http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/devilish-details-part-ii?f=puball
PART 11:
More troubling questions about how benign Islam actually is arise from examining the background of participants in Georgetown University’s April 24, 2013, conference on “The Boundaries of Religious Pluralism & Freedom: The Devil is in the Detail” (conference video here). Hosted by Georgetown’s Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding (ACMCU) under the auspices of the six-year old “A Common Word” initiative for international Christian-Muslim dialogue, this conference was the subject of a previous American Thinker article. While the conference itself ultimately did not convincingly demonstrate how orthodox Islamic faith could function within a framework of freedom, analysis of the conference participants provokes doubts about just who is promoting interfaith dialogue with Islam.
Behind their invocations of interfaith harmony, various Muslim conference participants had links to Islam’s darker sides. Former Barack Obama adviser Dalia Mogahed, for example, has a long history of associations with, and apologetics for, Muslim supporters of sharia and militant jihad. She even once tweeted that Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime was not worthy of support given its insufficient “resistance to Israel.”
Mogahed’s questionable past prompts consideration of other dubious Islamic influences on the conference. Abdulaziz Sachedina’s current George Mason University professorship, for example, receives its funding from the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a Herndon, Virginia, entity with Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic terrorist ties (see here and here). The ACMCU’s namesake (since 2005, when he gave the then-existing CMCU $20 million), moreover, is a Saudi prince and businessman memorable for having had his 2001 $10 million donation to New York City rejected. At the time, Mayor Rudolf Giuliani returned bin Talal’s contribution to Gotham’s recovery from the September 11 attacks because of his exculpatory linkage of them to American support for Israel.
While the conference’s Muslim participants drew attention, however inadvertently, to Islam’s difficult and indeed dangerous aspects, Christian participants such as Chris Seiple have in the past been exceedingly forthcoming towards different faiths. A recent article by Seiple, for example, at his Institute for Global Engagement’s (IGE) website based upon his comments at a January 2013 conference in Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar (Burma), called for finding “common values rooted in different theologies” despite “irreconcilable theological differences.” Seiple stated that “followers of Christ must walk in the shoes of the other, if only because He first walked in ours. Take the time to understand and engage the holy scripts of another faith, and what they teach of reconciliation, as understood by a practitioner of that faith.”