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Two sides feverishly dig up supporting evidence on imam

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/59079/full/59079/two-sides-feverishly-dig-up-supporting-evidence-on-imam/ Two sides feverishly dig up supporting evidence on imam Thursday, August 26, 2010 | by sue fishkoff & ami eden The controversy over building a $100 million Islamic community center and mosque two blocks from ground zero initially was about its location. Increasingly, however, attention has turned to the 61-year-old Sufi imam behind the project. Depending on whom you ask, Feisal Abdul Rauf — who recently returned from the Middle East, part of a U.S.-funded outreach program to the Muslim world to talk about religious tolerance — is a dedicated interfaith activist, a stealth apologist for Islamist terrorism, or something else. Those looking to defend Rauf in Jewish circles have a new card to play: It turns out the imam delivered a moving speech at the 2003 memorial service held in a Manhattan synagogue for Daniel Pearl, the journalist murdered in 2002 by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan. Invoking Pearl’s final words, Rauf declared: “If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind and soul, ‘Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ehad — Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One,’ not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one.” The speech was cited Aug. 19 by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg on his influential Atlantic.com blog, and then mentioned on one of journalism’s biggest stages: Frank Rich’s column in the Sunday New York Times. <div class="capDivLeft" style="width: 360px;"><img alt="usjta_rauf_360" class="left" height="238" src="http://www.jweekly.com/images/uploads/usjta_rauf_360.jpg" title="Feisal Abdul Rauf (center), executive director of the New York–based Cordoba Initiative, greets worshipers at a Bahrain mosque after leading midday prayers Aug. 20. photo/ap/hasan jamali" width="360" /> <div class="caption">Feisal Abdul Rauf (center), executive director of the New York–based Cordoba Initiative, greets worshipers at a Bahrain mosque after leading midday prayers Aug. 20. photo/ap/hasan jamali</div> </div> Goldberg called Rauf “a moderate, forward-leaning Muslim” and said his words showed courage because “any Muslim imam who stands before a Jewish congregation and says ‘I am a Jew’ is placing his life in danger.” Rauf’s other supporters note that he is a frequent participant in interfaith dialogues, and one who condemns terrorism and fanaticism. His critics, however, paint a different picture, accusing Rauf of paying lip service to such sentiments while either failing to offer strong criticism — by name — of foreign governments and organizations engaged in terrorism, or making common cause with anti-American Islamists. The critics come armed with their own set of quotes: Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the imam told “60 Minutes”: “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened; but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.” In an interview in June with New York’s WABC Radio, Rauf described himself as a “supporter of Israel” but declined to label Hamas as a terrorist group, saying, “I do not want to be placed nor will I accept a position where I am the target of one side or another.” This week, his detractors are trumpeting a 2005 speech in Adelaide, Australia, in which he cited the impact of U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq and asserted that “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.” The stakes are high in the battle to define Rauf as an interfaith leader or terrorist sympathizer, as the controversy over the proposed Islamic center has quickly turned him into the country’s most famous imam. How he is perceived by the public could play a key role not only in determining how Americans feel about the project — polls continue to show a large majority opposed — but also in influencing attitudes toward Islam in the years to come. On his State Department–funded trip to Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, Rauf reportedly avoided answering questions about the controversial project, stressing instead his efforts to “Americanize” Islam and to find a formula for Muslims to stay true to their faith while assimilating into Western societies. The Bush administration sent him on a similar trip. In an interview Aug. 22 with ABC, Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, connected these efforts to the drive to build the Islamic center. She also said that her husband’s comment in 2001 about the United States being an “accessory” to the World Trade Center attacks was a reference to support that the United States provided to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in the 1980s. Regarding Hamas, the website of Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative states: “Hamas is both a political movement and a terrorist organization. When Hamas commits atrocious acts of terror, those actions should be condemned. Imam Feisal has forcefully and consistently condemned all forms of terrorism, including those committed by Hamas, as un-Islamic.” Such assertions seem unlikely to sway at least one opponent — Judea Pearl, Daniel Pearl’s father and a computer science professor at UCLA. While he was “touched” by Rauf’s appearance and speech at his son’s memorial, Pearl said that “many Muslim leaders offered their condolences at the time.” More to the point, he said he is discouraged that the Muslim leadership in the U.S. has not followed through on what he hoped would come from his son’s death. Muslim leaders “[have] had nine years to build up trust by proactively resisting anti-American ideologies of victimhood, anger and entitlement,” he said. “Reactions to the mosque project indicate that they were not too successful.” Pearl said he views the controversy to be a vote of “no confidence” in the organized Muslim leadership, not specifically against Rauf. “If I were [New York] Mayor Bloomberg, I would reassert their right to build the mosque, but I would expend the same energy trying to convince them to put it somewhere else,” he said. “Public reaction tells us that it is not the right time, and that it will create further animosity and division in this country.” Israeli scholar Yossi Klein Halevi is another journalist who is throwing his hat into the imam’s bio ring. Halevi met Rauf in September 2001 at a symposium on “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden,” Halevi’s chronicle of the year he spent learning about the three Abrahamic faiths. Said Halevi, “If he is not a dialogue partner for us, then there is virtually no one with whom we can speak in the Muslim world.” That said, Halevi is opposed to the proposed mosque, saying it is “not an effective way of bringing Islam into the mainstream.” A better idea, he said, would be an interfaith center that would include a church, a mosque and a synagogue as well as a common space for people of all faiths or none. Like Pearl, Halevi believes that focusing on the imam’s personality is misplaced. “The question of building a mosque at ground zero is traumatic enough,” Halevi said. “We don’t need to create an artificial issue around the man behind it.”

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