two hundred mosques in New York. Another one is not a big deal.”After the American people started to wake up to the implications of a mosque at Ground Zero, however, they began insisting that it was not a mosque, but a “community center.”

It is worth noting that in the Muslim Brotherhood’s document delineating its strategy for Islamizing the United States, it calls for the establishment of “centers” that will function in American cities after the fashion of Muhammad’s base in Medina. From Medina, Muhammad conquered and Islamized the Arabian Peninsula.

Mosque organizers and the mainstream media were also deceptive about the location of the mosque at Ground Zero. While Rauf called the location “iconic” and Daisy Khan spoke of a divine hand leading them to a location at Ground Zero, Sharif El-Gamal, when confronted with pressure over the mosque’s location and character as a triumphal mosque at Ground Zero, insisted that the “community center” would be “nowhere near” the World Trade Center site. One thing was obvious: the location was tremendously important to them, as they brushed aside numerous offers – from Donald Trump, New York Governor David Paterson, and others — to buy the property at far greater than market value, and move their mosque elsewhere.

The media also followed the twisting line of the Islamic supremacists regarding whether or not the project was a mosque at all. Ultimately, the Associated Press issued guidelines ordering its reporters not to refer to the project as the “Ground Zero mosque,” saying falsely that it was neither at Ground Zero nor a mosque.The other mainstream media leaders fell into line accordingly.

Rauf was a prominent member of the Perdana organization, a leading funder of the jihad flotilla launched against Israel in 2010 by the genocidal Islamic terror group, IHH.

And he was a slumlord. Despite numerous citations for fire, building, and health code violations and reports of vermin and rat and roach infestations, the Imam left his tenants to live in abject squalor and filth. He claimed he didn’t have money to hire an exterminator, but he has the jiyza to build a $150 million Ground Zero triumphal mosque on hallowed ground? Worse still, Rauf snagged over $2 million in public money to fix his apartments. He took the money, never did the renovations, and forced good people to live with vermin and dilapidation. He was also sued for mortgage fraud, settling the case in June 2008.

Rauf told the American media that money for the mosque would come entirely from Muslims here. Then he told the Arab media that funding for the mosque was coming from many Muslim countries. Also telling was the fact that despite their much-repeated commitment to dialogue, Rauf, Daisy Khan and Sharif El-Gamal ignored our invitation to conduct a public discussion with us about the mosque at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2011. This followed their ignoring my open letter of June 28, 2010, in which I wrote: “Imam Rauf, please withdraw this plan and show the world real understanding and kindness and empathy.”

This was no real surprise, however — contradicting all his stated aspirations for dialogue, Rauf told the Arabic press: “I do not believe in religious dialogue.” Rauf, Daisy Khan and El-Gamal routinely demonized their opponents. Khan referred to my “Leaving Islam?” freedom bus ads as “deeply offensive,” claiming that they were designed “to provoke” and “to polarize.”

Funny, that sounds like an apt description of the 9/11 mega-mosque. Daisy Khan made the argument against the mosque unknowingly.

Rudolph Giuliani remarked that the mosque “sends a particularly bad message, particularly (because) of the background of the imam who is supporting this. This is an Imam who has supported radical causes, who has not been forthright in condemning Islamic (terrorism) and the worst instincts that that brings about. So it not only is exactly the wrong place, right at ground zero, but it’s a mosque supported by an imam who has a record of support for causes that were sympathetic with terrorism.”

Rauf even threatened America over this project, saying that if the mosque were not built, “if we don’t do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world….If we don’t handle this crisis correctly, it could become something very dangerous indeed.