If one of her sleuths knocks on my door, this opponent will readily state that I need no outside funding as a reporter who is deeply investigating the motivation of Imam Rauf’s choice of this site of mass murder for the mosque. I will add that, of course, all American Muslims have their First Amendment right to exercise their freedom of religion in their place of worship. There have been other mosques in New York City built without opposition. That freedom is not at stake here.
As for Rauf’s inflammable site choice, however, one of a growing number of construction workers pledging they will not work on this mosque (New York Daily News, Aug. 20), Dave Kaiser, a blaster, explains:
“I wouldn’t work there, especially after I found out about what the imam said about U.S. policy being responsible for 9/11.”
Imam Rauf said was interviewed on CBS’ 60 Minutes (Sept. 30, 2001) by Ed Bradley. (I have the transcript.) Asked how he felt as a Muslim “knowing that people of your faith committed this act,” Imam Rauf spoke about Muslim reaction throughout the world “against the policies of the U.S. government, politically, where we espouse principles of democracy and human rights and where we ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these countries.”
“Are you in any way suggesting that we in the United States deserved what happened?” Bradley asked.
“I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened,” Rauf answered, “but the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened. … Because (the United States has) been an accessory to a lot of — of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, it — in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the U.S.A.”
Were the heads of government in Iran, Hamas and Sudan also “made in the USA?”
Imam Rauf has refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization and had no comment when, on Aug. 15, Mahmoud al-Zahar, its co-founder, strongly supported the Imam’s mosque near Ground Zero, saying, Muslims “have to build everywhere” (Associated Press, Aug. 16). Sen. Charles Schumer, D‑N.Y., said the support by Hamas of the Imam’s mosque carried no weight because “Hamas is a terrorist organization.”
Why, yes, it is, Imam Rauf, with its suicide bombers and endless rockets into Israel. How else can suicide bombers be characterized?
This imam — widely lauded in much of the press as “a moderate” Muslim — is not reticent, however, in his firm commitment to Sharia (Islamic law), which regards women as far less than fully human. In the Dec. 9, 2007 Arabic newspaper Hadi el-Islam, Rauf insisted: